Proactive Re-skilling

Today's ET contains a short interview with management guru Ram Charan. The gyaan he gave was more or less routine, but one paragraph that caught my eye was this one:

To be world class you need to focus on people. A leader's highest lever is people: people before strategy. People compete, businesses don't. Leaders create vision or embrace a vision, they align people emotionally, they lead other people to a certain direction, but they also have to develop people ahead of the business needs.

Let's take a closer look at the last bit: "leaders have to develop people ahead of the business needs". Companies will go through ups and downs but as a leader, you need to keep moving things forward, for which you may sometimes have to redeploy key people in new and unfamiliar roles. Such changes may especially be required in bad years like 2008 and 2013, when it would not be unusual to move someone from delivery to sales or from production to maintenance. But such a transformation cannot be achieved suddenly or in a "perform or perish" mode. As a leader, you need to anticipate the need for such role changes well in advance and start re-skilling the concerned employee. This is where constant engagement with the team becomes crucial. If you have regular meetings with your staff, even during "business as usual" times, you can identify candidates for re-skilling and get them started on the learning curve. This makes it easy for them to pick up the new skills at their own pace and more importantly, it becomes easy for you to re-deploy them at the right time.