High Flyers: Developing the Next Generation of Leaders

by Morgan W. McCall Jr.

How do you develop the people who will one day lead your company? High Flyers challenges conventional wisdom about how to groom executives for the top positions in the firm by presenting a strategic framework for identifying and developing future executives that senior managers can use to identify and develop future executives. McCall demonstrates that the best executives aren't necessarily managers who possess a previously identified, generic list of traits or who have risen to the top through survival of the fittest. Rather, the real leaders of the future are those who have the ability to learn from their experiences and remain open to continuous learning. If these people get the right experiences on the job, they will have the ultimate opportunity to learn new executive skills. Full of vivid real-life examples, High Flyers is for everyone in the organization who has responsibility for developing people - as well as for aspiring managers who want to learn what it takes to become truly effective leaders. For companies, High Flyers demonstrates the power of executive development as a competitive advantage and the way to ensure the best leadership for the future.

Genres: Leadership, Business, Nonfiction, Management

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1997

Reviews

[Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this one and will be passing it on to at least one of the supervisors I manage. Gives a good argument for the importance of continued development of your top performers while highlighting pitfalls and excuses that can derail you.

[Anthony Korolev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting reading where author offers his own models to tackle the management development and derailment problems in organizational setting.

Might be interesting for wide audience.

[Ved Prakash · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well structured book on the development framework necessary to build leaders or become one. Chapter 8 and Appendix are more important to absorb the concept and practice in life.

[Jeff Lampson]

This is a really good resource. I seems to be in possession of just about every serious leader, L&OD, Talent, HR, and Coaching professional I come across. It is at the heart of my coaching specialty and I will continue to come back to it several times over.

It is loaded with illustrative examples (the first one involving Horst Schroeder from Kellogg's was very powerful) and first class summary tables and tools. He paints a very clear, practical and compelling list of developmental experiences for High Flyers ranging from first supervisory roles to project and assignments and turnaround situations. Also hardships as development experiences.

His flow charts are extremely helpful from a practitioner's point of view. I particularly like the one about how to translate the business strategy into an executive development system. It has the backbone to state that executives cannot accomplish what cannot be defined - excellent candor. The book also creates a clear delineation between the development and selection paradigm. I found the section on making succession planning more developmental very thought provoking. The chapter on making executive development was inspiring to me and McCall provides a compelling case for doing so.

[Nigel Street]

On balance a good overview of a process and structure to employee development with particular emphasis on opportunity development for leaders. McCall puts his finger on a number of the issues that stand in the way of companies developing their staff. Like most books of this ilk you can't help but feel there is rather too much padding particularly in the first couple of chapters when the author is framing the issue this could have been done much more quickly and prevents me giving it a recommendation.

[Rod Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth getting a copy even if you get the clearance ex Library one for 1p plus shipping.

Great structure, providing a framework of reference for any Leadership Development activity.