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Take Responsibility for Rising Stars

Leadership succession and recruitment need the sharp attention of your company’s top executives and board. But who should be held accountable—and how? An excerpt from a Harvard Business Review article by Jeffrey Cohn, Rakesh Khurana, and Laura Reeves.

Many executives believe that leadership development is a job for the HR department. This may be the single biggest misconception they can have. As corporations have broken down work into manageable activities and then consolidated capabilities into areas of expertise, employee-related activities have typically fallen into HR’s domain. The prevailing wisdom has been that if HR took care of those often intangible "soft" issues, line managers and executives would be free to focus on "hard" business issues and client interaction.

But at companies that are good at growing leaders, operating managers, not HR executives, are at the front line of planning and development. In fact, many senior executives now hold their line managers directly responsible for these activities. In this worldview, it is part of the line manager’s job to recognize his subordinates’ developmental needs, to help them cultivate new skills, and to provide them opportunities for professional development and personal growth. Managers must do this even if it means nudging their rising stars into new functional areas or business units. They must mentor emerging leaders, from their own and other departments, passing on important knowledge and providing helpful evaluations and feedback. The operating managers’ own evaluations, development plans, and promotions, in turn, depend on how successfully they nurture their subordinates.

by Jeffrey M. Cohn, Rakesh Khurana, and Laura Reeves

Full Story: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5227&t=organizations&iss=y

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