Tag: leadership

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Succession planning: does it matter in the context of corporate leadership?

Author/s: Patricia Richards

Edition: Volume 48, Number 3, November 2008

Summary: Corporations invest heavily in human resource management infrastructures intended amongst other things to provide for the future leadership needs of the corporation. Adopting well-known succession planning techniques, human resource managers routinely engage in corporate leadership identification and development processes, often directly involving the chief executive officer. This paper reports on a tendency for chief executive officers not to take all that much notice of these processes when making appointments to their own senior leadership teams. Drawing on three institutional case studies and in-depth interview data with the 12 chief executive officers, the paper shows that what appears to matter most in these appointments is likely impact of a leadership appointment on corporate profitability, though other pet leadership criteria may also be applied. The paper discusses the implications of this situation for human resource managers.

Keywords: human resources, leadership, manager, senior appointments

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A competency approach to developing leaders – is this approach effective?

Author/s: Patricia Richards

Edition: Volume 48, Number 1, April 2008

Summary: This paper examines the underlying assumptions that competency based frameworks are based upon in relation to leadership development. It examines the impetus for this framework becoming the prevailing theoretical base for developing leaders and tracks the historical path to this phenomenon. Research suggests that a competency-based framework may not be the most appropriate tool in leadership development across many organisations, despite the existence of these tools in those organisations, and reasons for this are offered. Varying approaches to developing effective leaders are considered and it is suggested that leading is complex as it requires both competencies and qualities in order for a person to be an effective leader. It is argued that behaviourally-based competencies only cater to a specific part of the equation when they relate to leadership development.

Keywords: competency, frameworks, leadership, behaviour

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