view the pool of senior leadership talent as a diversified portfolio of
talent for which there was no portfolio manager or investment
strategy. The third concept was the idea of a leadership supply
chain with a somewhat predictable life cycle. This perspective
made it obvious that there was an insufficient line of sight to
destination assignments, nor were there mechanisms in place
to manage the flow of a leader from one stage of the life cycle to
the next. The result of this analysis was the Motorola Leadership
Supply System.
Personal Commitment: Goals
at the Center of the SystemThe first building block of the system is the concept of personal
commitment. Personal commitment is a documented understand-
ing between a leader and a direct report concerning the goals and
results for which the associate is responsible in the near term. In
moving from being a company distinguished only for its engineer-
ing innovation to being a more consistently successful commercial
enterprise, Motorola had to have a customer- and market-based
scorecard for the company that drove a set of interlinked goals
cascading from the CEO to the shop floor. Personal commitment
became the mechanism for achieving that aim.
In my experience with a multitude of global corporations, this
was the first time I had seen a viable implementation of this con-
cept, and technology made it possible. The concept is similar to
management by objectives, introduced decades ago, but the imple-
mentation is much more powerful. Once every quarter, all
Motorola leaders sit down with each of their direct reports to
review how they are progressing toward the achievement of the
personal commitment objectives. The leaders also receive multi-
rater feedback concerning how they are doing with respect to their
behavior. This personal commitment process becomes quite cum-
bersome in a very large organization, and this is where the interplay
between technology and good human practice comes into play.
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