Case Studies

Following the publication in 1999 of Michael Watkins’s seminal book on senior executive transitions, Right From the Start, he was asked by the Management Education and Development (MED) group at J&J to study the company’s leadership pipeline and make recommendations on how to strengthen it. Following that study, Genesis Advisers was commissioned to design a company-wide high-potential leadership development process focusing on accelerating leadership transitions at the Director, Senior Director, and Vice President levels.

Between 1999 and the present, Genesis Advisers has delivered more than 70, two-day transition acceleration programs at J&J. The program design has gone through four major upgrades during this seven-year period as our understanding of what it takes to accelerate transition deepened. These programs, which intentionally mix leaders who have been promoted internally with those who have been hired from the outside, is J&J’s most highly rated leadership development experience.

In 2002, at the recommendation of Genesis Advisers, J&J began to experiment with transition coaching for executives at the operating company President and Vice President levels. The goal was to make transition acceleration available to executives who could not attend the two-day programs offered by Genesis Advisers. In 2005, J&J standardized on Genesis Adviser’s Acceleration Coaching™ to support transitioning executives.

In 2004, following the publication of The First 90 Days, Michael Watkins’s second book on transitions, Harvard Business School Publishing developed Leadership Transitions™, an e-learning system based on his work. J&J was an early adopter of this e-learning system. Genesis Advisers worked with the company to integrate the e-learning system with Genesis Advisers’s in-person programmatic offerings.

The use of e-learning, programmatic, and coaching modalities to deliver The First 90 Days™ transition acceleration model at J&J highlights Genesis Advisers’s expertise in transition systems design. J&J has conducted independent research on the impact that has validated the power of our approach. A study by an outside consultant commissioned by J&J, and based on 125 interviews with participants in Genesis Advisers programs and in transition coaching, highlighted the positive impacts:

Average reported improvement in performance of 40% for transition coaching and 38% for transition programs.

Conservative estimate of economic benefit (based on salary costs only) of $141K per participant for coaching and $81K per participant for programs.

The authors of the study concluded that, “Leader transitions are “high risk” points with significant cost implications. This study revealed that the leader transition programs at J&J appear to be quite effective at enhancing leader performance during these challenging periods.”