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Succession Planning’s Missing Link – Lunch with Your Boss’s Boss

By Michelle Malay Carter on October 30, 2007 

Institutionalizing lunch with the boss’s boss would be to talent management what the Chia Pet was to holiday gift exchanges – an annual, inexpensive, one-size-fits all way to get the job done.

The difficulty in spotting high potentials is that?their managers quite frequently don’t like them which, in turn, steers the manager’s manager’s perception of the high potential toward the negative.

Young, high potentials can be annoying, arrogant, and impulsive because their problem solving capability outweighs their wisdom, but instead of?designing systems to?protect high potentials from themselves, organizations are systematically demonizing the very employees everyone is warring to find.

The reason organizations are feeling the talent crunch is because the internet age has given young, high potentials an alternative to gritting their teeth as they dutifully climb the corporate ladder while everyone calls them names.

Find Hidden?Potential?
A low-tech, lunch with the boss’s boss system would provide high potentials guaranteed face time with the person for whom they might be working if they were promoted, the manager-once-removed.? I suspect managers-once-removed might be pleasantly surprised to find their organizations do have talent – it had simply been masquerading as an attitude problem.

Quite simply, spotting potential and talent development should lie at the feet of the manager-once-removed, not the manager.? Incorporate that concept into your talent management system, and you’ll want to treat me to lunch.

I’m OK.? You’re OK.? Let’s fix the system.

Filed Under Employee Engagement, Executive Leadership, High Potential, Managerial Leadership, Organization Design, Requisite Organization, Succession Planning, Talent Management

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