Preventing Derailment: What To Do Before It's Too Late

Increasing Variety of Experience for Managers

Challenging jobs teach about the subtleties of leadership—starting up or fixing troubled operations, expanding large operations, or working on time-limited projects, from crises to systems installations. Such jobs teach how to cope with pressure and ambiguity, learn quickly or deal with balky subordinates. In absolute terms, challenging assignments are the best teacher. They are most likely to be remembered as developmental, and can teach both the greatest variety and number of lessons.

Recommendation 4. Figure out what your challenging jobs are and why they’re challenging. A simple practice used in some organizations is to interview small groups of managers in each major unit to get examples of their ...