Forgotten Leaders.

Individual Contributors Are 'Forgotten Leaders': Are You Developing Them Well?

I have copied the above title from one of the article available online. I am an Individual Contributor in MNC. When I applied for this profile at that time our Organization’s hierarchy was different. If any Colleague is a People Manager or any Individual Contributor both was same, however recently Organization decided to change the hierarchy and structure. Now they decided to consider Individual Contributor Manager one step below People Manager. I strongly disagree with this. In one of my meeting with Leadership I raised this Point that why any Individual contributor is not equivalent to any People Manger. I was astonished that Leaders failed to answer my question. I was feeling proud and I was thinking that hope they will reconsider this decision. After a silence of a minute or two one of my Bosses replied that in the past few of our individual Contributors were promoted to the next level but the results were awful. We studied and post analyzing this we decided that promoting any Individual Contributor to next level is a risk. That’s why we changed the hierarchy in the Organization.

I am not satisfied with this reply, when we already know that each individual can have a different skill set then why are we judging them on basis of few colleagues’ failure. I raised couple of points but I lost the battle because no-one was ready to speak against this decision. We all just want to save our Job. Below are some pointers which I raised and Leaders failed to reply but they implemented there idea of change in Organization Structure and we did nothing but got the result of demotion. 

·         People Manager can blame his/ her team members for any failure v/s Individual Contributor can’t.

·         People Manager has to only work towards the delivery and I have seem very few People Managers working on their other deliverables like developing peers skills, enhancing peers skills for future role, etc. v/s Individual contributor does not get this opportunity to help peers directly. How can we assume that Individual Contributors doesn’t have this skill without judging them?

       
           I suggested to allow them the opportunity and all these skills should be judged during interviews if you find all the Qualities in any Individual Contributor give him/her a chance to prove.
Not giving them a chance and assuming that all Individual Contributors are looser is a clear cut insult of this role. Failure of few Individual Contributors in the past is a clear cut HIRING DEFECT.

 I tried my best to convince them but because I was in minority and doesn’t hold any decision making position hence I lost the battle. After this incident I decided to encourage my peers and audience to help your colleagues and enhance their skills and prepare them for next role. As per me Majority of Leaders are Individual Contributors. So if you are working in an Organization as an Individual Contributor please respect your profile and don’t degrade it and don’t feel ashamed. You are a Leader and you can prove yourself right if your boss will help you to enhance your skills and make you future ready. At the time I was writing this I tried to find something which can support my thoughts however after searching for few days I read something online which encouraged me , below is an Article by Mr. Jack Zenger who writes about leadership development and building strengths. His article is supporting my thought and I am glad that we have someone who is working for us to we can also get the similar respect in our Organization.

The efficiency and long-term health of the organization depends on how its leaders perform. Every year organizations spend thousands of dollars developing managers and directors to make them more effective as leaders. But are some individuals overlooked because of their titles? (In a recent HBR blog we discussed the peculiar paradox within the workplace between position and contribution.)

Anyone who has worked in an organization knows a person’s position does not always define their contribution, nor does it give an indication of the person’s true influence on others.  People with titles are not always influential, nor do they make major contributions to the organization’s success.  Conversely there are some people without a managerial title who wield a good deal of influence and make great contributions, regardless of their title or role. They meet what we believe are the ultimate criteria for true leaders.

     These people are the highly professional individual contributors.  In many cases they have deliberately chosen not to pursue a managerial career, preferring technical work or wanting to avoid the duties associated with being a manager, including budgets, reports, endless meetings and the never-ending people issues.  They may be petroleum engineers in an oil company, software engineers in a high tech organization, or an industrial designer in a toy company.  What they have in common is that they have no one reporting to them, yet they make a big contribution and wield strong influence on the success of their firms.
In the early 1980’s I recall hearing Michael Eisner speak when he was the President of Disney. He talked about the importance of taking care of the people in organizations who make unique, pivotal contributions, and who are easy to overlook.  “In Disney,” he said, “These people are our animators.”
They were the people who conceived the endearing cartoon characters and brought them to life through their craft of animation  (Today they accomplish their role with computer generated graphics; but the function remains vital to the organization, just the same.)
We submit that every organization has such people.  It may be someone in product development who without any direct reports, influences the selection and development of new products.  It may be key sales people, who because of their success and connection with customers provide a powerful influence on the organizations tactics in going to market.  They often get overlooked for any kind of development because they don’t fit neatly into the traditional categories of employees.
In a recent publication from the American Society of Training and Development, it was reported that the three dominant categories of learning and development for most organizations were:

1. Managerial and Supervisory training—the largest single type of content delivered
2. Mandatory and Compliance Training
3. Processes, Procedures and Business Practices.

The highly qualified individual contributors don’t usually participate in any of these three categories.  And missing from ASTD’s list is the role of development focused on helping this forgotten group of highly influential leaders without subordinates to become even more effective and influential in their executive jobs.

What kind of development is needed?

We think there is a huge opportunity to provide this group with many of the same development processes that their managerial colleagues receive.   We’ve found that they greatly appreciate receiving feedback from others.  While their so-called “360’s” don’t have the rater group labelled “Direct Reports,” they can receive feedback from peers, from their boss, from others in different parts of the firm.  They can also solicit feedback from clients and suppliers outside the organization.  (Maybe we should call their feedback reports 270’s.)  They greatly benefit from honest feedback that helps them identify their strengths or, in a small percent of the cases, to pinpoint some serious weakness that is detracting from their performance.
They benefit from becoming better team players, from improved communication skills and by learning to be better coaches.  Nearly everything they accomplish they do through influence, because they usually lack any formal “role power.”  Our research has shown that their pattern of competencies that lead to their success are closely aligned to the competencies of effective executives and managers in the firm.

 Payoffs
Because these people are so valuable, one objective of providing development is to have them feel highly valued.  You want them to know that as an organization you respect their contribution and that you care about their development enough to invest in it.   Secondly, such talent is more inclined to stay with organizations where they feel they are progressing.  You want them to know that if they continue  with the organization, they will move forward technically and in their ability to have expanding influence.
Third, they will enjoy increased success.  These professional, individual contributors succeed in part because of their professional expertise, but equally as much by their ability to work well with others, to collaborate and be good team players,  to communicate effectively to other departments and at all levels of the organizations. These skills can be learned in the same way that managers learn through coaching and formal training.
A fourth reason to provide development to this forgotten group is that a number of them could well develop into excellent managers.  This transition can occur without a shift in formal position. They don’t need to wait for a promotion to begin acting more like a manager. They can learn to put up with the temporary frustration of training others to do work that they know they could personally do much more quickly. However, this strategy pays off many times over in the long run because it develops organizational capability. And they can look for ways to improve people skills.
Furthermore, according to our data, the effectiveness of these individual contributors in the leadership skills that a 360-degree feedback instrument measures is not all that different from their managerial counterparts.  The chart below shows that there is a small difference, but a large percentage of the non-managers are rated in the top quartile in terms of their overall leadership effectiveness.  With some development and focus, we’re convinced that more than a half could be successful in a managerial role.  The individual contributors were rated more positively in their ability to take initiative and their technical expertise but have room to grow in strategic perspective, inspiriting others and communicating powerfully.

When push comes to shove, people want to know how they can continue to manage their careers and maximize their value to the organization, even when they do not have complete control over their position in the organization. We believe there is an important group within most firms who are consistently overlooked for development.  Yet these resources would benefit them and their organizations greatly.  Companies are missing the opportunity to retain these key people, to help them be even more influential and to prepare a portion of them for key managerial positions in the firm.  Losing them can be a huge and expensive blow to the organization, but often they fail to show up on anyone’s radar screen.