Disney didn’t ignore its animators: here’s why you need to develop the non-manager ‘leaders’ in your business

Disney didn’t ignore its animators: here’s why you need to develop the non-manager ‘leaders’ in your business

Published 20 February 2014 17:18, Updated 21 February 2014 10:24

Jack Zenger

Talented individuals are more inclined to stay with organisations when they feel they are progressing. 

When they hear the word “leader”, most people immediately think of someone with business cards that say “manager”, “director” or another such lofty title. That is, someone who holds a position of stature within a company’s hierarchy, and to whom several other employees report.

But in any organisation, there are also people who don’t have managerial titles or direct reports, and who nevertheless wield great influence and make critical contributions to the firm. These are the highly professional individual contributors. They may be petroleum engineers at an oil company, software engineers at a technology organisation, industrial designers at a toy company or pilots at an airline. In many cases, they have deliberately chosen not to pursue a managerial career. Perhaps they prefer technical work. Or perhaps they want to avoid the budgeting, reporting and meetings that management jobs entail.

In some organisations, the importance of these employees is both obvious and rewarded. In the early 1980s, Jack Zenger heard Michael Eisner acknowledge one such group when Eisner was president of Disney. He talked of the importance of taking care of the people in any organisation who made unique, pivotal contributions and who were easy to overlook. “In Disney,” he said, “these people are our animators.” They conceived the endearing cartoon characters and brought them to life through their craft. Today that work is done with computer-generated graphics rather than laborious drawings, but the function remains vital to the company.

Every organisation has such employees. It may be someone in product development who, without any direct reports, plays an essential role in the selection and development of new products. It may be a key salesperson who, because of some unique connection with customers, exerts a powerful influence on the organisation’s go-to-market strategy.

These individuals meet important criteria of true leaders, but they are often overlooked for leadership development because they don’t manage or supervise anyone and aren’t thought to need training in management basics like budgeting. They may be included in the mandatory compliance programs such as safety or data security, but those programs don’t do much to advance their leadership acumen or behavior.

WHAT A FOCUS ON ‘MANAGERS’ MISSES OUT ON

Companies are missing a huge opportunity to provide this group with much of the same development experience that managers receive. For several years, we have conducted development sessions for more than 1000 such individual contributors. Their response to, and the outcomes from, these development sessions have been very similar to comparable sessions we’ve conducted with managers. In particular, we’ve found that they greatly appreciate receiving the same kind of feedback from others that developing leaders receive in 360-degree evaluations by their peers, bosses and direct reports.

While they’re not rated by direct reports (since they don’t have any), individual contributors can receive, and benefit from, feedback from peers, bosses and colleagues in different parts of the firm. Some also invite feedback from customers and suppliers.

There are several reasons firms should invest in this group. First, investing in their leadership development will make these valuable employees feel highly valued, signalling that the organisation respects their contribution enough to provide for their continuing development. And talented individuals are more inclined to stay with organisations when they feel they are progressing.

Investing in their development will also help these employees achieve greater success. Individual contributors succeed in part because of their professional expertise, but also because of their ability to work well and communicate effectively with other employees and departments. Leadership development efforts can make them better team players, improve their communication skills and teach them to be better coaches – skills that are particularly important for people who, given their lack of formal organisational power, must accomplish nearly everything they do through informal influence.

Finally, some of these individual contributors could develop into excellent managers, and they could begin such a transition without a shift in their formal position. There are obvious advantages to identifying management potential before promoting some other valuable contributor who will turn out to be unsuited to or unhappy in that role. Moreover, as they learn to be more effective interpersonally and become more attuned to the people issues, many individual contributors with management potential may become increasingly open to managerial roles. Even those who don’t will be more apt to adopt some of the perspectives and behaviours of managers – such as being concerned about developing others and not always taking the short-term, expedient path of handling every task themselves.

Individual contributors are a huge asset for any organisation. Yet they typically fail to show up on anyone’s radar screen for development. Organisations are missing a great opportunity to retain these key people, to help them be even more influential and to prepare some of them for key managerial positions in the future.

(Jack Zenger is the CEO of Zenger/Folkman, a leadership development consultancy. Joseph Folkman is the president of Zenger/Folkman. They are co-authors of the forthcoming “How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths.”)