Content area
Full Text
Creating a culture of leadership.
AT FIRST GLANCE, ZAPP0S.COM, THE online retailer, appears to have little in common with General Electric (GE). Hit hard by the recession, GE is in the throes of scaling down its financial services subsidiary, GE Capital, by 40 percent. Zappos, on the other hand, is tapping into changing consumer habits and ramping up for 30 percent growth this year.
Yet surprisingly, these two organizations face similar challenges in motivating and engaging their employees. For Zappos, it's about creating and maintaining passion in a call-center culture. For GE, it's about keeping people engaged in a changing climate.
Named among the 20 Best Companies for Leadership in a BusinessWeek.com/ Hay Group survey, both GE and Zappos put a premium on selecting, developing, and retaining strong leaders at every level. What sets them apart, however, is not just their emphasis on good leadership, but also how they approach it. They carefully tailor their developing leaders to fit their unique business strategies and organizational cultures.
While there is no one best way to grow leaders, the companies that do it best share certain characteristics. The top 20 companies address LD on multiple fronts, from articulating how leadership behavior needs to change to meet the challenges of the future to managing their pools of successors for mission-critical roles. And, they continue to make leadership a top priority.
The Best Companies recognize the value of strong leadership in both good times and bad. Culturally they can't do away with LD, even in a recession. They see it as necessity, not a perk.
People at the Best Companies sense the urgency to develop leaders; in fact, 94 percent say their organization actively manages a pool of successors for mission-critical roles, compared to 68.6 percent of the other organizations.
Leadership feels different at the Best Companies. In the survey, more than 64 percent of respondents from the top 20 say people in their companies are expected to lead, even when they are not in a formal position of...