Book Review: Ram Charan and Geri Willigan,The High-Potential Leader: How to Grow Fast,Take on New Responsibilities and Make an Impact

Staying in the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) world of work, companies have realized that leaders with diverse way of thinking and concomitant action plan can only reinvent the game of business. The contemporary leaders are expected to address such radical changes in the form of reinventing the entire business model, reshaping the entire ecosystem of supply and distribution or rethinking the entire customer experience. In the twenty-first century, the race is on to explore those with high potential to lead the organizations onto new paths in a world of constant change.

Ram Charan and Geri Willigan in their best-selling book The High-Potential Leader: How to Grow Fast, Take on New Responsibilities and Make an Impact have a valid reason to state that ‘amid everything that is new and different, today’s high potential leaders (‘hipos’) are expected to identify the untapped opportunities their companies can pursue and mobilize’. This makes it clear that business needs to be transformed more than once in a leader’s tenure and hipos must be prepared for that and thus they need to exhibit three distinct characteristics that the previous generation of leaders did not always need: (a) the need to take tons of information from different sources and almost instantly expected to fetch out what could be meaningful; (b) talk to anyone and not just confine within the organizational hierarchy to make their business happen; and (c) visualize the total picture for conjuring a mental image of the web of interrelationships in their business activity and then to think imaginatively about how to redesign it for deriving organizational effectiveness.

Roughly 23 million population of Gen Z (born between 1995 and 2012) has been steeped from an early age in video, the Internet and social media platforms. They are basically growing up in an information-rich world and a global social hive, interconnected and living with unprecedented social transparency. This ensuing generation have the advantage of adapting quickly to the new (as they are witnessing brands, trends, celebrities, and social conventions rise and fall overnight), having diverse social networks (they are connected to people far beyond their local environment exposing them to a wide array of viewpoints), while carrying a change-the-world mentality (as they have seen unknowns becoming well knowns and college dropouts becoming billionaires before they turned 35).

Hipos of Gen Y and Gen Z reach their leadership potential through the disciplined routine practices of essential skills combined with periodic leaps. The purpose of the book helps the readers (assuming meeting the criteria for a hipo leader) to continually expand, keep building skills and define the next step or leap. The authors provide the road map for finding opportunities and dealing with the hurdles stating the period ‘while you double or triple your leadership capabilities and capacity every three to four years’.

The entire book is divided into three major parts: Part I guides through a series of leadership skills one should practise. Authors say ‘it takes mindful repetition of these basic skills to master them’. The first six chapters include action items and resources along with stories of other leaders one wishes to learn from. The best part of the book is that one does not need to follow the order laid out in the table of contents as each skill set explained in the chapter stands on its own. ‘So you can create your own sequence, by immersing in one or two that seem relevant. Work hard on them; you will use them throughout your work life’, says Charan and Willigan.

The highest leverage is not in process, organization or money, but it is the people. Every task right from creating a strategy to implementing a marketing plan depends on the quality of the people responsible for it. One of the biggest fallacies the first chapter of the book has identified is that, ‘leaders consistently fall short when it comes to hiring, developing and promoting the best people for the work at hand, for a variety of reasons’. Generally, we may find that the leaders pick people they are comfortable with without considering others who may be better suited to the job. Authors suggest that, ‘if you are uncomfortable hiring people outside your band of loyal followers, try to pinpoint your psychological blockage’. Similarly, once after getting the right people on board, the hipos need to check whether they are draining energy—driving people relentlessly or burning them out by making impossible demands—or are they in the process of expanding the capacity of the organization by helping people grow and expand their own capacities?

The job of hipos is to discover the problems and make sure that they are resolved promptly. Authors suggest that during meetings, ‘skip the superficial questions about how things are going and don’t accept perfunctory answers that everything is just fine’. Probing questions need to be asked such as: what is going better than expected and what is the biggest risk to completing the project on time? These questions basically make the meeting more meaningful. The best leaders also think big and conceptualize while never losing sight of the discipline behind execution, and in fact, their strategic thinking is grounded in reality because of it. Hence, hipos should communicate clearly by breaking down concepts into specific action items and mutually identify the goals and boundaries, bringing clarity on why it needs to be done, its importance in the overall scheme of things and the possible complications that arise in due course of time. The essence of mutual goal setting is in the dialogue as it is where behaviours get modelled, corrected and reinforced. Conversations in the form of meeting create intellectual content, which is important for personal and business growth. Authors have suggested a set of guidelines to make meetings more energizing: (a) know your goal: what do you want to accomplish? (b) know your intention: how do you want to share behaviour? (c) press for the truth, good or bad; (d) really listen, including for what is not being said; (e) develop and clarify ideas and options; (f) bring conflict to the open and resolve it; and (g) bring the meeting to closure: who will do what, by when?

Compensation affects motivation, but what really releases energy is the kind of personal attention the leader shares to help people leverage and grow their talent. Hipos need to choose one or two things the person should focus on and they should be clear and specific. For example, it could be a particular business skill the person needs to acquire or it could be on the behaviour side. The authors suggest that another way to help multiply people’s energy and skill is through providing them constructive feedback on a continuous basis. On the one hand, mastering the art of giving the kind of constructive feedback helps people grow and, on the other hand, this will build a reputation as a great person to work for while attracting more hipos in one’s team. Along with sharing constructive feedback, today’s leaders also need to think of themselves as integrators while working with cross-functional teams. Integrators get people to see beyond the narrow view of their organizational silo or expertise by focusing on the bigger picture of what is best for the unit or company as a whole.

True hipos can do both: they come up with big ideas and get them executed. Senior leaders at many legacy companies of contemporary times are realizing that one does not need decades of experience and high organizational stature to generate great ideas. Contra-positively, authors stated that ‘long tenure in an organisation in fact is detrimental when it comes to conceiving something radically new’. Most great ideas start as one thing but are reshaped in iterations to make them better. Hipos do not necessarily need elaborate charts or a formalized plan to present their ideas, but rather they need crystal-clear thinking about how and why it will work and make a positive impact on the business.

Dreaming is fine, but converting lofty ideas into results is the acid test of high potential. Author Ram Charan along with Lary Bossidy, the former CEO of Honeywell, have penned a book titled Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. The book covers hands-on activity for every leader while impressing on the fact that ‘not the dirty work you can delegate to someone else while you think big thoughts’. One needs to master the art of execution to get results and the truth is that it will improve the quality of business thinking. Similarly, big picture strategic thinking, for example, is useless unless it takes into account the human capacity one has in terms of the number of people and their skills. Therefore, hipos seek inputs from people close to the ground and adjust to those realities as they define the specific actions that need to be taken and their timings.

Learning about customers and competitors is a part of every organizational assignment, but every leader benefits from deepening their knowledge about their aspirations and needs. As a hipo, one may have a natural bent to search for new ideas and information. However, if they maintain an external orientation while turning their casual scanning into a discipline, they will be better prepared to see where the opportunities lie and what might upend their business. Author has cautioned that, ‘despite the value of big data and analytics, one should cultivate an intuitive feel for their customers, in part by direct observations’. Direct interaction with customers will tell something about competitors, such as why they are buying more from one than from the rest. Therefore, anticipating change and exploring opportunities in it begin with the discipline of scanning the environment broadly and spotting the unstoppable trends and change-makers.

‘Peter Principle’ says that people rise to the level of their incompetence because they stop learning. Authors have endorsed the fact that, ‘have the humility to realize that there is always something more to know and that many other people know more than you do’. Short, targeted conversations with a wide range of individuals give breadth to one’s knowledge. Similarly, the book has suggested hipos to invest half an hour a day in reading as it brings more value to leadership strength than any other investment of one’s time. Expanding one’s knowledge base not only helps in advancing one’s career path but also gives much more insights to share with others, building reputation as a valued ‘go-to person’ in one’s network.

The second part of the book covering two chapters states about how to take charge of one’s growth while impressing on the fact that ‘it has been common for hipos to move upward by assuming greater responsibility within their vertical silos’. Venturing into unknown, ambiguous new situations versus doing an expanded version of the same job is the best preparation for the challenges one faces at the highest organizational levels, when one suddenly has to integrate many functional areas, balance conflicting interests and sort through a number of variables. Moving from one department or functional silo to another is a leap many hipos make early in their careers. These shifts force one to see things from different perspectives, creating a fuller picture of how the organization works. Authors have indicated that, ‘as you enter a new role, nothing trumps humility’. People will relax and be open if there is an attitude of curiosity and desire to learn about the new situations. This part of the book cited numerous examples on active listening skills as it reaches out to solicit ideas and insights from others and avoid judgement at all costs. Finally, no leader is a solo performer, as they will be judged on how well others follow their lead. Higher the one rises in an organization, the more the success will depend on the others who work with and for them.

Each chapter of the entire book is densely packed with content, action items, resources and stories of numerous leaders (Mullally, Zuckerberg, Palmer, Goel and many more) who are leading successfully in the new normal. Much of the material for this book comes from Ram Charan’s role as a consultant to many companies, management teams and individuals. His experience is deep and broad. He draws on these experiences to connect the dots to reveal the leadership profile needed in a period dominated by rapid structural change, the ever-growing importance and pervasiveness of digital technology and the global operating and strategic agility. Those who have the mindset but need the skills can use this book to continually expand their world by building the ‘new’ skills, learning, expanding their networks and making leaps that will propel them towards their best self, aligned with their career and personal goals. This book is truly one of a kind, a self-help manual for high-potential leaders, with depth and insights that are the products of wisdom, experience and access to the world’s best.