Developing Your People

Developing Your People

Of all of your organisation’s assets and resources, the most vital are your people.

Some leaders seem naturally able to spot and nurture talent and potential, and some will invest time and themselves into this process.  Many do not.  They may be fully focused on developing their own career and, or, they may simply lack the awareness and skills required.

If you’ve ever reported to someone like this, you know how damaging this can be to your motivation and engagement, and how much waste can result from lost opportunity.  You might even become motivated to leave the organisation to work for one that is interested in developing your talent, your potential and your career.

Developing the capability and potential of your people is a key leadership and management competency.  It shouldn’t be optional.  However, unless leaders and managers are measured on this, and their competence in inspiring and growing their organisation’s human capital becomes a key factor in their performance and suitability for promotion rating, it will be treated as such.

Many leaders and managers may never have had a great ‘development’ role model they can follow or received inspiring training in this area.  All they may know is the ‘tick box’ procedures brought in and out by HR departments - trying to develop your people by ticking procedural boxes is dispiriting and demeaning for you and for them.  Tick boxes? How can you be a leader, let alone a great one, if people are not your passion?

This series of articles aims to provide support and guidance to help you build your competence and your confidence in developing your people and their potential. 

As you work through each, think about your own development and what support you are getting from your leader.  How can you help and encourage your leader to invest in your development?

As a leader, think about how you instil a ‘development’ culture in your area of responsibility.  How do you:

• communicate the importance of people development to the people who report to you? 
• ensure that they have the right skills to bring out the best and invest in the growth of their people? 
• measure their performance in this area?  How does it affect their performance rating?

Developing your people is a vital part of developing yourself as a leader.

ARTICLES: Developing Your People

1.      Agreeing Development Needs

Download this useful template to guide your initial development planning discussion.  Focuses on drawing out development needs to in order to improve performance in the current role, as well as to prepare for future roles.

2.      Preparing Development Plans

Following your initial development discussion, download this Personal Development Plan (PDP) template to record and monitor the progress of your agreed development actions.

3.      10 Ways To Keep Development Action Plans Alive

Don’t file development plans away for a semi-annual, or even annual ‘tick box’ review.  Keep them alive and maintain momentum with scheduled, regular progress reviews.  As a leader, ensure that any actions that you have agreed to take in order to facilitate someone else’s development are done and that this forms part of the evaluation of your performance.

4.      Developing People Through Delegation

Delegating your workload is frequently cited as an effective means of improving your effectiveness and productivity.  If done well, it can be, in addition it can provide valuable, supported learning opportunities for your people.  If done badly, you can be effectively ‘dumping’ unpalatable work that you are actually paid to do on the less well paid and just as busy, potentially creating resentment, reducing motivation and engagement.

5.      Identifying Potential

How do you identify who in your team has potential?  What is the difference between potential and high potential? How do you define and recognise it – and, as a leader, what actions do you need to take?

6.      Career Development: Charting Your Career

How successful has your career been to date? Have you achieved your goals and your potential?  What does this say about your ability to reach your future goals? 

Chart your career highs and lows to understand what has made you successful, or stopped you from achieving your full potential.  Use this knowledge to plan your development and achieve your career goals.

7.      Coaching

The most accomplished, skilled and successful athletes and sportspeople in the word have coaches.  This is also true for singers, dancers and many other professions.  Whether you are at the top of your game or on your way there, you can benefit from coaching.  Click here to visit our coaching centre.  Whether you are a coach or a ‘coachee’ you will find many free resources to help you get the most out of the coaching process.

8.      Leading Effective Teams

Develop effective individuals, develop an effective team.  

Download Leading Effective Teams NOW - free with your 14 day iWise2 Membership trial or buy it without Membership for £12.99 (around US$21.00) from our e-books store or in paperback from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.