How to: Develop Staff

What does this look like?

Managers who develop their staff:

• provide challenging and stretching tasks and assignments
• regularly talk about development
• know each person’s career goals
• create and execute development plans
• encourage people to take development opportunities
• willingly take on staff who need help and further development
• follow the organisation’s performance development system.

How can I do this?

1.    Be prepared to invest time

• It takes about eight hours per year to properly invest in a person’s development. This includes:
• an annual in-depth appraisal of their strengths and weaknesses and the competencies they need in order to progress in their career (about 2hrs)
• an in-depth discussion about career aspirations, goals, what’s required to reach them and their own appraisal of their skills (about 2hrs)
• working together to create a 3-5 year plan (about 2hrs)
• organising development opportunities for each person and presenting findings and recommendations to the organisation (about 2hrs).

2.     Start with an appraisal

Start by appraising each person’s current strengths and weaknesses. Identify what competencies they need to perform their job effectively and to progress in their career, referring to their role description.

3.    Give constructive feedback

People need regular and constructive feedback to know what they’re doing well and how they can improve and develop. Follow these guidelines.

• Get feedback from multiple sources, including yourself. Ask other staff what a person should stop doing, start doing and keep doing to be more successful.
• Give staff new and challenging tasks and offer feedback on their performance.
• Make sure feedback is accurate but balanced i.e not just what needs to improve.
• Set up a buddy system so people can get regular feedback in a supportive way.
• Give as much real-time feedback as you have time for. Most people appreciate getting feedback against agreed on goals because it:
  • helps them adjust what they’re doing along the way so they can achieve their end goal
  • shows that you value what they’re doing and are available to help
  • ensures any negative feedback is received immediately, not well after the fact. If people need to improve, they should know this as soon as possible.

4.    Create a development plan

Work with staff to create individual development plans with a combination of skill development opportunities. Bear in mind that:

• 70% of skill development comes from new and challenging tasks/assignments. Create opportunities for staff to be stretched and use skills they haven’t used before or use skills in a different context. There’s a lot to learn from a tough assignment.
• 20% comes from reflecting and working with others. Give staff a chance to work with and observe others. Encourage them to reflect on what works and doesn’t work both in their own work and in what they see others do.
• 10% of development comes from study and new ways of thinking. Expose staff to new ideas and ways of thinking through courses, books or mentors.

Remember to:

• tailor development opportunities to suit a person’s unique needs
• check progress against the plan.

5.    Delegate tasks

• Brainstorm with your direct reports which tasks are important but not being done.
• Ask staff to list the tasks that they no longer find challenging.
• Delegate three tasks you do which could provide a development opportunity for others.
• Ask two direct reports to trade some tasks and assignments and do each other’s work.
• Assign each of your direct reports a task that takes them out of their comfort zone. The task should:
  • be something that actually needs doing
  • be something the person hasn’t done before or needs more practice at
  • require a skill the person needs to develop.

6.    Encourage staff to take on a challenge

Staff need real and challenging work opportunities in order to grow their skills. These can be rewarding but also intimidating. Even ambitious people will sometimes avoid a new and difficult task. It’s your job to encourage staff to get out of their comfort zone and embrace development opportunities. Bear in mind though, that some people are satisfied with the status quo and despite all your encouragement, will opt to stay where they are.

7.    Look for repeating patterns

Encourage your staff to reflect on their work and look for patterns in the situations and problems they encounter. Ask them to think about:

• what succeeded and what failed?
• what was common to each success or present in each failure?
• are there repeating patterns?

Focus more on successes than failures. It’s easy to analyse failures but they don’t always give insight into what works. Comparing successes can provide more useful information.

Help your staff identify principles or rules of thumb they can apply in future.

Encourage staff to reflect on where they’ve come in the past year. What can they do now that they couldn’t do before? Encourage them to keep going.

8.    Broaden horizons

Help staff to broaden their horizons by working on assignments outside your function, unit or business. For example:

• volunteer them for cross-boundary task forces
• have them attend meetings with people from other areas.

You may find this challenging if you…

• don’t value developing people or see it as part of your job
• are results driven and don’t have patience for long-term development
• prefer to play it safe and avoid the risk of assigning work to others
• don’t understand how to develop staff
• would rather recruit talented staff than develop the staff you have
• don’t support the organisation’s developmental system.

You’re not developing staff effectively if you…

• concentrate on developing a few and ignore the development of others
• assign challenging work unequally
• are overly optimistic about how much people can grow
• try to impose development fads on everyone instead of tailoring development opportunities to individual needs.