Hire With Succession In Mind
By Martha Frase-Blunt© IT Recruiter. January 2001.
Succession Planning in IT? Isn't that an oxymoron? Even though turnover is high and employee loyalty tends to be low, having a long-term hiring strategy in place is what separates the so-so companies from the employers of choice.
When recruiting for mid- and upper-level IT positions, hiring managers should consider how to develop those new employees over the next several years. According to a 2000 survey conducted by Manchester, Inc., a career management and consulting firm in Jacksonville, Fla., 6 out of 10 companies - of 200 surveyed - reported regularly promoting technical experts into management positions, and 44 percent said it is a frequent practice.
But thinking about a candidate's prospective management capabilities can seem counter-intuitive in an environment where critical expertise is always needed immediately, and hiring managers clamor to finish understaffed projects by plugging in just the right skill set for the moment.
For executive recruiter Gary Kaplan of Gary Kaplan & Associates in Pasadena, Calif., planning beyond immediate hiring needs goes hand in glove with a successful strategy of internal hiring. (See Considering An Insider?"IT Recruiter, October 2000). Even though I'm a recruiter, my value system is that a good company disproportionately hires from within."More and more, Kaplan said, Clients are telling me, 'Don't bring me a 'terminal' person. I want someone who is promotable to the next level.' This message is verbalized or inherent more than 50 percent of the time."
Customarily, that next level is management. But one of the quirks of IT personnel is that the capabilities that make someone a highly sought-after technician may also predict that they can't or won't be management material. Often, the person who meets the immediate need isn't going to move beyond that position,"remarked Kaplan. Think of it this way: Most people choose their profession for psychological reasons - it fits their personality. It's unique to IT that people in leadership positions more than likely did not start out as a computer operations person who moved through programming and systems to become part of the management team. How many systems programmers have you met who have the charisma to be leaders? Many of them go into IT because they are independent, creative and analytical."
Rich Hagberg, CEO of the Hagberg Consulting Group in Foster City, Calif., and an organizational psychologist, conducts leadership development programs for high-tech middle managers up to CIOs. His firm has profiled the strengths and weaknesses of technical people based on a 360-degree feedback device and found that, They tend to be extremely bright, analytical, creative, visionary and good at strategic decision-making. But they are also very independent, perfectionistic and sometimes extremely insensitive to the reactions of others."Hagberg explained that those who are drawn to IT work tend to get caught up in the technical problem-solving and don't build relationships. In addition, They have high standards and can't delegate because they want to do things themselves. As managers, they are doers, not coaches."
In short, your Java guru may not have what it takes to lead a team, and you should be aware of this from the point of hiring. That's not to say he or she won't be a good hire - there is a place in IT for parallel success tracks - technical and management. A smart company will have ways of identifying, directing and fairly rewarding people on each track.
Uncovering Future Leaders
So how can you tell the future manager from the career technician at the outset?
Psychologist Arthur Resnikoff, Ph.D., practice leader for Executive Development and Prehire Assessment for Hagberg Consulting Group, believes that, Looking ahead, looking at management capability, rather than plugging a body into a job, requires finding out how much 'emotional intelligence' a person has in order to effectively manage people."
In 1985, Israeli psychologist Reuven Bar-On first coined the term emotional quotient,"or EQ. As his thesis project, Bar-On demonstrated the basic differences between people who are emotionally and socially effective in various parts of their lives - in their families, with their partners, in the workplace - and those who aren't. He identified a series of factors that seemed to influence such success, and developed tools that assessed strengths or deficits, based on those factors.
Using Bar-On's models, Daniel Goleman wrote the now-classic 1998 management handbook, Working with Emotional Intelligence, in which he identified a set of competencies that differentiate individuals with emotional intelligence. The competencies fall into four clusters:
* Self-awareness: The capacity for understanding one's emotions, one's strengths and one's weaknesses.
* Self-management: The capacity for effectively managing one's motives and regulating one's behavior.
* Social awareness: The capacity for understanding what others are saying and feeling and why they feel and act as they do.
* Social skills: The capacity for acting in such a way that one is able to get desired results from others and reach personal goals.
Together they add up to a recipe for a good people-manager. Resnikoff believes that a few simple interview questions can disclose enough about emotional intelligence to know whether a candidate has leadership potential.
"I usually ask how they handled certain tricky situations, which lets me know - specifically and behaviorally - their instinctive approach,"he noted. For instance, I'll ask for an example of someone who reported to them who did not meet their expectations, and how they responded."For those with no experience, Resnikoff asks the question more conceptually, perhaps engaging them in brief role-play.
Resnikoff might play the part of a team member who is late on a project and believes the assignment is too large and complex to finish in the time allowed. In the candidate's response, I'll check for sensitivity, the ability to confront a person appropriately and an awareness of the implications of what they say in this situation. I also look for awareness of themselves and an understanding of the problem's larger business context."
Someone without management experience can still grasp the larger implications of their response, and if so, I'll know they can learn to manage. Someone without that inherent awareness may never really 'get it'."
More Predictors
Elliott Ross, senior vice president and consulting psychologist for Manchester, Inc.'s Delaware Valley operation, is a great believer in screening for management skills in a technical hire. In an interview, you can get an idea of how the candidate makes decisions. Look at how they have managed their own careers, and ask the kinds of questions that delve into the history of their development as people and professionals."
Look for clues like what steps the candidate has taken to keep her skills current, and evidence that she is a lifelong learner. Also, does she show an interest in other people's development? This is an important cue for management affinity, Ross believes. If they have done any coaching or mentoring - inside or outside the workplace - this demonstrates that they get pleasure from helping other people develop their talents."
Another indication of management readiness is how a candidate tends to work with peers outside his own functional arena. Have interviewees tell you stories from their job history about successful experiences in working across groups. And ask for more than one example; most people can tell one good story, but you are looking for a pattern."Ross suggested also soliciting stores about the time they slipped on a banana peel."
Beyond personal skills, a manager-in-the-making will also demonstrate some affinity for or curiosity about the company's business as a whole. We understand enough about leadership to know that technical professionals become successful managers - or not - because of their ability to understand the nature of the business and how it's changing. They are interested in the strategic direction, not just the tools,"said Ross. In coaching technical people at every level, I see that they sometimes get themselves into trouble because they have a hard time unhooking from the technical perspective and communicating in business terms."
Start Cultivating Right Away
Candidates with the right stuff should be given appropriate management skills training from the very beginning of their tenure - don't wait until a promotion is imminent. A lot of companies make the mistake of waiting too long before identifying and developing future managers,"said Ross. They don't pay enough attention to the organization's 'bench strength'."He pointed out that proactively investing in people's management skills is a great way to attract talent.
And retain it, added Hagberg. It's good for everyone; what we know from our studies on retention is that one of the keys is to invest time in employee development. Then their likelihood of leaving is less."
But heed those dyed-in-the-wool technicians who may discover too late that management is not their calling. Particularly for technical professionals, make sure you have an escape route for them if their new role is not making them happy,"suggested Ross. Make sure there is a way for them to return gracefully to their old job without having a blot on their career."People shouldn't be punished for an ill-advised promotion, he asserted, adding, Try to maintain an alternative career path that is just as prestigious and profitable for your technical superstars as management."
