The importance of strong leadership for companies to achieve success and remain successful is undeniable. That’s why there is a significant effort on the part of companies to develop their leaders.

Although leadership responsibilities vary according to each organization, Ram Charan argues that there is a common path that all professionals need to follow to become ready for leadership positions—what he calls the leadership pipeline.

This week we brought Eduardo Refkalefsky, Associate Professor at the School of Communication at UFRJ, to talk with us.

Hello everyone, it’s wonderful to have you here with us. And today I’m here with a guest who came to compete with me in the category of difficult last names. Eduardo, tell me—how do you pronounce that last name? I’m very, very happy to have you here with us. We have here a professional who is a PhD, has extensive experience in the market in training, development, and consulting, is an associate professor at UFRJ, and is here today to join us in talking about the leadership pipeline. Let’s get started, Eduardo. Tell us a bit about yourself, share some of your experiences before we dive into the topic.

Well, my undergraduate degree was in journalism, and then I ended up working as a journalist in the fields of Economics and Administration. To work in the advertising side of marketing for newspapers and magazines, especially in this administrative and economic area, I ended up starting to work with marketing consulting and management consulting.

What I bring from back then is always an emphasis on the importance of communication-related skills, which I see as something very relevant nowadays.

Where I think I really came in, even without having a degree in administration or other similar fields, having gone straight into a master’s and PhD without doing an MBA, was bringing this aspect of competence in communication, which is something important, and the leadership pipeline itself considers this a fundamental point.

Perfect, so let’s get started. Tell me a bit about how science can help in building this leadership pipeline. And perhaps there are people listening to our podcast who still don’t know—what exactly is a leadership pipeline?

So, how does science build and support this construction, and what is a pipeline?

Well, pipeline would mean “tubing,” so it’s actually a difficult term to translate into Portuguese. It could even make for a catchy headline like “leadership went down the drain,” so to speak. It’s funny that in one of the Portuguese editions, instead of using “pipe,” they used “straw.” The concept created by Ram Charan and other authors suggests the following: that idea of leadership—when we talk about leadership—depends a lot on the hierarchical level you have, the position you hold, and that completely changes the scope. So, one of the limitations in how we approach the topic, and how many people approach leadership, is saying things like: a leader has to have this, has to be proactive, and so on. But when we start looking more closely, we begin to see that the scopes are very different. For example, one of the important points they mention in the leadership pipeline is analyzing how a person allocates their time. So, of course, every leader, every professional, needs to know how to allocate time well, must have good time management, make time productive—that’s generic.

Now, if we look at the specific scope of the level the person is at—for example, someone who has just started and says, “I’m not managing anyone”—they are actually leading themselves, and that’s already extremely difficult. There are people who spend their entire lives and still can’t lead themselves, lacking discipline. So, for this person, the focus of leading themselves is being able to have self-control, to build discipline, to keep a schedule, to meet deadlines—these are important things. Only after that can they start thinking about other aspects; then they would be moving to the second level, when they begin to lead other people, to lead a team.

And this person who leads teams already needs to have another aspect that the first level doesn’t—time allocation. For example, they need to allocate time to provide guidance, do a bit of coaching, offer mentoring, answer questions, and give feedback to their teams.

So, in the translation of the first edition they call it “application of time,” which is terrible. The second edition used “time management,” which is a bit better, but I personally translate it on my own as “time allocation.” Because I look at a person’s schedule to understand how they are distributing their time—they may manage time very well, but still distribute it poorly, meaning the time is badly allocated for the role they hold.

So when we start working in a more specific way, we kind of move away from that management discourse that has become somewhat pop and popularized—everyone knows how to talk about entrepreneurship, everyone knows what a startup is—but things can sometimes become superficial, or people think leadership is just a matter of motivation, or mindset, or a mental model. Of course, those are important things, but they are only part of it. When we study it scientifically, we begin to understand what mindset really is, from a psychological perspective, we understand ways of managing time, and what research shows about it. So we bring deeper knowledge that science provides, so it doesn’t remain something superficial and generic like we often see.

One thing I think is very important to remind people—and that they often, in many cases, fail to realize—is that management begins exactly at this first stage of managing oneself. People always think that because they are not in a leadership position, they don’t have a leadership role; they believe it’s the next step or the position they’ll have that will prepare them. But it’s actually the opposite: if we don’t start this challenge within ourselves, from the beginning—leading ourselves, our time, leading our deliverables while ensuring quality—how are we going to do that with others? This mindset is something very important that people forget most of the time.

Perfect, what happens sometimes with younger professionals, I think, is part of the problem we have with an excessively voluntarist and motivational discourse—thinking that management is only that, that there’s no science or knowledge behind it—is believing you can just look ahead without following the steps. And the pipeline shows very clearly that there are several stages; it’s a sequential process that you can’t skip, because it will show up later. That’s why you even have CEOs who carry flaws from the beginning, who don’t know how to lead a team.

Then the person thinks they’ll join a company and become a director in six months; if that doesn’t happen, they feel frustrated. Or they join a company and ask themselves what they need to do to become a manager. So the basic answer always starts at the first level, which is: do very well what you were hired to do. You have to deliver results, you have to demonstrate them in order to gain legitimacy. It’s similar to what happens in a soccer team. For a player to be a leader, the first thing they need to do is play well, because they need to earn credibility from others. If they don’t have that, it becomes complicated at that point.

So what you added is important. First, you need to manage yourself and deliver results, and then add more responsibilities.

Perfect. Let’s talk a bit about these challenges. What are the main challenges in implementing this model?

I think that from the company’s structural point of view, there are two issues. The first is that the pipeline refers to a type of career a person follows—a managerial or leadership career—because you will be working with other people. So you need to have skills and interests that can be developed. And many times, the person doesn’t want that.

For example: I’m a great salesperson, I enjoy talking to clients, but people like my work so much that they promote me to be a sales manager. But who said I want that? Who said I even have the know-how? And they promote me to do something I’ve never shown I could do.

Companies need to have flexibility, and we often talk about the Y-shaped career path, where a person either follows a managerial career or a specialist career. I might want to be a salesperson my whole life, I might want to be a doctor to perform surgeries, I might want to be a journalist out in the field. We need to make space for that. So what do we do with the salesperson? Let’s promote them to a top salesperson, not to a sales manager. Give them challenging clients, new areas—so within the company structure, we need to think about how to leverage these two paths: those who will pursue a managerial career and those who will not, and will instead become specialists—people who will make great use of their technical knowledge.

As a second point, there’s how to identify this in people. You need to have a structure, you need to assess well to understand whether the person is on the right path or not—looking at aptitude, interest, and analyzing competencies. It’s complex because there are many variables, and you need an evaluation mechanism that is reliable and fair, which I think is the key point.

Perfect. And you mentioned a point that I think is a critical mistake, one that for a long time—and companies still fall into it—is promoting an employee with high performance but low potential for management. These are people who don’t have the aptitude for management.

I once had an experience during an interview with a candidate who had been let go from a company where he held a managerial position, and the role I had available was a specialist position. He asked me, “Here, where I’m interviewing now, is it possible to grow as a specialist?” Because his dismissal from the previous company happened because he didn’t perform well in the management role—which he didn’t even want—but since he performed his previous function very well, he kept being promoted. However, when he reached the managerial position, he wasn’t suited to it or didn’t have the competencies to perform in that role.

I think this is a mistake that companies often make, but we’re starting to see other career paths—considering possibilities for lateral moves, expanding opportunities, goals, and also offering more robust compensation, without requiring the person to grow vertically.

Perfect, I think your example illustrates this very well. Because when this structure doesn’t exist, it becomes a serious problem for the company. You lose twice—you lose a good salesperson and you don’t gain a good sales manager. So what was going well turns into two problems.

And what concepts from academia can we use in implementing this project?

Well, I’ll speak from my area—communication. I conduct academic research specifically to understand how communication operates at different levels of the leadership pipeline and career path, what the demands are, and which specific communication competencies are required. One of them, which is perhaps one of the most difficult points to deal with and something people often learn in practice—but it’s rarely discussed—is when you become a fourth-level leader, meaning you lead an entire function or area. You become a specialist within the company. In a hospital, for example, the head of the ICU or head of Nursing, the Commercial Director, the Industrial Director. This person is actually responsible for managing an entire specialized area.

And then, what is this leader’s difficulty? They can no longer be seen as just a member of the area—they have to stop thinking like one and start acting as the leader of the area. And what does that mean? It’s not about those generic competencies that are important—time management, communication, proactivity. No. It’s something specific within communication that I call a “language translator leader,” a concept I borrowed from journalism theory.

Because they need to translate the language. For example, I’m the head of nursing in a hospital—what do I do? I have to spend 80% of my time talking to people who are not from my area. First, I need to develop people—that’s why the previous stages are important. In those earlier stages, I need to develop multiplier leaders, being part teacher, part coach, part mentor, so that I can build a team and they will run my area.

What do I actually do? If we think in terms of time allocation, out of five days in the week, I spend four outside my area. I’m the nursing lead, but I go talk to the medical director, ICU director, finance director, engineering director. I spend much more time on that because I need to “sell” my area to others, understand how other areas align with mine, and for that I need to master communication. There’s no way around it—within my own area I can use technical terms. For example, journalists using newsroom terms, engineers using industrial terms. But when you talk to someone from finance or marketing, it’s like speaking Greek. So you have to know how to express what you do in the other person’s language. It’s a complex exercise, especially because most people don’t even realize it.

So this issue of the functional leader, to me, becomes more complex the more specialized the company is, because they will have to communicate across multiple languages and with many different people.

Of course, we have two ways to deal with this. One is to provide soft skills training—developing communication, listening, and interpretation. The second involves tools that can help. I personally really like tools with a strong visual appeal. The Japanese used this extensively during World War II—project management and quality were all handled with visual tools. More recent tools like the balanced scorecard, which I really like, and everything related to design thinking, canvas, BMG canvas, and so on. Because visuals are a way for everyone to speak the same language more quickly. So the leader needs to know how to master all of them.

And you mentioned one that I think is fantastic, because it shows the synergy between areas, which is the canvas. You can understand where it starts, the interfaces it connects with, and all in a single report, on a single page, you can see all these interconnections.

Eduardo, this point you brought up about communication extends to all areas, but as someone in HR, I observe this quite a lot as a major difficulty. I often joke that HR speaks its own language, and only we understand it, with several terms that only we get—and then you go to the client area and they don’t understand. So this happens across all areas, especially in back-office functions like HR, finance, and technology, where you have many interfaces with the core business areas, creating this need.

One point I think is worth sharing as advice is to start getting more involved with the client area. As someone in HR, I say this because one of the key turning points for me was sometimes stepping away from sitting with HR and instead sitting within other areas. That way, you start to understand a bit of their reality, hear their language, adapt your own language, and become more effective—while also showing greater proximity.

Of course, in light of the pandemic, in-person interaction has now shifted to this virtual world. But what’s important is to always show that you’re available, close, and present—even if sometimes it’s not a meeting where you’ll actually have direct interaction with the client, being there to listen, understand a bit of the dynamics, and how the area operates. This greatly facilitates that exchange of language.

Perfect. In fact, I think one of the terms you mentioned is when you use the word “client,” because people often don’t realize it can refer to the internal client. I think that’s great because it actually shows a very strong sense of closeness. When we talk about the sales area, which today faces a major communication challenge, it comes up when we talk about consultative selling. Salespeople, because they work with quotas, have a problem—they need to deal with a psychological aspect that few people notice: they have to manage anxiety. They may have to make 20 visits to close one deal, so they’re dealing with anxiety and time pressure. Because of that, they feel they need to start by talking rather than actually listening.

So I often compare this role—especially using the word “client”—to consultative selling that HR does. It’s about listening to the other area before you start speaking and translating your language for all other areas. Language has this role—it’s the way you bring people together. The word communication comes from “communi,” community—you build a community. For example, if you want to know whether someone who works at an airport or for an airline can tell you’re not from their field, just say one word: “plane.” Everyone says “aircraft,” so if you say “plane,” they’ll know you’re not from the field. If you’re in healthcare, you need to understand a word like “gloss,” which is when a payment request is denied. If you say “rescission” to someone in real estate development, they’ll know you’re from that field. We start discovering these kinds of things.

There are many examples I find interesting, and I can even say from my own experience that it took me a while—and even though I worked with strategy, since my area ended up being closely tied to training, development, and even teaching MBA classes in people management, it took me a bit longer than it should have to grasp this. These are things we gradually come to understand, and then you’re able to present much better what you bring to the table—your value and all of that. And this comes from communication techniques. You need to develop active listening, empathy, and so on.

And one final point you just brought up, which I also think is important: communication also comes from listening. People think communicating is about speaking, but it’s also about listening. It’s dialogue, not a monologue.

Exactly. I once wrote a text that gets cited quite a bit—Rubem Alves wrote in a text once: I always see advertisements for public speaking courses, but I’ve never seen one for listening courses. It would be a course where you stay quiet and listen to the other person, so it’s something that needs to be developed. I ended up adopting techniques to train this, but it’s much more difficult. That’s why we call it active listening. We have to make an effort not to speak and to deal with our emotions, and that’s where emotional intelligence and several other aspects come in.

Wow, we could stay here much longer, but we’re already heading toward the end. I’d like you to bring and share with us these lessons learned about applying this concept—the biggest challenges your students face in their companies. How are they doing it, what difficulties are they dealing with, and what suggestions have you been offering in response to this practice? So share with us a bit of what you’ve been seeing in the classroom.

Well, let’s go. I really like a quote I found online from Richard, who is an entrepreneur in the EduTech space, which is actually a phrase by the Portuguese professor José Pacheco. It says: 20th-century teachers teach 21st-century students using 19th-century techniques. It doesn’t add up. That idea of the teacher speaking, the student copying, and then taking a test that measures the student’s ability to write what the teacher wants—that’s over. If you say that schools already have methods, I had the privilege of studying at a very forward-thinking school in this regard, Colégio de Aplicação da UERJ. Instead of writing an essay as a purely technical exercise, we would discuss a topic, write about it, and then after debating the topic, we would write again. So you do something different from simply listening to the teacher and putting it on paper.

When you move into an MBA or executive education, this becomes even more critical. Because first, people are focused on work most of the time. They have a series of problems they need to solve, so any knowledge that doesn’t add value or that they can’t see being applied in the short or medium term already creates a barrier to learning. Of course, there are interesting things, and that’s why we differentiate training from development. Training is for the present; development is for the future. You train Excel spreadsheets, and you develop leadership. These are competencies that deliver results later on.

This idea of lectures being the primary way of learning. So I really like something I find interesting—working with simulations, practical projects. Even peer learning among students changes.

What happens is that you could talk about the 19th-century classroom, or even the 20th century—everyone had time. Today, people learn in a different way. You can’t expect classes to remain the same as they were 150 years ago.

For example, I recorded a video that was under 10 minutes about the Balanced Scorecard. If someone watches my video, they’ll probably learn more about the Balanced Scorecard than they would in half an hour of class with me. Because in a class, I decide the time and the person has to adapt, but if you have the opportunity to learn when you want, at the time that best suits you, when you can truly focus, then it’s much better.

Today we talk a lot about student-centered education and active methodologies, but in practice it often still ends up being someone speaking at the front. If you truly understand that the process depends on the student’s interest, you need to provide alternatives at that point. Giving someone a practical challenge to work on is a very powerful way to learn.

For example, when I teach a class on canvas, I don’t actually explain canvas to them. Instead, I spend 80% of my time preparing the class—taking questions from books, improving them, making them more intuitive, adapting them to how people speak, gathering student feedback, adjusting the model, refining it to be more intuitive—so by the time I get there, it’s more or less ready. It’s like that Abraham Lincoln quote: “If you give me eight hours to chop down a tree, I’ll spend seven sharpening the axe.” So that’s it—I focus on asking questions so that people can build the answers themselves, rather than explaining step by step and then asking them to do it. I present something more open-ended, and at first people feel like they’ve been dropped in without guidance, but that’s what ends up working. You draw out the knowledge they already have, their practical experience, and then put a challenge in front of them to solve as a team. They help each other, and you get learning happening between people.

You can’t just say that the teacher is the holder of all knowledge. If I’m going to talk about the leadership pipeline or give a class on BSC, I need to do something in my field that adds more value than the videos from the creators of these models. I have to do something different.

In my field of communication, I’ve done a lot of training for sales, and it’s an area where people often struggle to train salespeople. Salespeople have quotas, they’re under time pressure—that’s the challenge of keeping them engaged. That’s what we call active methodologies.

Perfect, I think the academic world has gradually been rethinking this. The positioning of the “client,” which is the student—where they should be. Because until now, it has been very centered on the content and its quality, but not as much on how that content is delivered.

Finally, to wrap up, what advice would you give people about implementing a leadership pipeline? What tips would you share—based on what you bring from the classroom and what you observe in the market—that are effective? Of course, we won’t cover every question, but an initial path of what someone should do.

Well, I think there are two things. First, this initial idea of having career plans and career development that clearly allow a person to go down both paths. For example, someone may pursue a specialist role, but sometimes the company’s structure doesn’t support that—so there should at least be a structure that allows the person to leave and work as an independent contractor or service provider. You can create arrangements where the person even works as a contractor, allowing them to focus on that area, which can also benefit the company itself.

And today our labor laws are beginning to bring in some aspects that help in this regard.

Exactly. I like to joke that outsourcing is something very simple—instead of making it, you buy it ready-made. For the company, that’s essentially what happens.

A second point is how to carry out evaluations. Build a path for those who will follow the managerial track, without neglecting three aspects. As the leadership pipeline itself suggests, you need to give strong attention to time allocation and assess the person in a way that helps them improve this.

Time allocation is different from time management. Time management is a skill people say you need when you have a heavy workload. Time allocation is about your priorities—how you distribute your time. You can manage your time well but still allocate it poorly. And there are people who allocate it well but manage it poorly. So in this case, it’s about seeing how the person distributes their time and whether they dedicate it appropriately—and we can observe this clearly in their behavior. This aspect of time allocation, I don’t see as such a big priority. Ram Charan says it’s one third of the evaluation.

And a third point is the system of beliefs and values. Corporate values—value is what you deliver to the client. What we call the system of beliefs and values is the person seeing themselves as a leader, valuing the success of others. So values are difficult to assess because they are intangible. You need to observe the person’s behavior to try to understand their mindset, their mental model, and how it works. So, Ram Charan suggests three elements: competencies (skills and abilities), time allocation, and values.

Among these competencies, since it’s my area, I highlight communication skills. I think they are essential. I translated the “new manager’s handbook,” and it mentioned very simple things—what does a manager need to know? Planning and communication. Everything we do ends up coming back to that, which is theory and practice. I call it the “why” and the “so what.” These are things you will do—planning is more related to hard skills, and you need communication to get others to buy into that plan. If someone plans alone, they are more of a specialist. I need to take my plan and have my team buy into it.

I think these three points—competencies, the importance of communication, time allocation, and the system of beliefs and values as part of evaluation or even for promotion—are the key aspects I would highlight. In general, this is where we see whether the leadership pipeline will work or not.

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