Good Ideas …
For Tucking Development into Work

OK, so maybe you’re not in charge of opening new markets around the world. How can you tuck development into the work you do manage? The opportunities are endless. Start by considering these:

» New demands on your department that you can turn into skill-building work that will stretch your employees

» Tasks on your plate that are routine for you but would be good learning opportunities for others

» Opportunities for people to reshape their work to include tasks that are developmentally rich from their point of view

» People who hold critical knowledge and can be tapped to transfer knowledge to colleagues

» Communications that provide individuals with a stronger line of sight to business strategy in order to pep up and enrich their day-to-day tasks

Another approach is to encourage someone to take a side trip from a core job to pick up something he or she can bring back and apply. Imagine a football player taking a ballet class as part of his practice regimen. Before you get too distracted by visions of a hefty running back up on tippy toes, think about the potential of this kind of cross-training. Some NFL stars do, in fact, take ballet because it teaches them physical lessons about balance and nimbleness that improve their moves on the field. Here are some “off-road” experiences from the world of work:

Gregg, a supervisor in the Auto Maintenance Pool, was known for his rough feedback style. He had a habit of losing good employees. His boss, Walt, decided to have him spend time working on the customer response line handling customer complaints. With this experience, which began with a short training course, Gregg learned some new communication skills such as how to be responsive to irate customers and leave each with a positive impression instead of a negative one.

Sydney was a staff project manager who used the same planning method over and over and expected everyone to comply with her way of doing things. Spencer, her manager, wanted her to vary her style. He assigned her to the corporate advertising department with the specific charge to learn how the same communication challenge could be addressed from four or five different angles using six different channels.

Once you have pinpointed what development you want people to acquire in a side trip, you’ll need to engage them in actually taking the side trip and acquiring the learning that fits their development goals. It’s important to take each of the four steps. To illustrate these steps, let’s pick up the story of Gregg, the supervisor of the Auto Maintenance Pool. Gregg will be taking a learning side trip to customer service. See what his manager, Walt, told him in each of the key steps.

Get the person to recognize that the skill to be developed will make him more successful in his job.

“Gregg, you’re very direct with people. As we discussed before, the way you talk sometimes turns people off. It’s as if you have one tool in your toolbox but you could use a few more. How about exploring other ways to influence people—ways that will work on your job and help you retain good people?”

Sell the particular development idea as a fast and effective way to learn and practice new skills.

“There’s nothing like going to a new place to learn something. Gregg, have you ever been on vacation and picked up a new way to fish or learned how to scuba dive? Going to customer service where people deal with confused or angry customers is a great place to find out different ways to deal with people. You’ll get a chance to develop a new tool and try something new away from your current job and staff.”

Express your support and respond to the person’s concerns and needs.

“I know that this new role will feel strange. Learning new skills always does. What concerns do you have about making this side trip into customer service, and how can I help?”

Engage the person in coming up with solutions.

“Gregg, I know you are concerned about what your staff will think of your involvement with customer service. Some of them might get nervous about a change in your role or that you might not be available to them when they need you. Let’s first figure out a time schedule for you with customer service that you can live with and then craft a conversation you can have with your team.”

2. Create the Right Stretch

A challenge of tucking development into work is to plan just the right amount of stretch that builds skills without pushing people too far beyond their limits. Let’s look at some ways that EDMs get the balance right.

Accurately Assess Employee Capabilities

If you had packed for a Maui beach vacation and then were given the opportunity to trek the Himalayas, you would obviously need to repack. You’d swap your swimsuit and flip-flops for parkas and hiking boots. But you’d keep your toothbrush and some of your T-shirts in the bag. That decision-making process is similar to what you need to do when sending people on a development journey. Your first task is to help people understand what’s in their skill “suitcase” that can be of value in the new role. Then consider what they might unpack and what they may be missing for the next destination. Here’s how Jared thought about helping Sheila pack the right stuff for a new development journey:

Plant manager Jared wanted to move Sheila, the plant controller, one step closer to learning the skills to become a plant manager in the future. His plan? To expand her role to include quality management (QM). This objective worked very well with the QM function’s recently adopted approach of empowering frontline supervisors to improve quality. Jared thought about Sheila’s biggest strengths: an almost reflexive action to jump in and solve problems independently, and her highly developed skill of digesting and interpreting the numbers. For her new quality management role, Sheila wouldn’t need to lean on her number-crunching skills, so that could be left out of her “suitcase.” Similarly, she could unpack her skill of solving problems on her own. Sheila would need to add some new skills to her luggage, including superior questioning and listening skills to find out what supervisors needed to learn about quality, developing rapport to gain credibility, and teaching ability to help others understand how to use QM data.

When you are assessing skills to develop your staff, remember that it really helps to push yourself to be specific. Don’t just think “communication skills.” Get inside that broad notion and identify the behaviors as you have seen people apply them on the job or how you would like to see them applied in an expanded work setting. For example, a better phrasing than “You have poor communications skills” would be “You are good at listening but too wordy in replying to people. To progress in a broader role, you will need to be able to present ideas in a meeting succinctly, without drawing out your explanations.”

Articulate What Is to Be Learned, Not Just What Needs to Get Accomplished

The picture of what people need to learn in a new assignment may be clear in your mind. It’s less likely that the picture is as clear in their minds. If the lessons inside the assignments are not crystal clear, you run the risk that people will rely heavily on their familiar skills to get the job done and miss the chance to grow new skills. Consider this story about a manager who at first failed to make development goals clear:

Hector was a division VP of a Fortune 100 company who had been tracking Jim, a bright and likable high flyer in the Finance Department, for ten years. Hector liked what he saw. During many assignments on several division and corporate strategic initiatives, Jim consistently turned out innovative ideas and good plans to implement those ideas. Hector quietly identified Jim as his heir apparent. But Jim needed some rounding out, so Hector sent him off to head up the León, Mexico, operation for a couple of years.

At first, Jim focused on making great improvements in the back office rather than dealing with plant operations. He felt that his cultural and language difference might upset the flow. He essentially relied on his plant staff to keep things humming. The locals loved him, and Jim had a sense of pride for having mastered the role of general manager. But Hector saw that Jim had missed the primary learning goal. With some help from his HR partner, Hector acknowledged his fault of not clarifying the development goal and caught his own misstep just in time. On a visit to León, he sat with Jim and clarified what Jim needed to learn from the assignment in order to develop as a GM: how to create a market-based strategy with his staff and then help them align their goals to that strategy. Jim also needed to learn how to lead cross-culturally.

That conversation made all the difference. The goals were clear and the needs identified. Together, Hector and Jim came up with some specific developmental support options that included setting Jim up with a mentor, a general manager who had successfully implemented strategies in different cultures.

How might you clarify learning goals in your workplace? For example, you might assign an individual contributor the lead role on a project team and tell her you want her to get experience running a team. But don’t stop there. “Running a team” is too soft a target. She might interpret that to mean that she should guide others in the use of her well-honed project management skills. You, on the other hand, may want her to gain skill in managing conflict and in group decision making. You don’t want her to end up “doing more of the same instead of getting the gain.” When you are crystal clear with employees, they have the direction they need to adjust their behaviors. You will end up spending your time on the right conversations. They will be less likely to fall into the same old rut and more likely to accept your feedback as they lean into the discomfort of learning new ways to operate.

Assign Work That Stretches but Does Not Overwhelm

When you stretch a muscle, you’re actually creating tiny tears that heal and make the muscle stronger. Stretch it too much, and you rip it, causing pain and perhaps necessitating surgery. Ouch!

Similarly, assigning work that stretches is a balancing act. Not enough stretch, and there’s little development. Too big a stretch, and the assignment can backfire, hurting people in the process. EDMs caution that you don’t want anyone (or yourself) to have to deal with the blowback that comes from serious performance shortfalls. It will break your heart if a good employee fails publicly, gets taken off an assignment, or receives a lower performance rating. Too much unsupported and unmonitored stretch may break a person’s career.

Here is where your careful assessment of capabilities pays off. Consider how one manager thought through the right amount of stretch for an employee:

Gerald, a program tester in a software company, wanted to be a program manager NOW. Carly, his boss, knew that Gerald had shown some key management qualities, such as being able to orient new testers and be the “go to” person for people who were learning the ropes. But at the same time, she felt it would be too big a step to move him directly into a management role. Instead, she carved out a new part-time role for him. While he spent 70 percent of his time as a tester, he also had a project to lead. This project assignment (leading a task force to improve the initial training and assimilation of new testers) built on his strengths. It gave Gerald the opportunity to hone his project management skills without the intense pressure of managing a time-sensitive and higher-risk software project.

This vignette is an example of a half-step that stretches the employee without the risks of a full-step job change. Half- or even quarter-steps take many forms. Can you spot opportunities to encourage employees to question the status quo, to give them assignments as members of a task force, or to position them as a mentors to others? How about giving people greater decisionmaking responsibilities, the challenge of filling in for a supervisor, or the responsibility to handle a high-risk stakeholder interface for a certain period of time?

Although the balance between safety and risk is often hard to judge at the outset, give it your best shot and then stay tuned. We found that even EDMs experience backfires when they neglected to watch employees’ stretch assignments closely enough. No matter how much stretch you build in—a little or a lot—monitor and adjust the assignment to keep the development tension just right. Look for early warnings of stretch strain, and be prepared to intervene. Expect to make early adjustments, especially if you have built in a lot of stretch.

3. Seize Developmental Moments

What do you think would happen if we asked a totally stressed-out manager to take an hour out of her busy day to meditate? She just might reach over her desk and throttle us. So instead we suggested that she take two minutes every now and then to stand up and concentrate on breathing in and out. She actually tried it—to great effect. Likewise, EDMs find that there’s time for development when they are creative about putting small pieces of development into the crevices of a busy day—their staff’s and their own. To EDMs, development just naturally feels like moments in between other stuff. They don’t see or experience development as an extra activity requiring meetings, complex forms, or awkward discussions. To them—and maybe to you—these extras feel like distractions from work. Stay out of the trap of distractions by viewing development as moments that occur “inside the job” of getting results. You’ll find that development becomes manageable and doable.

Let’s look at some ways that EDMs make development moments happen.

Look for Moments to Help Staff Develop a More Strategic View

Because having the big picture in mind helps people work smarter, EDMs find ways to show employees how to climb up to see the higher-level view. One EDM simply took the time to share information about the total business in one-on-one and staff meetings. She described this approach as “getting them attached to the business as well as their jobs.” Another had people attend meetings to gain exposure to corporate decisions. He called it “getting out of the cheap seats.” How about having people interview the creators and keepers of growth-driving initiatives? Even having people read and discuss the annual report can do wonders for understanding the strategy and financial drivers of the business.

Open Eyes to New Approaches

We find that EDMs like to “get Socratic.” This questioning approach works well for people who need to discover new ways to operate, particularly if they are using the wrong ones or are new to the team. Adopt your own version of the Socratic method by asking questions to help employees think and act differently. For example, an EDM we’ll call Ken knows that a direct report, Sharon, needs to deal with an irritable stakeholder. Instead of offering advice, a natural tendency, he asks her questions that help her see it from the customer’s perspective. With another of Ken’s direct reports, Chad who is trying new ways to develop customer relationships with the major decision makers, Ken asks him questions about what worked and why and what didn’t and why. Question-driven discussions can be short—even passing encounters in the hallway. EDMs keep their solutions and advice in the background and position them later in the discussion. For example, they lead with questions such as “What resources might be useful to address your current challenge?” and only later suggest something like “I would tend to do this. What do you think?”

Powerful questions, well crafted, lead to even deeper conversation and learning. Questions can uncover assumptions, challenge the status quo, and take your employee into new territory. EDMs have told us that to be most positive and productive, how they ask the question is key. Diana Whitney, a renowned expert on the art of positive questioning that leads to productive results, has written a dozen books on this topic! The three parts to what she calls an “appreciative question” are letting others know the importance of the question or conversation, a rapport-building lead-in that conveys a sincere invitation for the other person’s response, and a ready string of probes to uncover their best thinking.

Satisfy Appetites for Lots of Feedback

EDMs know that everyone needs and benefits from instant feedback. Yes, people really do want “the good, the bad, and the ugly” as soon as you see it. There has been much talk about how Gen Xs and Ys want and need your feedback. But it’s a universal desire among people of all generations. Regardless of age, all the exceptional developing employees (EDEs) that we talked with put feedback near the top of the list of developmental practices they most value in managers. One said, “I am passionate about my work and want to grow. I’ve only had one real developmental manager. She took the time to give me feedback—constantly. Both positive and negative. And it made all the difference.”