Companies looking at their long term future clearly recognize that:
- Change on a significant scale has happened in the past and will continue to happen. Changes are prompted by a variety of fluctuating conditions including new technologies, competitor changes, economic conditions, leadership changes, customer sentiment and regulatory changes. Having an illusion of impending stability will lead to frustration.
- The capabilities of a company’s workforce need to continually change as the landscape changes. In general, people at lower levels such as individual contributors add new skills associated with technology changes, enhanced teamwork, and more effective interpersonal skills. At more senior levels, skill enhancements come from, among other things, broader experiences, greater awareness of the bigger picture, leading and managing large organizations, grounded decision-making skills, and positive influence skills.
Clearly a company must have ways to enhance their collective capabilities to deliver great products and services while experiencing and adapting to continuous and abrupt changes. Companies address this capability challenge by finding the right balance between hiring people from outside the company and developing people from within. If the emphasis is hiring from the outside, a company usually has a higher turnover as employees learn pretty quickly that their possibilities of moving up in the organization are limited. If the emphasis is more toward internal development, the costs of developing people will be considerably higher than competitors if taken too far.
All companies would like to get the most bang for the buck in developing their employees.
Many organizations view this as streamlining their training departments – and assuming that will optimize the situation. That idea is built on the false premise that training equals development. More accurately, training is a subset of development. There are other activities which are high impact for development.
How Do People Develop?
If we were to look at our learning institutions inside and outside of our organization, we might come to the conclusion that people primarily learn in the classroom. Yet research by the Center for Creative Leadership (Lombardo and Eichinger) indicated that coursework and seminars are only 1/12th as effective as job changes, job restructuring, and special assignments.
Work that I did at a Fortune 200 company concurred with the results by the Center for Creative Leadership. I interviewed the top 120 leaders in the company. One of the open ended questions I asked was focused on helping me better understand the 1 or 2 most important factors which they felt led to their success. After having the data analyzed by an expert in statistics, the results showed that the most important factors, in order of importance were:
Variety of experiences in different functions, locations, companies, countries, business cycles. A variety of experiences was deemed to be the number one lever for development. The benefits of these experiences were numerous: having a better understanding of how the whole business operates; being able to understand the impact of their decisions on other parts of the organization; transferring best practices to new areas; learning how to be effective in a variety of situations; and having developed strong networks inside and outside the organization.
High risk, high visibility assignments. It was interesting to note that sometimes they were thrown into these assignments and other times they threw themselves in. Many of the assignments were not your typical ones, but instead were multi-functional and focused on solving a crisis or smoldering situation. The sooner this happened in their careers, the better. It goes without saying that they rose to the occasion on each of the assignments and delivered outstanding results. Often their reward for success was to be given another high risk, high visibility assignment. This then turned into a “snow ball effect.”
Coaching from executives. This took the form of others in the organization, usually at a higher level, taking interest in them to “show them the ropes,” give them feedback, and actively promote their next career move. In virtually all cases, this happened informally. In fact, most of those who had experienced formal mentoring programs said they did not work.
Personal characteristics (as typically seen in leadership models). The personal characteristics described by these individuals, when looked as a composite, are all the things one would typically see in a leadership competency model: commitment to deliver results no matter how challenging; positive “can do” attitude; curiosity and continuous learning; enjoyment in working with people and teams; willingness to take appropriate risks; and the item mentioned the most: a belief that if you don’t follow through on your promises, everything else is irrelevant.
Education / training. It’s probably no surprise that the only memorable learning events mentioned were those they could immediately apply on the job, or even better, those in which learning was applied during the event to critical business issues. It’s noteworthy that this is the fifth most important item on the list, and yet, the development plans for most people contain more things that fit in this category than any of the other four items above.
This research indicated that having a variety of experiences had about 5 times the emphasis compared to education/training.
The bottom line is that people develop in a variety of ways, with training being only one of these ways.
What Can I Do To Further Develop The People In My Organization?
As the person primarily responsible for ensuring that your organization has the capability to deliver results, you must ensure that the people in your organization are continually developing in a way that matches the necessary capabilities for success in your organization.
Given the research outlined above, a focus on ensuring that people have a variety of challenging, meaningful, and interesting assignments provides a long term foundation for people development. For people who want to stay in their current role, this means finding assignments which require growth in that particular area. For individuals who aspire to grow in leadership in the organization, this means having a talent management process which provides a variety of assignments which develops necessary leadership skills. It is important to keep people in an assignment long enough for them to live with the consequences of their actions and short enough to maximize their experiences over a given time period.
I don’t want you to finish reading this and think that I don’t value training. Training has a very important role in development. In fact, when it is done creatively, it can provide high risk high visibility assignments, mentoring, enhancement of personal characteristics and training all in one package. This type of “all in one” approach works really well in developing the pipeline of future leaders because the growth in development is huge compared to the cost. There are other times when training is critical such as when a person joins a new company or department, when a person transitions from an individual contributor role to a supervisor role, when a significant change is being implemented in an organization, and when a person moves into a new, higher level position.
Development of people in organizations can be done creatively, cost effectively, and in a targeted way when one understands the key developmental levers to pull.
I am interested in your comments and thoughts on this article as well as your experiences.
