chapter 1 Make Every Day a Development Day

WHEN WE SUGGESTED TO JOE that he make every day a development day for his staff, he just about jumped out of his chair. “I’ve been trying to get two people to a required training course for the last five weeks and just can’t work out the schedule. I am up to my eyeballs in projects and paperwork. How can I possibly make every day a development day? Sorry, but that’s just nuts!”

You can probably relate to this harried manager. Good managers know how important it is to develop their people, but actually finding the time to do so is a challenge for them. Let’s face it, it’s a challenge for anyone in business these days. Fortunately, there are ways to go beyond what Joe saw as “nuts” (as in crazy) to nuts-and-bolts actions that make daily development a reality. Exceptional development managers (EDMs) we interviewed told us they use a dual approach to deliver a daily dose of development:

1. Deliberately building stretch into the work people do every day

2. Using their daily interactions with people to support that stretch

Surveyed EDMs overwhelmingly supported this winning combination. In fact, it was at the very top of their list of practices they value and actually put to use. What’s more is that the exceptional developing employees (EDEs) we interviewed (the people who have done particularly well at developing in their careers) also ranked this kind of daily focus on development at the top of their list. That’s why this practice is one of the two foundational elements for developing employees (the other is to tap the psychological side of development, which will be discussed in Chapter 2).

How to Make Every Day a Development Day

Imagine for a moment that you were asked to make every day at work a fitness day. Your first reaction might be to schedule time to go to the gym or to take the stairs instead of the elevator. But here’s the hard part: you must stay in your very small office. Oh, and you have no budget to buy any fitness equipment—no treadmill, no elliptical trainer, not even weights. Give up? Anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela didn’t. Confined to a small cell on Robben Island for the first eighteen of his twenty-seven years of incarceration, he found a way to make every day a fitness day. Keeping his long-term goal of being strong enough to lead the country beyond apartheid, he used whatever tools he had at hand—mainly his own body—to do calisthenics and make fitness part of his daily routine.

Like Mandela, exceptional development managers use what is in front of them—namely, the work itself and their daily access to people doing it—to make bite-size progress on a big goal: continual development of the capacity of all their people so that they make talent their business.

If you were to observe these managers, you’d see two major trends. First, EDMs plan “stretch” into the work so that their people are continually pushing the boundaries of what they know and are comfortable doing. These managers are motivated to spend the little bit of extra time it takes to plan and support stretch because they know that the work at hand is the most powerful source of development. As one manager put it succinctly, “The work itself is the development. Experience is far and away the best teacher.” We agree.

The second trend you’d spot is the way that exceptional managers spend their day. Instead of waiting to make a big (but infrequent) investment in development, they make lots of small (but frequent) deposits in their development account—think recurring short interactions versus infrequent formal meetings. They do this to help their people learn while doing work that stretches them. Another EDM we interviewed summed up this trend beautifully: “I approach development as an everyday ‘being there’ sort of thing, not as a programmatic process. I gently push people to do more than they think they can do. Then, if I see something, I note it and simply say it. I don’t wait for a meeting or call it out as a developmental conversation.”

Using the work itself as a major source of development is not a novel idea. The uncontested results of multiple research projects, some dating back to the 1980s, show that the vast majority of development comes from experience on the job, not from formal training programs. Leadership guru Warren Bennis puts it this way: “I would argue that more leaders have been made by accident, circumstance, sheer grit, or will than have been made by all the leadership courses put together.” Yet according to research that mirrors our experience, fewer than one manager in ten uses the work at hand as a development tool. Training is an important part of the mix, but too many managers still see sending people to programs as the panacea for development. When they do this, it lets them off the development hook, and that’s unfortunate.

Are we saying that the one thing that matters most is done the least? Yes. We believe that a major reason that using the work itself as a development tool is so rare is that managers simply don’t know how to package together work and development or how to put themselves in the picture every day to support development. The solution comes down to these four approaches that you can use to make every day a development day:

1. Tuck development into work

2. Create the right stretch

3. Seize development moments

4. Leverage team learning

1. Tuck Development into Work

EDMs are experts at creating development “twofers.” You know the system: the hotel room that accompanies the plane ticket, the bottle of champagne that complements the purchase of a three-course meal. Marketers love to give attractive two-for-one deals—and we all love receiving them. EDMs achieve twofers by planning and shaping work so that employees go after one goal (business results) and along the way meet another one (development milestones). Here’s how the twofer concept worked for an EDM we’ll call Tim:

Tim was a sales and marketing manager for a small software company. He was committed to developing Gloria, a latetwenties marketing manager who had just knocked his socks off by finishing a focus group project ahead of time while achieving great results AND teaching some interns how to properly conduct a focus group. She was chomping at the bit to learn more. Tim assigned her to lead a large and exciting project to design a new market approach for India. The market launch was a mere six months away. Gloria’s team included financial analysts, HR specialists, and a consultant expert in doing business in India. Tucked into this assignment was lots of potential learning: about the Indian market, about creating a business plan that included financial analysis, and about getting the most from an expert consultant without letting him hijack the project. Tim took the time to talk Gloria through the assignment up front, making sure she knew there was a double finish line. He told her, “There are two ribbons waiting for you at the finish line: a results ribbon and a development ribbon.” Then he went on to very specifically describe the expected results and what he wanted Gloria to learn while achieving these results.

What Tim and other exceptional managers do is not only tuck development into daily work but also create a simple, very strong combo development-and-performance plan. Tim didn’t just tack a development plan onto Gloria’s performance objectives, as routine performance management processes often suggest. Instead, he used one recurring planning process that put development right in the middle, on the way to results, so to speak, not at the end.

Imagine yourself giving people goals that will stretch them while they achieve important results. Be inspired by an EDM we know who said, “If you build developmental goals in, you improve the chances that they will be achieved. The results are better too, because the learning fuels higher levels of performance. So if someone has a goal to ‘improve communication’ in an execution plan, the person will not view development as extra stuff. You send a strong message—grow and learn while you are at work.”