Grow Your Own Leaders: Seventeen Reasons Acceleration Pools Work
- Making Corporate Darwinism Fairer
- Acceleration Pools are 21st century programs
- Less paper, time, and bureaucracy
- A better use of time—no additional top-management time required for making job or development assignments
- Acceleration Centers improve the accuracy of the development needs diagnosis and are perceived as fair
- Development, job, and organizational success are linked
- Acceleration Pools build skills and confidence
- Support is available
- Emphasis is on changing behavior—and proving it
- Managers' and mentors' roles and responsibilities are clear
- Top management (finally) has accurate, timely information for key appointments
- Acceleration Pool System Advantages
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
"The best way to predict the future is to create it."
—Peter Drucker, Professor, Author
Claremont Graduate School
Making Corporate Darwinism Fairer
Morgan McCall, a professor specializing in executive development at USC, and others have said that many organizations have relied upon a Darwinian approach to top-management development: identifying the best people and then giving them increasingly difficult challenges until they drop off the organizational ladder or reach the top (McCall, 1997). This is not the approach taken in an Acceleration Pool system. Pool members receive appropriate growth and stretch assignments in which they can succeed and are given support along the way to facilitate their success. Some people will still opt out of the pool, but most of the chance factors that so often unfairly affect people's career progress have been eliminated. The organization keeps better track of how individuals are doing and what they are doing and learning in their job assignments so that both the behavior and the actual results can be evaluated. In contrast, in a Darwinian system, people in job assignments might hit a difficult economic period or run into unusual competition that can make them look bad; the opposite can also be true, with people's poor performance looking seemingly good. We strongly advocate helping individuals learn from their experiences by providing accurate feedback regarding what they did well and what they could improve upon.
denotes that information on this topic is available at the Grow Your Own Leaders web site (http://www.ddiworld.com/growyourownleaders).
The Acceleration Pool system gives pool members training and adequate preparation before they face a challenge so that they will use more of the right behaviors and be successful. Our approach is more analogous to an agricultural model, which is based on nurturing and cultivating the seeds of talent, rather than the "fittest" emerging from a series of tests and challenges. The balance of this chapter focuses on 17 specific reasons that Acceleration Pools offer a superior alternative to corporate Darwinism.