by Carl
Binder
I found a great article in
my pile of tear-outs from reading on planes: a one-pager about leadership and succession planning at Proctor and Gamble.
What's important in
P&G's successful approach is devoting as much or more of your time to
developing others for success as you do to developing yourself.
This is why my partner,
Cynthia, thinks that we should teach more people to use The Six Boxes Approach
for creating self-development plans. I quite agree. It seems clear that we need
to have simple tools for creating development plans for ourselves and for the people who report to
us.
Question: What do I produce?
If you think about your own
job, or about the job of one of your reports, the immediate question should be:
What do I produce that contributes to the success of the organization?
You probably contribute things like important
decisions, plans, communications, sustainable relationships and teams, and many
other accomplishments that characterize successful leaders. We teach leaders to
use the Performance Chain to think about the value each person, including herself
or himself, contributes to the organization – based on the value of their
outputs or accomplishments.
Question: What
behavior is most successful?
If you can figure out from
experience, from mentoring, training, or from study of others the best ways to produce your contributions to the organization, you and
others will be better at delivering value. If you can determine what works
best, most smoothly, with the least amount of cost and effort, you'll smooth
the way for yourself and the people who work for you. We use the Performance
Chain to identify best practices
and strategies: behavior
for success.
Question:
How can I develop and sustain successful performance?
That's where the Six Boxes model comes in. We can show people how to design
their own development plans, and how to develop plans for their reports – using
the Six Boxes model.
Development requires more than
training. In order to develop sustainable performance, the entire Six Boxes
matrix needs to be balanced and complete in relation to the important
components of your job. We can help anyone at any level problem-solve
their own development and know what they need to do or ask for to create
sustained excellent performance and development in themselves and their
reports.
Great leaders develop
themselves and others
If we can help leaders develop both themselves and others with the same, flexible tools, then we've got a winner. That's why we think that Six Boxes Leadership is potentially a very big opportunity for forward-looking organizations.
