Developing Employees

Harvard Business Review

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781422128855
• eBook ISBN: 9781422136591
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

The Pocket Mentor series offers immediate solutions to the challenges managers face on the job every day. Each book in the series is packed with handy tools, self-tests, and real-life examples to help you identify strengths and weaknesses and hone critical skills. Whether you're at your desk, in a meeting, or on the road, these portable guides enable you to tackle the daily demands of your work with greater speed, savvy, and effectiveness.Managing employee growth is critical to your organization's success. But to develop your employees effectively, you must have certain skills, such as the ability to seek out opportunities, set goals, and provide feedback. This volume teaches you to:
· Assess developmental needs
· Understand and take into account differences between your employees
· Use a Performance and Potential grid to determine next steps
· Conduct a career development discussion

Developing Your Employees: The Basics

The Business Case for Employee Development

Ask three people in your organization to define “employee development,” and you will probably receive three different responses. For example:

• A direct report may focus on upward mobility (“What can I do to get a promotion?”).
• A manager may speak to employees’ motivation, productivity, and engagement (“What can I do to encourage my employees to do their best work?”).
• A senior-level executive may address issues such as what it takes to retain and grow top talent to help lead the company in the future (“What do we need to do to ensure that we have the people with the best skills in the right places throughout our company in the future?”).

Regardless of your vantage point in the organization, employee development can be defined as a process intended to manage employees’ professional growth. Ideally, this process is integrated with an organization’s performance management program, but it remains distinct from routine performance evaluations.

How your organization benefits

Developing your employees is critical to your organization’s success. In fact, as noted in Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s book First, Break All the Rules (which discussed a study on employee engagement conducted by the Gallup Organization), research has shown that companies whose employees are inspired to fulfill their greatest potential yield the best business results overall—including profitability, market share, innovation, and efficiency.

Employees who are delivering their best on the job have the energy necessary to generate fresh solutions to organizational problems. They also collaborate better to create innovative products, services, and processes. Moreover, inspired employees generally take pride in their work and feel accountable for their unit’s or organization’s well-being. Because they are stimulated by their work environment, they also tend to be loyal to the organization.

Your company’s plan for developing employees is a key factor in how successfully the enterprise attracts and retains the best talent—those individuals who are best equipped to add to your firm’s bottom line. If high-performing individuals feel that they are regularly being given opportunities to grow, they will be more likely to stay with the company, even during tough times. This saves your firm a bundle on recruitment and training costs.

Likewise, having a strong career-development program in place helps your organization prepare for the future. How? It helps you determine who will be in place to take on what assignments in your department or team in the coming years. That way, your employees will stand ready to move into key roles as the need arises. With this sort of succession planning, you help position your organization to respond to new challenges as well as seize new opportunities in the marketplace.

TABLE 1

Two Approaches to Development

Old Approach	New Approach
Only poor performers need development.	Everyone in an organization can be developed, especially high and solid performers.
Development is the responsibility of the human resource group.	Employee development is every manager’s responsibility.
Career development focuses on moving capable employees up a predictable corporate ladder.	Career development focuses on moving employees through new challenges to strengthen their professional abilities.
Development means “training” (i.e., internal seminars or weekend workshops).	Development may include training but it also means informal, on-the- job ways of learning, such as
	●	“Stretch” assignments
	●	Job rotations
	●	Self-paced e-learning
	●	Action learning
	●	Manager coaching and feedback
	●	Mentoring

Comparing old and new approaches to development

Over the past few decades, the approach to employee development has shifted in many organizations. Numerous companies have adopted more expansive models of what development looks like. Table 1 gives you an idea of how these expansive models compare to previous models.

To develop your employees effectively, you must have certain skills, such as the ability to seek out opportunities to unleash direct reports’ potential, set development goals for them, and provide feedback they can use to strengthen their talents even further. Equally important, however, you need to feel a deep commitment to cultivating your employees’ potential.

As you strive to develop your employees, keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. You must respond to your organization’s unique business context and to your individual employees’ values, skills, and interests. Later in this book, we’ll go into more detail about how you can customize your development strategies to each employee’s performance, potential, and interests.

You have to water the flowers you want to grow.

—Stephen R. Covey

Your Role

Although an organization’s employee development program usually originates in the human resource department, the success of the program hinges on how well managers throughout the company execute the program. Unfortunately, many managers fail to adequately address their employees’ developmental needs. Let’s look at why this happens and what negative consequences arise from it, and then explore ideas for how you can avoid this all-too-common mistake.

Why some managers neglect employee development

Managers often feel that they don’t have the time to invest in developing their direct reports. In light of their busy schedules, they believe that as long as their employees are meeting basic performance expectations, it’s enough to address any performance issues during annual or quarterly reviews. And unless an employee actively seeks his or her manager out to talk about professional development, the manager often won’t take the time to provide developmental resources such as ideas for mastering new skills or challenges.

Additionally, managers often avoid employee development discussions because these conversations are frequently difficult—for a variety of reasons. To illustrate, Joe, a manager, feels uncomfortable talking to his poor performers because he hasn’t yet figured out a clear plan of action for addressing the problem performance. Siobhan, another manager, knows that there are no challenging and interesting new opportunities currently available in her group, so she avoids talking about career development with her high performers because she doesn’t want to lose them.

What happens if you neglect it

Although discussing professional development with your employees can be difficult, failing to hold these conversations can adversely affect your unit’s performance as well as that of your entire company. How? Your top performers, as well as competent performers, may feel neglected and unmotivated. If these direct reports are not regularly given opportunities to grow or feel supported, their morale and motivation may begin to decline. As a result, they may view their work as less of a priority, and their work habits may deteriorate. They may even defect to a competitor. After all, if top performers don’t see any prospects for career growth (these may exist, but might not be immediately apparent), they may seek challenges outside your team—or your organization.

At the other extreme, if you focus on development instead of performance improvement with underachievers, they may wrongly assume that they are doing a good job. These employees might then become disappointed when they don’t receive promotions. If they don’t know why they haven’t been promoted, low performers may share their frustrations with others and spread resentment.

Similarly, there are serious consequences for you as a manager if you ignore employee development. Specifically, you

• Miss the opportunity to align your employees’ development with your organization’s direction.
• May have unproductive, unhappy employees working for you who poison morale and erode other employees’ productivity.
• Don’t have backup or “bench strength” among your ranks should a top performer leave.

What Would YOU Do?

Blinded by the Stars?

JACK STARTED AS DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH at Rose, Greene, & Bloom LLC, a statistical analysis firm, one year ago. He prided himself on his ability to grow his star employees, and was confident that he had addressed performance issues with his underachi...

Table of contents

• Pocket Mentor Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Mentor’s Message: Why Develop Your Employees?
• Developing Your Employees: The Basics
• Tips and Tools
• How to Order