Developing your people is commercially AND professionally smart. Here's why.

by Angela Lane and Sergey Gorbatov

The world we operate in is tough.  Problems are messier. And the work itself keeps getting harder.

The solutions we require demand more people work on them, with greater expertise, from across more functions. We are more interdependent than ever. 

Knowledge workers, the people you depend on most, have options.  They know it, if turnover patterns are to be believed.  And while the talent market may be shifting, the scarcity of genuinely skilled people isn't likely to go away anytime soon.  

In that context, developing your people isn't a nice-to-have. It's a commercial imperative.

We see leaders as accountable for managing talent.  Our challenge to leaders is to deliver talent: More. Better. Now.  Better is where your team's development resides. It is how you improve performance, by improving each and every member of the team.  

And here’s the thing.  Humans like being developed.  So not only does it build skills, but it can also fuel engagement and discretionary effort.  And it isn’t that difficult.  

Here's how.

Step 1: Decide what's up

The first act of development is diagnosis. It is about deciding what has to be developed.  

What determines whether someone succeeds at work? Four things:

Their fundamental wiring, including intelligence, values, and personality. You didn't build those, and you probably can't change them. It is the constraint you’ll work within.  

Another constraint is your learner's ability to learn, that is, their “learning agility”. Each of us has a different capacity to grasp new things quickly, especially when they fall outside our existing experience. Lombardo and Eichinger defined it simply: knowing what to do when you don't know what to do. You’ll want to factor that into the equation when you decide what you want your team member to focus on. 

But, with your employee, you can impact two of the success criteria.  Firstly, their skills and experience. Some of this they brought with them. But you influence the skills and experiences they get next. 

Finally, learners have to be motivated to change. They cannot own it. People learn for their own reasons, not yours. But a leader can stimulate this. Including by setting the expectation of continuous improvement.  And holding team members accountable to meet that expectation. 

So what will you actually prioritise for development? We use what we call our 4M filter:  You will diagnose the development need based on: 

1. What Matters:  what skill, experience, or behaviour is relevant to high performance?

2. What’s Missing: of the performance-enhancing skills, which represents a gap to close, not a strength to polish?

3. What’s the Minimum: What are the minimum (one or two) areas where you’ll set a new expectation? 

4. What’s the Micro (skill): What’s a small, specific, practicable action that would move the learner closer to your expectation? 

Of our 4Ms, the one we're challenged on most is our focus on what’s missing.  So many leaders have been “trained” to focus on the employee’s strengths.  Strengths-based development has its place. But performance derails because of gaps, not because someone was too good at something.

Step 2: Build self-awareness

They can’t develop what they can’t see.

The development process starts with providing the learner with the self-awareness that improvement is needed.  Our research, somewhat dated now, surfaced at least 20 reasons why leaders don't actually give the feedback needed for self-awareness.  For all that they appear unique, each of the 20 falls into one of two categories: “skill” or “will”.

You will find us impatient with leaders who argue they haven’t had the training or experience to give feedback.  If you can speak or write, you have what you need. You may not deliver feedback perfectly. But in our experience, almost any feedback is better than none.

On “will”, the hesitations are more interesting. Some are emotional, such as conflict avoidance, fear of disappointing others, and reluctance to criticise others in areas where you yourself aren't strong. Other reasons appear rational but are often rationalisations, like the risk of labour turnover or reduced motivation.  You can get our list of 20 reasons here.

Regardless of whether it is “skill” or “will”, here is the argument for pushing past both: self-awareness is the entry point to a virtuous cycle. Awareness can lead to action.  Action can lead to better results. Better results can generate positive feedback from leaders, from stakeholders, and from the environment. As well as the dopamine hit from positive feedback, the fact of practice makes the effort of acting easier.  Better feedback.  That just gets easier to get.  

So the virtuous cycle is self-reinforcing.

Without it? The vicious alternative. No awareness, no change, declining results, negative environmental signals, disengagement. The cycle still runs.  In the wrong direction.

Ford under Alan Mulally is both cycles in one room. When he arrived in 2006, his weekly Business Plan Review had every executive color-code their status: green on track, yellow at risk, red in trouble. Every chart came back green... while the company was on its way to a $12.7 billion loss. Nobody had the self-awareness, or the safety, to say otherwise. Vicious cycle, running exactly as designed.

Then Mark Fields, running the Americas business, put up a red chart on a launch problem. His own team asked him twice if he was sure he wanted to do that. Mulally didn't reprimand him. He applauded, then asked the room how they could help. Within weeks the charts turned honest, and stayed that way for years. One leader rewarded the person who told the truth instead of punishing him, and the whole company's feedback loop flipped from vicious to virtuous.

Feedback.  As they say, if you see something, say something.  

Step 3: Set the expectation of deliberate practice

Whoever said “it is all about the conversation” was never great at developing others.  

Deliberate practice is, for us, defined as taking a specific action, with the intention of demonstrably improving performance. Did it work? Do more. Didn't land? Adjust and try again.

Marshall Goldsmith built a coaching practice around this loop, with over 150 Fortune 500 CEOs as clients. He calls it feedforward. The leader picks (only!) one behavior and asks a small group of colleagues not "what did I do wrong" but "what could I do differently next time." No debate, no defending yourself, just "thank you." Then he checks back with those same people on a set schedule, for months, to see if the behavior moved. No personality inventory, no strengths audit, no long conversation about potential. One behavior, one loop, repeated until it sticks. That's the Micro from your 4M filter, running on repeat.

Your role as a leader is simple.  Set the expectation that there is deliberate practice of an agreed-upon action to support skill-building. And hold the learner accountable. 

It’s good for you commercially.  It’s also professionally smart. 

Developing your team improves your results.  But it’s professionally smart for another reason. 

Developing others is a moderately difficult leadership skill to build. It is not beyond anyone reading this. But here's the data: in the general leadership population, the skill of developing others is genuinely rare.  It is as scarce as creativity, as rare as the ability to inspire, and as uncommon as the capacity to make oneself vulnerable. In fact, even at the most senior levels, the ability to develop and coach team members remains relatively hard to find.

Notice that both stories above are still being told years later: one in a turnaround narrative, one across 150 CEO engagements. That's not because Mulally's color codes or Goldsmith's one-behavior rule are complicated. They aren't. It's because almost nobody actually runs the loop: name the gap, make it safe to admit, hold to one action, repeat. The discipline of the follow-through is the rare part.

Which means, if you learn to do this well, you'll not just be making your team better. You are differentiating yourself. Including all levels of the organisation.

Developing your team.  Commercially smart. Professionally rare.

The views depicted here are those of the authors and not those of the organisations with which they are associated.