A recent DDI survey revealed that a transition at work is the most stressful transition in a person?s life. The survey further stated, based on a detailed research of thousands of leaders that over 57% of leaders making transitions were ill-prepared for their transition. Surprisingly, at the critical operational-to-strategic level, about 19% received no preparation at all. A manager who participated in the survey put it rather succinctly, ?I was never formally prepared as a leader. I have never had a formal mentor. I have learnt by experience, building on some natural instinct, I imagine. You know, class captain, scout leader, team leader, manager-in that order.?

In Leaders Without Sea Legs (Howard and Watt, 2009), the authors use data collected from DDI?s executive assessment centres to demonstrate that the leadership attributes needed to steer the organisational ship in perilous times differ markedly from those in more normal times. The fall of iconic companies and their leaders lead one to move away from theories of infallibility and relook at our existing methods of identifying leadership potential and preparing future leaders for career transitions. It can be truly said that transitions at work have never required more preparation than the times we are in today

A client put the following question during a recent meeting, ?My business landscape has changed. We need different kinds of leaders for us to succeed in this downturn. I can?t believe that we should be doing the same things by way of talent management as we did when things were hunky dory. How do we identify the strategic leaders who are ready to move into the level which reports into the CEO?? This may not be an uncommon quandary as the reality is that from a time when you needed to worry only about preparing leaders for transitions, you now have to recalibrate who makes the transition and then how you prepare them for it. The truth is that both the processes of talent identification and talent development have to be reoriented in the shifting sands of a changing market reality.

The new organisational DNA

A talent management head confessed, ?It is clear that the leaders we need in a downturn are quite different from those we needed during boom-time. In the leadership pipeline, I guess the challenge is not so great when people move from, say, managing oneself to managing others as it is when people make the transition to operational leaders and thereafter from operational to strategic leaders.? The fact is that each transition has new challenges but the challenges at the senior levels are more complex. Let us look at a situation in XYZ Ltd, which is a large Indian group with a global footprint. XYZ is looking at a robust process to identify successors for its C-suite. XYZ appoint a global consulting company and state their problem quite simply, ?Our competency framework is static. It was created several years ago when it seemed the party would never end. We used that as the basis of our internal potential assessments all these years. Our business landscape has since turned topsy-turvy. Will our assessments look the same??

They are not likely to: it is a no-brainer that XYZ?s business drivers or key leadership challenges have changed from what they were during boom-time. For example, export markets have all but disappeared and the company has to look at domestic growth as opposed to its former strategy of focus on overseas markets.

Similarly, there could be changes in other business drivers as well. This dictates that XYZ will have to look at different things in their assessment centres. A survey of more than 12,000 leaders by DDI (Global Leadership Forecast, 2008) threw up an interesting point ?what derailed leaders or led them to fail were not knowledge and experience but deficiencies in interpersonal and leadership skills. Therefore, when you are looking at a bunch of guys who have copybook CVs and you can expect that in XYZ, what is important is that you look out for deficiencies in interpersonal and leadership skills and how they play out, especially in times of stress and how they prevent the person from bringing their skills and knowledge to bear on the job.

These deficiencies arise from personality patterns that are sometimes called ?Executive Derailers? and they include volatility, impulsivity and avoidance as they tend to derail the person during stressful times. Therefore, determining the new organisational DNA or the profile of the successful leader (and you would benchmark your current leaders against this ideal profile in the new assessment centre) in the downturn requires going back to determining not only what knowledge and skills are now more important but also what personality patterns can help or hinder the leader.

Setting up your leaders for success

A leader who moved up the ladder recently spoke up during DDI?s Global Leadership Forecast, 2008 and said, ?I wish that I had been coached and developed with an eye to my inherent challenges from the beginning. In retrospect, I feel like I got thrown to the sharks a bit and had to learn to communicate and lead in ways that were not my inherent style.? Different surveys on leadership practices have shown that barely half of all organisations had programmes for transitions.

It is important for each organisation to check out two things very quickly?what are the key competencies that are development areas for their leaders and the quality of programmes that they have to address these. All competencies are not equally developable. Good organisations are clear about which are easily developable and which aren?t and have clear strategies for addressing these, especially at the selection stage.

What then is the best way to prepare for these transitions? DDI?s Leadership Forecast, 2008 revealed that the best organisations use a combination of development methods?the more the better actually. Additionally, the survey also revealed that anything on the job?stretch assignments, special projects, shadowing a senior leader etc was better than methods away from the job?training workshops, coaching, executive management workshops and so on. Another interesting finding was that leadership development initiatives that were rated very high quality were 20 times more likely to measure the results of their initiatives than those rated very low quality. As Lord Kelvin said, ?If you can not measure it, you can not improve it?.

The writer is managing director, DDI India Pvt Ltd, an HR consultancy firm