A high flier does not have strings

Corporations must give their biggest and best talent the room to develop.Roger Trapp reports

Not every executive experiences a fall from grace as swift as that which befell Horst W Schroeder, president of the cereal company Kellogg. According to a newspaper report quoted in a new book, he was returning from a plant visit in late 1989, when the corporate jet in which he was flying was ordered to land at an airport close to the organisation's headquarters. He was met by the chairman and chief executive and - after just nine months in the job - fired.

As the author of the book, Morgan McCall, points out, "by all reasonable criteria, this executive had been extremely successful and had demonstrated, over a long period of time, an ability to get results". Yet after only a brief spell in the post he had become a prominent example of what McCall, in High Flyers (Harvard Business School Press, $27.95), calls "derailment".

Though not every fall is as spectacular as Schroeder's, the comparatively high number of senior-level derailments makes McCall conclude that there are lessons here for the ways in which organisations develop staff - for, while such incidents are most obviously a calamity for the out-of-favour executive, they are not great news for the company either.

When executives depart suddenly, it is common to read in newspaper reports lists of their alleged flaws. But such things, maintains McCall, a former director of research at the influential Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina, are less interesting than the questions raised by such scenarios. For example, is there a relationship between an executive's strengths and weaknesses? After all, what came to be known as aloofness and autocracy might well have been characterised while he was successful as commitment and dedication.

McCall puts some of the blame on organisations - for not apparently preparing rising executives for their new roles by telling them, for instance, that the sort of behaviour or performance that won them recognition in the past might need to be modified or adapted. Borrowing from the leadership guru Warren Bennis, who believes that "the release and full use of the individual's full potential is the organisation's true task", he says that companies need to "create a context in which development is supported or, at the very least, in which it is not subverted".

But - in keeping with the current thinking on personal responsibility for careers - he suggests that it is also up to individuals to pay attention to what is necessary for achieving their potential.

In an ideal world, both individual and organisation would realise the truth of what he calls a simple principle - that people learn most by doing things they have not done before. But he is realistic enough to see that "in an organisation where using people's existing skills is a rational way to optimise performance, getting people into the challenges they need for further development often requires mechanisms that can override short-term decisions".

He also acknowledges that even in those organisations where mechanisms exist for moving people around, executives cannot be forced to develop - especially if "the way they are" has served them so well in the past. And he refers to the historian Barbara Tuchman, who seems to have made a life's work out of proving the truth of the adage that "the only thing you learn from history is that nobody ever learns anything from history".

It is thought-provoking stuff - and a subject that companies increasingly buffeted by change would do well to ponder if they are not to waste more executive material than they already do.

But in the end, following McCall's approach seems to require a supreme act of faith. In what looks like grist to the mill of the outdoor development brigade, he takes the view that "it often takes an act of real courage to deliberately put ourselves in situations that force us to change, to learn something new". Our potential lies, he adds, "one step beyond where we thought we could go"n