.
Developing
Talent
The world is constantly changing, and your organization along with it.
Your team—the company’s human capital—drives that change and shapes
your company’s future. Your role as a manager is to develop talent that
meets the needs of your business. It is fundamentally future-oriented, en-
suring you can deliver exceptional performance both today and tomorrow.
Whereas feedback aims to improve performance now, talent development
expands your employees’ capacities for the future.
The best managers know how to balance the needs of the organization
with the interests of its employees. As you work with your employees to
identify new skills, new experiences, and new responsibilities of interest,
you’re helping them fi nd work that’s fulfi lling. As their manager, you must
also look for the resonances between their desires and your company’s
needs. In this chapter, you’ll learn about the benefi ts of employee develop-
ment, as well as how to spot those opportunities and help your employees
take advantage of them.
176Managing Individuals
Employee development as a priority
One of the most important and rewarding responsibilities you have as a
manager is to develop the capabilities of your direct reports. That means
helping them:
• Discover their passion and purpose
• Identify their work values
• Understand the organization’s priorities and politics
• Improve their skills
• Expand their competencies
• Challenge themselves with new experiences
• Acquire mentors and build their professional network
• Discover how to manage others
You’ve already thought about how to do many of these things for your-
self and sought to negotiate opportunities for growth with your own boss
(see chapter 8, “Self-Development”). You asked yourself, “How does my
work fi t into the vision I have for my life and my career purpose?” Now
you’re looking at the issue through the eyes of your employees and your
motivation is a little different: you want to help others grow and align to
their greater purpose, but with a focus on how that growth will intersect
with the business goals of your unit.
The company benefi ts greatly from your investments in talent develop-
ment. Many managers assume that the personal happiness of their em-
ployees confl icts with the needs of the business, and that they must choose
between the two. But that’s a mistake. Employee development is one of
your core responsibilities for a reason: It directly serves your business’s
interests. By encouraging your direct reports to think strategically about
their career and helping them become more capable and content, you’re
creating tangible value for your organization.
Developing Talent177
Developing your employees also benefi ts you. If you can improve your
team’s performance and move promising players to the next level, you’ll
enhance your reputation with upper-level management. What’s more, your
staff’s expanding networks can enrich your own professional connections.
New experiences bring them into contact with people you might be glad to
know. And you’ll refresh your existing network, too, as they develop new
relationships with your old colleagues, like other managers in your com-
pany. It is incredibly rewarding to invest time and energy to develop the
talents of others in the organization.
Of course, your employees are the most obvious benefi ciaries here. The
payoff is clear with star performers, who will rise to higher and higher lev-
els of responsibility with your help. But it’s just as important to spend time
with all of your employees. Even people with more modest professional
goals will perform better in their current role if they feel that you respect
and support their growth. Nearly all employees have a basic human need
to keep learning. Frederick Herzberg, a psychologist who studied employ-
ees’ motivation, argued that money is a less powerful motivator than op-
portunities to learn, advance in their responsibilities, and be recognized
for their achievements. Employee development doesn’t need to be about
facilitating your employees’ meteoric rise to the top; it’s more about help-
ing them achieve this fundamental satisfaction in their everyday work and
reach their highest potential, whatever that might be.
Creating career strategies with your staff
Effective managers help employees discover what they really want out of
their work and how they can use their present situation as a springboard
to reach those goals. That means talking to your direct reports about their
hopes and dreams, but also engaging in some practical brainstorming
about where they can fi nd opportunities for growth in your organization
and how their present role could be reengineered for the better.
In the past, when many companies had more defi ned career paths for
advancement, this conversation would have gone a little differently. Most
companies had a career ladder of some form, a logical series of stages that
178Managing Individuals
moved a talented and promotable employee through progressively more
challenging and responsible positions. Managers propelled their employees
to the next rung when the manager and HR colleagues judged them ready.
The path for growth was mostly unidirectional: up, in whatever stream of
the business they’d already landed in.
Today, the map for each employee’s development is more complicated.
You can move up, but also over through a lateral career move—for example,
from customer service representative to user-experience (UX) researcher.
And because many companies have adopted fl exible organizational struc-
tures, employees can also grow in the same position by reinventing their
responsibilities.
All this means that career advancement requires more initiative and
more imagination than ever before, from employee and manager alike.
That’s great, because it gives you and your employee the opportunity
to craft a strategy that’s responsive to the company and the individual’s
needs, something you couldn’t do when organizational structures were
more rigid.
Take the example of the customer service rep who wants to transi-
tion to UX. That’s a diffi cult jump to make if each business division has
a strictly regimented pecking order (“UX researchers must have at least
three years’ experience as a UX research assistant”). But if you and your
counterpart in the other unit can work together to bring a bright rep over
to UX quarter-time, both departments will benefi t tremendously. The
UX team can use their direct line into customer service to identify design
problems, and customer service can use the employee’s new expertise to
improve internal tools, from rewriting agendas to customizing software
settings, as well as customer-facing scripts and services. Similar opportu-
nities to this one abound.
Step 1: Talk to your direct reports
Start with your employees. To support their growth, you need to under-
stand their aspirations and their current state of development. The more
you know about the people who work for you, the more you’ll be able to
motivate them, coach them, and help them grow. The coaching sessions,
Developing Talent179
Employee development interview
To help your direct reports create and implement a career strategy, sit
down with them to learn how they see their current situation and future
path. This is an intimate conversation, so prepare them ahead by letting
them know what you’d like to discuss, and share any questions you’d like
them to give special thought to. Use these questions from psychiatrist Ed-
ward Hallowell, who has studied the brain science of high performance:
INTERESTS AND SKILLS
Learn about what kind of work they enjoy and what direction they’d like to
keep growing in by asking the following questions:
• “What are you best at doing? What do you most like to do?”
• “What do you wish you were better at? What talents do you have
that you haven’t developed?”
• “What skills are you most proud of? What do others say are your
greatest strengths? What have you gotten better at?”
• “What are you just not getting better at, no matter how hard you
try? What do you most dislike doing? The lack of which skills most
gets in your way?”
• “Can you think of ways to incorporate more of what you do best
and what you most enjoy into your job?”
• “Can you think of ways to build on your strengths and accomplish-
ments to date in your current role?”
• “Everyone has weaknesses and dislikes. How do you think you can
continue to compensate for yours? How would your work have to
evolve to accommodate them?”
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