MUSCLE BUILD YOUR ORGANIZATION
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Worship, success & potential

Situation analysis is the cornerstone of your upgrading effort. Having identified how well your managers and divisions are performing, you are now in a position to determine how best to deploy your people. If you want to grow fast and improve fast, you have to develop people fast. And the secret to that is to produce challenging, fresh, taxing assignments.

It goes without saying that you want to put the best-qualified person into each important job (and to move marginal performers aside so they don't block new talent). What may be less obvious is that you want to keep every high-potential manager constantly challenged and learning. Make sure that talented people don't stay in one job too long. Most people need about a year to master a new assignment; after four years, they're usually just repeating what they've already done, and they may go to sleep on the job. In most companies, people work in a single area for years, moving slowly and ponderously up the career ladder. By the time they reach senior positions, many have run out of steam — they've become "deadwood".

Just reassigning a top performer isn't enough. You don't want a talented person simply to repeat the same experience in a different region or at a somewhat higher level. You need to round out executives' experience through challenging new assignments that will give them a broader business viewpoint. Entirely different positions can accomplish this; for example, moving someone from domestic operations to international, putting a manager in a new functional area, or letting a high achiever engineer a turnaround.

Keep raising standards & rooting out the lesser performers.

Large companies should rotate their managers through different divisions, both to keep them challenged and to help the organization prepare future leaders who understand its many facets. Companies that have a number of smaller divisions or a significant international business can easily move people around like this. Managers in these enterprises have many opportunities to be tested and learn in freestanding situations at lower risks.

Decisions about reassignments are best made once a year as part of the annual performance review, not on a piecemeal basis throughout the year. Making a series of moves at one time allows you to consider the needs of the whole organization and to deploy your entire pool of talent most productively. Also, when assignments are shuffled all at once, the company has time to settle down and assimilate the changes. In the real world, of course, you will also be faced with a few piecemeal decisions, but that doesn't negate the approach.

The aim of rearranging things is to make the best corporate use of all your managers, instead of asking each business unit to do the best it can with existing resources. To be sure, you take some chances when you bypass traditional channels of promotion. Moving someone to an entirely new division is not with out risks: the new unit may resent your interference, or worse, a person may fail in the new job.

To prevent resentment and resistance, don't just foist your selections on your operating people. Take particular care when implementing this portion of the upgrading process, and choose candidates whose odds of succeeding in a new division are high. Operating managers must realize that these people are top performers and not someone another area wanted to get rid of. You should also give your operating managers veto power over candidates, or give them a slate to choose from. Eventually, they will accept and support "corporate musical chairs" as they realize they're getting better qualified people for their openings.

If you promote on the basis of potential and not just on experience, you're bound to make some mistakes. The safest route is to promote someone already in the department rather than an outsider with less experience in the function. But you'll never shake up the organization enough if you stick to safe choices. If you see one of your assignments not working out, face it quickly, and try to find another slot for the person. Over time, you'll learn which jobs require pertinent experience (there are some) and which ones don't (there are many of these).

There is one other risk in rotating people throughout a company. You are running a business, after all, not a finishing school for executives. Continuity and experience are important in building relationships and relevant skills. The priorities shouldn't be one-sided in either direction. The company needs a balance. Avoid moving people so much that you destroy continuity and nobody really gets developed, but also be careful as you can keep people from getting stale.  

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