3 Ways to Develop Your People

A major responsibility of all leaders is building the next generation of leaders. Your development activities are the means to that end.

One of the four major activities that will consume your leadership capital is developing your people. Developing your team means you’re training them, coaching them and promoting them to help them advance their careers. Here are some keys to doing a great job of developing your people.

Training

In terms of training, you should be training them on new skills. You should be helping them apply what they learn in training to their day-to-day job. You should also be identifying skill gaps that these individuals have. Training should not be about training them on expected skills. You shouldn’t be doing a lot of retraining, and you should not be identifying specific training activities for them.

Coaching

Coaching is about coaching them to overcome new challenges. Coaching them to have high impact on whatever tasks they’re doing, and coaching does require critical feedback at the moment it’s warranted. Coaching should not be routine. It shouldn’t be a security blanket for the members of your team. And you shouldn’t be following up constantly on tasks that you’ve given them.

Promoting

Promoting activities fall in two buckets for me. First, promoting people and helping them get that next role, but also promoting their work across the organization. Promoting should be about giving people career advice. It should be about sponsoring their career plan, and making introductions to critical stakeholders in other parts of the organization. Promoting should not be you as the leader sitting down and writing that career plan. It shouldn’t be about you having ownership for that individual following that career plan. And promoting should not be about you building those relationships. You should make the introduction and step back.

I worked with one leader who did a great job of coaching. I was a consultant at the time, and I had a project that didn’t go very well. I didn’t do a good job. On my next project, she was my project manager. She and I sat down and said, “Mike, you need to fix these things.” We laid out what those new challenges were for me. We identified high-impact deliverables that I could focus on during the project. She also provided specific and frequent feedback at the point of need. The result was, I did a much better job on that project and I improved my skills overall as a consultant.

A major responsibility of all leaders is building the next generation of leaders. Your development activities are the means to that end.

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