The Twenty-Two Ways to Develop Leaders
Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 03:34PM Evaluate Staff Professionals for Management Potential and Intent Early Although many staff professionals prefer to remain individual contributors, it's not true that most don't want to be managers or couldn't make better managers if given proper preparation and opportunity. Roughly 40% of Fortune 500 CEOs had their primary background in finance and law, so success is not so much based on where or how one started as it is based on one's later experiences. The AT&T studies (Bray, Campbell, & Grant, 1974) found that 29% more of low-assessed managers were promoted than the high-assessed if the former had more challenging jobs. Many staff managers don't get these early opportunities. The CCL studies found staff executives whose first real supervisory experience took place around age 40; for line executives the experience occurred on average at age 23. Moreover, managers (line or staff) that encountered their first leadership challenge at mid-career tended to fail. By then the stakes were too high and the tolerance for mistakes was lower, and people whose background included many technical projects with similar groups of people were less prepared than those who had encountered start-ups and fix-its and had managed varied groups of people previously.