How fast can a leader learn?

90 days. 3 months. A heartbeat of time. That is how long we give leaders to learn.

Even the President of the United States gets 100 days to get up to speed. Or, at least that is what we say. But if we are honest, we are looking for immediate changes.

Think of what we are asking. The leader needs to be in place, understand the organization, the business, the customers, the stockholders, investors, leadership team, regulators, the competition, the global marketplace...AND make noticeable positive changes. All in 90 days. And if not, we, as share holders or employees or colleagues, get impatient and wonder if we made the right decision to put that leader in place.

What are we asking? Once we ask such a thing do we give that person the tools they need? No. Usually not. We say we do with succession planning...but does that provide the person with the in-depth knowledge, the experiential, contextual background to deeply understand the rationale of the past to avoid making similar mistakes for the future? No. Not because we don't want to but most of the time because we don't know how. Or we simply use magical thinking to say it is all in who we choose. Really. They don't need help because they can pick it up fast, they are smart.

And then we wonder why leaders stay approx 5 years in their top jobs and why they make decisions with such short term gain. You have to wonder whose fault that really is. We set unrealistic expectations and then we reward the wrong behavior.

I have seen time and again the gains made by using a process to illuminate and transfer the deeply held, experiential knowledge held either by the previous leader or within the organization. Not to keep people stuck in the past but to move them forward with the background to make better decisions, good decisions consistently. This work is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity in this fast paced and complex world. Do you want to take a highly visible leadership role without an understanding of the relational or organizational knowledge needed? The cost of doing nothing or the same thing over and over is too high. It is time Knowledge Transfer is seen as the critical business tool that it is.