Diagnosis
You've got three talented reps – but who's really best for leadership development?
Prescription
To make the right choice, consider their strengths and weaknesses from every angle.
Acommon factor links the careers of successful pharmaceutical and biotech executives, from district managers to company presidents:
a manager once identified their leadership potential.
Through our annual region manager and district manager benchmarking studies ("RM Effectiveness Monitor" and "DM Effective
ness Monitor") and a series of interviews with these frontline managers and senior industry executives, Health Strategies
Group set out to learn how effective DMs and RMs currently identify future leaders. We also analyzed how today's leaders were
identified from among their peers earlier in their careers. Since the health and success of pharmaceutical and biotech companies depend upon the quality of their leaders and the decisions
they make, we hypothesized that we might find a substantial and well-resourced infrastructure supporting leadership identification.
We did not. Although leadership development receives substantial attention (the in-depth effectiveness report on which this article is based, "Identifying & Developing
Future Leaders," also analyzed the leadership development practices of effective region and district managers), leadership
identification receives less. As a result, many who enter the leadership pipeline never emerge as viable company leaders.
Success in identifying future leaders largely rests with effective frontline management – region and district managers. RMs
and DMs face challenges in this area. With little and infrequent formal training available on this topic, the criteria and
processes they use are often the products of trial and error. Mistakes may therefore be common as learning develops. Because
few or no incentives are attached to leadership identification, results are rarely tracked. There may therefore be no consequences
for poor performance in identifying leaders.
However, our experiences studying region and district managers in other settings assured us these talented individuals had
best practices that could be discovered and shared. We also believed that studying the ways current industry leaders were
originally identified could yield valuable guidance for today's RMs and DMs. These two hypotheses proved true. We found three
important leadership-identification lessons, each encompassing a barrier that RMs and DMs confront and the strategies they
use to overcome it. By understanding how these strategies work, all RMs and DMs can identify future leaders more accurately
and confidently.
Three lessons illustrated
In looking at the three lessons, please imagine yourself as a region manager. (Congratulations if this is a promotion!) Three
of your DMs nominate representatives for entry into the company leadership-development program, and your review and approval
are required. Participation in the program carries significant costs in dollars and time out of the field, so you should advance
only those who truly demonstrate high leadership potential.
Each representative helps illustrate a lesson learned from effective DMs and RMs. We will consider each case, posing appropriate
questions you, as the RM, should consider.
Representative A
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Representative A possesses strong sales performance. Our research found that one barrier RMs and DMs face in identifying future
leaders is "sales fog," or the tendency to allow sales success to obscure underlying skills. Effective DMs and RMs clear away
sales fog by digging in to validate the factors driving sales performance, particularly factors the representative controls.
They also value very good, consistent sales performance over outstanding one-time performance.
Could Representative A's DM be viewing his skills through the haze of sales fog? Three areas should be investigated to validate
the DM's opinion.
Sales increases may indicate superior skills, abilities, processes or effort. Then again, they may indicate a formulary win,
a great partner or sporadic effort. Determining what this exciting sales performance implies about Representative A's skills
and potential to lead others requires further investigation.
