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An overwhelming majority of North American firms want to fill 80 percent or more of their senior management positions (general manager and above) with internal candidates, according to an ongoing survey conducted by Development Dimensions International. Yet few are coming near that goal, and the percentage is going down. Companies report that corporate downsizing has left them with fewer middle managers, of whom too many lack the competencies and career experience necessary to run a third-millennium corporation.

A major reason for the dearth of ready-to-promote managers is the failure of traditional succession-management and planning systems. In such systems, senior managers spend an inordinate amount of time considering and naming potential replacements for themselves and lower-level managers, applying such labels as "ready now" or "ready in two years." These systems are often expensive, forms-driven, bureaucratic, and out of touch with organizational strategy. There's usually little focus on skill development; most of the attention concentrates on job placement. Most important, the majority of traditional programs are inaccurate: Fewer than 30 percent of senior management positions are filled by those hand-picked backups. If organizations are going to have the executive talent they need in the next decade and beyond, a drastic change is needed.

One answer to this dilemma is to use the acceleration pool system as the vehicle for grooming executive talent. Rather than targeting one or two people for each senior management position a la traditional succession planning, an acceleration pool develops a group of high-potential candidates for undefined jobs at the executive level. As the name implies, the development of these pool members is accelerated through "stretch" assignments that offer the best learning and highest-visibility opportunities. Pool members spend less time in assignments, get more training, attend special developmental experiences such as university executive programs and in-company action learning sessions, and get more feedback and coaching.

With an acceleration pool system, senior managers no longer need to worry about figuring out who's going to back up whom in their organization except for the top four or five positions. With that task removed, they can focus on skill and knowledge development.

Sink or swim
A midsize company (1,000 to 5,000 employees) might have one acceleration pool aimed at developing people for top management positions. Nominations are made by the management of each strategic business unit, based on job performance and, sometimes, assessment center results. The pros and cons of accelerated development are explained to the candidates, and they decide whether to join the pool. There's no stigma to opting out.

People might be in the pool for one to 15 years, depending on when they enter and their development needs. Pool members have an assigned mentor or a team of two to three executives to aid their development. Assessment centers help define specific individual development needs and act as the basis for individual development plans.

A senior management team reviews each participant's job performance, competency development, and job-experience growth at least twice a year. The team makes appropriate assignment and development decisions for the good of the organization and the candidate. Organizational movement can be horizontal or vertical, with heavy use of task-force assignments to minimize family relocation. Training focuses on management and interpersonal skills, with the training delivered through action learning assignments, virtual teams, Web-based self-study, and classroom instruction.

Though most people become part of the pool relatively early in their careers, the door is always open for late bloomers, and they can be dropped if they aren't adequately performing in their assigned jobs or meeting their development goals. Not everyone named to senior positions will come from the pool, but most of the internal promotions will.

There are many variations on the basic acceleration pool model. A large organization might have three pools--one starting at the supervisory level, one at middle management, and one directly below senior level. The size of a pool depends on the number of positions above it and the selection ratio that the organization would like to have in filling target positions. The number of acceleration pools reflects how a company thinks about its people and how it's organized.

For example, an acceleration pool in a manufacturing firm might exist to fill top plant management positions, while the purpose of a pool of middle managers might be to fulfill a range of positions. Some people might be in two or three pools as they advance. Some managers might never be out of an acceleration pool; they might jump from one pool to another as they move up.

Being in the right lane
Acceleration pools are built around several factors that define the characteristics of the top managers needed to move the organization forward.

Competencies or dimensions. These are clusters of behavior, knowledge, technical skills, and motivations important to success in senior management. Examples include change leadership, strategic direction, global marketing, entrepreneurial insight, and the building of business partnerships.

Job challenges. This refers to the kinds of situations that a person entering into top management should have experienced or at least been exposed to. For example, carrying an assignment through from beginning to end; being heavily involved with a merger, an acquisition, a strategic alliance, or a partnership opportunity; implementing a company wide change; developing and implementing a plan to cut costs or control inventories; negotiating agreements with external organizations; and operating in high-pressure or high visibility situations.

Organizational knowledge. This term encompasses the areas of an organization that a senior manager must understand to perform effectively--such as line and staff, home office and field offices, domestic and international, and management and sales.

Benchmark organizations use a combination of job performance, interview, and assessment-center data to identify high-potential people and to diagnose competency-development needs.

One organization looking for top managerial potential decided to put people with certain organizational titles through assessment centers to help identify those with promise. One of the assessment centers had people who managed 2,000 or 3,000 employees, along with a young man from Nova Scotia who was responsible for only three employees. He stood out because he hadn't gone to college, while most of the other managers being evaluated had MBAs from leading schools. Yet, this young man performed admirably--one of the best of the hundreds of people who went through the centers. The organization jumped on the opportunity and sent him to an executive development program at Harvard, gave him some behavioral training he needed, and promoted him. Every few years, it moved him to different key assignments around the world. In every job, he exceeded expectations, and within a few years he was leading one of the largest sectors of the organization.

These are the lessons from that story:

• All organizations have more good people than they think; the trick is to find them.
• The assessment center method is a good system for spotting potential.
• An assessment center is an excellent tool for diagnosing specific development needs, which can be the target of effective training interventions.

Modern day assessment centers can play an important role in succession and development planning:

• Assessment centers provide insights far beyond those than can be obtained by quicker, easier methods such as paper-and-pencil tests and interviews. Extensive research has proven their effectiveness.
• The use of outside professional assessors provides an accurate and unbiased view of competencies.
• The assessment center is perceived by participants as being fair, job relevant, and accurate.
• Assessment centers allow for an accurate comparison of people throughout the world.

Staying afloat
Acceleration pool members develop through a combination of short, high-impact, targeted training programs; short-term learning experiences such as attending conferences or hosting a delegation of foreign customers; and, most of all, from meaningful, measurable job assignments.

For each development activity, acceleration pool members are prepared for success. They understand why the learning opportunity is important to their current and future job success, and they define desired outcomes relative to competencies, challenges, and organizational knowledge. Specific measurable learning application objectives are established to keep the focus on application rather than on learning completion. For example, acceleration pool members are not evaluated by completing a training program but on how they apply the training concepts in a measurable way back on the job. By having application targets defined before taking training, pool members can focus their attention on application during the training. They can also tap into the instructor's special knowledge or get coaching from other people in the training class, relative to the targeted application. Pool members develop their learning goals and have a strong sense of ownership of their own development.

After completing a learning event, pool members evaluate their success against their objectives and document their achievements. The pool members and the organization can use that information to gauge their developmental achievements on the road to senior management positions.

Why not just develop everyone? There are several good reasons.

• Every organization has a limited number of good developmental positions, in which a person can be given an unusual amount of freedom and authority to make decisions.
• Organizations have only enough time to develop a subset of their managers.
• Development is expensive in terms of special education opportunities, executive coaches, and sending people to conferences.
• Developing people burns a great deal of management energy. One of the biggest hurdles is getting managers to focus on their assigned development responsibilities.
• Not everyone wants to be in an acceleration pool. There are negatives in terms of travel, necessary changes of residence, and amount of work.

In the past, some organizations used the term talent pool to describe their high-potential people. The problem is that implies that people outside the pool don't have talent. The assumption of an acceleration pool is that everyone in the organization has talent, has the right to be developed, and has the right to be considered for promotion, but only a few people will be accelerated in their development. Not being selected for an acceleration pool doesn't mean a manager's career development is stifled. In fact, many high-potential people decide they don't want to be in an acceleration pool (as least at a point in time) because of the pool's demand on lifestyle and other issues.

As organizational success depends more on having the right people for the right jobs at the right time, there's a need to become more active in developing internal talent. Tired, old systems that didn't work in the past will almost certainly not work in the fast-moving, dynamic organizations of this millennium. The acceleration pool system meets the needs of many organizations because pools focus executives' time on developing the competencies of high-potential people instead of wasting time with needless paperwork trying to nominate people for jobs that are likely to change.

Acceleration pools are an attractive alternative because they fit the current culture's young managers by offering intensive self-development, job flexibility, and self-management of their careers.

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