Although no organization will refute the value of leadership development or its ability to yield results, many find it too expensive to pursue in depth. However, while the size of the investment is nothing to balk at, it is generally overplayed. Most companies cannot afford to invest in all of the best practice leadership development interventions out there, but there is no reason that they cannot design a system that fits their needs at an acceptable cost. Despite being one of the largest companies in the world, McKesson has taken an approach that focuses on choosing only the most simplistic and effective methods based on principles of efficiency and sustainability.

McKesson is ranked eighteenth on the Fortune 500 with more than $88 billion in annual revenue. The company delivers vital medicines, medical supplies, and health information technology solutions that touch patient lives in every health care setting. The depth and breadth of the company’s product and service offerings, coupled with the largest customer base in the health care industry, uniquely position McKesson to meet the needs of its customers:

McKesson has a highly decentralized operating environment and maintains a delicate balance between individual business unit autonomy and pursuing the “One McKesson” initiatives—that is, combining a unique collection of health care products and services to create unbeatable value and offerings to clients. The culture is highly relationship driven, with the creation of trusting partnerships based on delivering on commitments critical to success in the organization.

Historically, McKesson was managed more as independent businesses, but over the past five years, it has been creating shared services and One McKesson processes across all of its businesses. Leadership development has been no exception. Over the past several years, it has designed and implemented human resource (HR) processes and automated systems for performance management, compensation planning, talent acquisition and talent reviews, and succession planning processes.

FIGURE 8.1. MCKESSON LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PATH

Source : Scott Boston and Sandy Allred, 2007.

As the Executive Development and Talent Management team at McKesson began the project plan to design the LTL program, we saw five areas in which leadership development programs fail and wanted to stay clear of them:

We designed the LTL program to be a nine-month learning experience—enough time to make something happen in terms of allowing participants time to make meaningful application of the program learnings. The nine-month process consisted of the following components (see Table 8.1 for a time line of events):

The process begins by soliciting business unit presidents to nominate up to twenty-eight high-potential midlevel managers to participate in the program. Great care is taken to ensure that the business unit presidents and executive managers of participants have an understanding of their role in supporting the participants through the process.

Participants begin the process by attending Linkage’s Global Institute for Leadership Development (GILD), an intensive week-long learning program where participants are exposed to world-class thought leaders from academic, business, and government circles. Also during the Institute, participants receive 360-degree feedback and two on-site coaching sessions and one additional session thirty to forty-five days after the program. At several points during GILD, learners participate in a McKesson learning team where they:

Prior to attending the first learning activity (LTL II), participants and their supervisors are required to identify a project where participants have an opportunity to lead a change effort within their area of responsibility. This is not a make-more-work project; rather, it is usually something they are already doing or contemplating doing during the performance period. Projects have these characteristics:

Three months after participants take part in GILD, they attend LTL II, a two-and-a-half-day session at company headquarters in San Francisco. During this event, participants tour company headquarters and hear from senior company executives on topics such as strategy and financial position. Board members participate as well. They come to the program and discuss what it means to be a board member and share insights from their personal leadership journeys.

A key to any successful leadership development program is its ability to follow up and track participants’ progress toward their final goals and outcomes and the ability to show the results of the program.

To do this for the LTL program, we turned to Fort Hill Company’s DevelopmentEngine tool, which (1) ensures that the participants’ learning plans are executed, (2) supports participants’ growth by offering them the ability to request feedback from the supervisors or coach, (3) minimizes overhead for both participants and administrators (it is a turnkey process), and (4) can be customized to specific program needs and schedules.

“It was awakening, reminding, reinforcing of what I knew, and discovered new things I didn’t know.”

“The value of protecting some reasonable amount of time to actually think about what I am trying to achieve and the importance of having useful tools to assist in focusing and driving that thinking process.”

“My most valuable take away . . . it’s all about other people . . . it isn’t just one thing . . . but mostly how I leverage my strengths and look for the strengths of my team.”

“Build better relationships with my peers.”

“Do it with more passion and leverage all of my people rather than the privileged few.”

“Share more information, improve meeting management, and accelerate change using the CAP tools.”

“I have witnessed a dramatic improvement in your second [personal] goal and as a result, I believe your peer relationships have improved and you have further developed the trust/respect of the team. I am also learning by your example and believe it has made you a more effective leader.”

“The effort you are making to improve your leadership skills is evident in how you participate in our [leadership] meetings. Since you completed the LTL course, you have increased your communication and input on strategic and operational issues and most recently, in the budget process.”

We are in our second wave of this program and, based on our experience and the feedback from the learners, have made some modifications to it. The first realization for us was that the degree of McKesson-specific business literacy among the group was lower than we had anticipated. So for wave one, we mixed the team into learning teams at GILD with leaders from other companies. Once we identified the critical need for them to understand the McKesson companies and our products, services, strategies, and other topics, we opted for a McKesson-specific learning team. Results indicate that this was the correct move: participants not only bonded faster but began sharing cross-boundary information and best practices both inside and external to the formal program earlier in the process. Moreover, few business relationships within and between businesses had existed among this group of middle managers prior to the program, so taking greater time for team building yielded great dividends.

J. Scott Boston is senior vice president of human resources for McKesson Corporation with responsibility for executive development, talent acquisition, organizational capability, diversity and inclusion, and the McKesson Center for Learning. He has over twenty years of experience with Fortune 50 companies leading talent management, HR transformation, and large-scale cultural change initiatives in domestic and international contexts. Prior to McKesson, he worked for seventeen years at BellSouth Corporation in a variety of positions, including chief learning officer, division head HR generalist, and director of executive development. He has an Executive M.B.A. and a B.B.A. from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.

Sandy Allred is the manager of executive development and talent management systems at McKesson. She has managed several cross-functional teams to design, develop, and implement initiatives across the organization. During her ten years with McKesson, she has led several corporatewide initiatives to include performance management, talent review process, and succession planning initiatives. Most recently, she has led two leadership development initiatives: the LTL program and the Rising Leaders Program, both designed to develop high-potential leaders within McKesson. She has traveled internationally to facilitate sessions with McKesson executives, managers, and individual contributors on topics ranging from performance management to ICARE Shared Principles. She is completing her Executive M.B.A. at Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson School of Business.

Christopher Cappy works in the areas of large-scale change management, leadership development, and innovative executive education and coaching. He is founder of Pilot Consulting Corporation, which led IBM’s worldwide Accelerate Change Together (ACT) initiative between 1995 and 2000, and he served for eleven years on the faculty of General Electric’s Crotonville Leadership Center, which included leading the external consulting team for GE Appliances Workout. Cappy is a founding member of the Learning Network, holds a degree in production management from Rochester Institute of Technology, and is a graduate of Columbia University’s Advanced Organization Development Program.