Leadership Pipeline

The leadership pipeline has six passages, each with a different shift

Charan, Drotter and Noel describe each passage as a turn in a pipe. At every turn, the leader has to let go of work that made them successful and value a different kind of work instead.

Organisations use the pipeline to find where leaders get stuck

The most common failure is promotion without transition: a leader moves up a level but keeps working at the previous one. The new manager still does the technical work; the new director still manages tasks instead of managers. The organisation then has two people doing one job and nobody doing the senior one.

HR and talent teams use the model to define what good looks like at each level and to design development before a promotion, not after. In the Gulf, national talent programmes such as Bahrainisation and Saudisation often move capable people up quickly, which makes clear passage support even more valuable. Succession planning coaching is one way organisations prepare people for the next turn.

A hypothetical example: the engineer who kept doing the engineering

Imagine a senior engineer at an energy company promoted to lead a team of six. She was promoted because she solved the hardest problems, so she keeps solving them. Her team waits for her, her hours grow and her manager wonders why the team's output has not changed.

In pipeline terms, she has not yet valued the work of managing others: delegating, coaching and making time for her people. The fix is less about skills than about what she considers real work. The guide on how to delegate as a manager and the answer to why new managers fail both explore this first passage.

The model's limits: careers are less linear than the pipe

• ✦Flatter and matrix organisations blur the passages, so a leader may manage managers in one direction and influence peers in another.
• ✦Specialist careers do not always lead to people management, and the model can undervalue them.
• ✦Family businesses sometimes move a successor several passages at once, which the model describes but cannot prevent.
• ✦Identity and mindset matter as much as skills at each turn, and the model only names them as work values.