How to Keep Leaders Fresh (and Crispy)

Professional organizations often require re-certification to ensure one is up to date in their specialty. Similarly, middle-line leaders should undergo regular re-evaluation to prevent role stagnation. By using an incentive-based method that encourages growth and innovation, we can ultimately enhance performance management, increase engagement, promote continuous improvement, and reinforce company core values.

Tupperware. It’s not just for leftovers anymore. How do you keep leadership and their ideas “fresh” in your company when the default desired experience is to achieve tenure? Most professional organizations require re-certification of credentials to ensure holders are up to date with the latest information. Why not make sure middle-line leaders are also regularly “re-certified” as well?

We have all seen and probably experienced manager or leader stagnation: individuals who have been in the same position for several years with no hint of anything changing. To be fair, if I’m putting a business leader hat on, I may argue that having someone in the same role for several years creates a sense of stability and continuity in core parts of a business. My counterpoint would be that individuals doing the same thing over several years is not good for your business OR the individual. Neither are growing, improving or becoming resilient to the change that will happen eventually.

Have those individuals lost their ambition or passion? Is there job apathy that’s inhibiting fresh ideas or a willingness to take calculated risks? If a role has been distilled to a point that it is predictable, then why wouldn’t this be a candidate for AI or process automation (more on that later)?

There are rumors that some companies have figured out the job stagnation issue by having rotation-based positions. My take is similar, but with a twist, of course. It’s what I call, the “Career Congressional Hunger Games” (yes, I’m working on a catchier name).  It goes like this:

• Individual contributors can apply for their manager’s job and their manager has to RE-APPLY to keep their position every two to three years.
• Managers can apply for their director’s job and their director has to RE-APPLY to keep their position every three to five years.
• The reapplication process can be triggered before then by a “vote of no confidence”, where the majority of direct reports call for a change. This would only apply to larger teams of five or more.

Personally, I would love to keep this going and include VPs, but let’s face it, once you’ve made it there, it’s like having tenure; not to mix in another metaphor.

If you apply this up and down the hierarchy, one of four things will happen:

1. Promotion: employee has demonstrably grown and has proven they can handle more responsibility
2. Re-hire: employee extends tenure. They are doing great or their directs aren’t ready yet
3. Demotion: employee has lost their edge and has a chance to re-apply in the next cycle
4. Exit: employee decides to leave. This could speak to a cultural misalignment or unwillingness to grow.  Either way, it’s probably better for the company.

For individual contributors, it can highly motivate them to think like leaders – no more waiting indefinitely for a chance to lead or being blocked by “gatekeeping” leaders! For leaders, it creates a need to be humble, hungry and committed to delivering what’s best for the company and their employees in the time they are allotted. With this cycle of renewal, there is a constant influx of new ways of thinking (diversity of thought) and a drive to promote a culture of continuous improvement and learning.

Will it get messy when corporate politics get involved? Probably, but if your company has strong core values AND it ties individual performance to corporate performance, it will be harder to go outside the system. A fringe benefit of exploring this approach is that it will naturally trigger a re-evaluation of your performance management system, which is a good thing. Adding transparency to the review and promotion process doubles-down on your merit-based system, which is widely desired by employees. Moreover, providing employees with timely, critical feedback, or opportunities to self-develop is a huge driver of employee engagement. If this approach sounds like a winner, I would love to hear from anyone whose tried it. If you have serious reservations about the value of limiting terms for leadership, I’m happy to schedule time to discuss this with you, Senator Grassley (44 years).

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[ WHAT IF? ]