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Background: Experiences That Develop Managers and What Makes Them Developmental

The Center for Creative Leadership’s continuing studies^† of executive growth and development have confirmed and extended the adage that experience is the best teacher.

In these studies we found that variety in leadership challenges—certain jobs, exceptional other people (overwhelmingly bosses), coping with our mistakes, enduring hardships, and coursework at pivotal moments—all contribute to the building and seasoning of managers.

Specific experiences teach specific lessons necessary for success. But it is critical, as T. S. Eliot said, not to “… have the experience, and miss the meaning.” Managers we studied who went on to become effective executives not only had the experiences but learned lessons from them. Learning was not automatic, only made possible by the encountering of certain challenges.

Armed with this knowledge, development can certainly be a more systematic effort than it has been in the past. By exposing young managers to developmental jobs and developmental bosses, and by helping them become effective learners, we can increase our pool of potential leadership talent for the future and provide more meaningful work for managers.

Several problems get in the way, however the most obvious is that American organizations are hardly in a boom era. Since 1980 the Fortune 500 has eliminated 2.8 million jobs, 30 million people have been displaced in restructurings, and entire levels of organizations have disappeared overnight (Peters, 1987).

With the rapid increase of dual-career couples and single heads of households, a trend line projected to rise further beyond the year 2000, many managers are refusing geographic moves. A recent study found that 60% of relocation requests were refused. A human resources director told us the tale of asking nine managers to take a plum developmental assignment in France before he got a taker. With organizations slimming down, the problem of creating challenging assignments is complicated by the fact that there are now fewer developmental jobs. In addition, many companies have slowed moving people around due to cost. What is needed is more than a recounting of the types of assignments that are developmental. What is needed is help with development in place so that challenge and growth can be added to virtually all managerial and physical jobs.

This is exactly what this article aims to do. Before we discuss development in place, however, we will take a few pages to look at what makes certain kinds of assignments developmental. Then we will turn to the question of how developmental challenge can be provided in existing jobs.

There are five broad categories of experience that executives generally cite as being potentially developmental:

(1) Challenging jobs, because they teach about the subtleties of leadership—starting up or fixing troubled operations, expanding large operations, working on time-limited projects from crises to systems installations. These represent what leaders do. Such jobs teach how to cope with pressure, learn quickly, or deal with problem subordinates. In absolute terms, challenging assignments are the best teacher: They are most likely to be remembered as developmental, and can teach both the greatest variety and the largest number of lessons.

(2) Other people, mostly bosses, because they serve as models of values. Exceptional people seemed to create a punctuation mark for executives, either by representing what to be or do, or what not to be or do. Whether by serving as a model of integrity or acumen, poor ethics or avarice, certain bosses exemplify how values play out in management settings.

(3) Hardships, because they tell us something about our limits. In our research, managers told of making mistakes, getting stuck in dead-end jobs, having to fire people, and enduring the traumas of life. These events often caused managers to look inward and reflect on their humanity, their resilience, and their flaws.

(4) Coursework, because it can serve as a powerful comparison point, a chance to build self-confidence by sizing oneself against managers from other firms. Executives spoke of coursework as a kind of forum for trading tips, picking different problem-solving methods, and comparing themselves with others.