Ask yourself as a professional, what do you want to be remembered by? As the manager that always achieved his numbers or as the manager who was singled out by others as the person they learned most from during their career. Of course it is never a choice and you find that a person who is recognized by others as a great developer of talent is also probably the person who always achieves his numbers.
Investing time and energy in an individual’s development reaps dividends of increased loyalty, motivation and of course, performance. So if you haven’t done this already, spend some quality time talking to your team members and identify areas for them to develop and grow.
From my experience, bosses find it relatively easy to recognize areas where a team member should develop and learn. However the most difficult part is often translating development needs into an actionable development plan. As a result we often revert to a shortcut and nominate our subordinates to a formal training course, hoping that this will do the trick.
Unfortunately chances are that these training courses wont make much of a difference and it is more likely that you are just pouring company money down the drain. As mentioned in my previous blog (Busting The Training Myth) there is now a large body of evidence that suggests formal class-room training as the least effective form of developing people’s leadership competencies and that the majority of organizational learning comes from ‘on the job experiences’. This causes a problem, because sending subordinates on a training course has, in the past, been the easiest way to resolve your subordinates development needs as he/she loved the status that goes with a paid day away from the office, along with getting a certificate and a free lunch on top of it.
So what are the alternatives? What other development actions can you design in order to create a more impactful and lasting learning experience to develop leadership skills for your subordinates? To help you I have come up with 34 different development ideas as seen in the figure above. Some are simple, some are more difficult to apply, some might make more sense than others, but each one has its different functions.
I am sure that you have used other ways of developing your team. Let me know what they are so we can build an expanding repository of development interventions and ideas.
And don’t forget, keep on teaching others, because by teaching others you learn even more yourself.
– Paul Keijzer
Psychometrics testing (with formal readback sessions) & 360 degree have also helped some colleagues in understanding themselves a little better or understanding how they are interpretted by others. Self awareness of strenghts and areas of improvements by the team member will facilitate their interest in development. As leaders, we can explore options to provide these means to our teams.
Hi Paul,
Your article was surely an eye opener for many of us, can you also please share few of those 34 different development ideas as well ?
Dear Farrukh, please see image at beginning of the post. It lists all the 35 development ideas. Good luck using them
I certainly agree, with everything you have written in this article. Allow me to share on approach, I had been using to build confidence & competency in my team-members.
I develop short presentation / learning session, deliver a mock session to my team and they in return offer feedback on the quality of the session, which at times is brutally honest!
Will certainly include that approach in my next version Javed – Thanks