Imagine for a moment that you were asked to make every day at work a fitness day. Your first reaction may be to schedule time to go to the gym or take the stairs instead of the elevator. But here’s the hard part: You must stay in your very small office. Oh, and you have no budget to buy any fitness equipment—no treadmill, no elliptical trainer, not even weights. Give up? Anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela didn’t. Confined to a small cell on Robben Island for the first 18 of his 27-year-long incarceration, he found a way to make every day a fitness day. Keeping his long-term goal of being strong enough to lead the country beyond apartheid, he used whatever tools he had at hand—mainly his own body—to do calisthenics and make fitness part of his daily routine (Nelson Mandela, “Long Walk to Freedom,” Little, Brown and Company, 1994; pp. 379-449).
Like Mandela, exceptional development managers (who we now are calling EDMs) use what is in front of them—namely, the work itself and their daily access to people doing it—to make bite-size progress on a big goal: continual development of the capacity of all their people so they make talent their business.
If you were to observe these managers you’d see two major trends. First, EDMs plan stretch into the work so their people continually push the boundaries of what they know and are comfortable doing. These managers are motivated to spend the little bit of extra time it takes to plan and support stretch because they know the work at hand is the most powerful source of development. As one manager put it succinctly, “The work itself is the development. Experience is far and away the best teacher.” We agree.
The second trend you’d spot is the way exceptional managers spend their day. Instead of waiting to make a big (but infrequent) investment in development, they make lots of small (but frequent) deposits in their development account—think recurring short interactions versus infrequent, more formal meetings. They do this to help their people learn while doing work that stretches them. Another EDM we interviewed summed up this trend beautifully: “I approach development as an everyday ‘being there’ sort of thing, not as a programmatic process. I gently push them to do more than they think they can do. Then, if I see something, I note it, and I simply say it. I don’t wait for a meeting or call it out as a developmental conversation.”
Using the work itself as a major source of development is not a novel idea. The uncontested results of multiple research projects, some dating back to the 1980s, show that the vast majority of development comes from experience on the job —not from formal training programs. (The original research from the Center of Creative Leadership (CCL), published by Morgan W. McCall, Jr., Michael M. Lombardo, and Ann M. Morrison in “The Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job,” Lexington Press, 1988, found the majority of lessons came from experience on the job. Subsequently, CCL and others quantified the relative strength of each major source as 70 percent work experience, 20 percent from other people and just 10 percent from coursework and reading.)
Leadership guru Warren Bennis puts it this way: “I would argue that more leaders have been made by accident, circumstance, sheer grit, or will, than have been made by all the leadership courses put together” (Warren Bennis, “On Becoming a Leader,” Basic Books, Perseus Group, New York, 2003; p. 34).
Yet according to research that mirrors our experience, fewer than 10 percent of managers use the work at hand as a development tool (The War for Talent Study, McKinsey, 1998). Training is an important part of the mix, but still too many managers see sending people to programs as the panacea for development. When they do this, it unfortunately lets them off the development hook.
So the one thing that matters most is done the least? We believe a major reason that using the work itself as a development tool is so rare is that managers simply don’t know how to package work and development, or how to put themselves in the picture every day to support that development. The solution comes down to these four approaches that you can use to make every day a development day:
- Tuck development into work.
- Create the right stretch.
- Seize development moments.
- Leverage team learning.
Excerpt from “Make Talent Your Business: How Exceptional Managers Develop People While Getting Results” by Wendy Axelrod and Jeannie Coyle (Berrett Koehler).
Wendy Axelrod and Jeannie Coyle are managing partners at Talent Savvy Manager LLC, a human capital consultancy specializing in manager-driven, performance-centered people development. As former HR executives for Fortune 100 companies, they support organizations and leaders to apply what it really takes to be exceptional development managers, seamlessly intertwining development with performance requirements. For more information, visit TalentSavvyManager.com.
