Over the years, research papers have started to talk about the more negative elements of the traditional approach to personal development. This is because it is time-consuming and demotivated employees because of how paperwork heavy it is. To prevent this negative impact on employees, companies are looking to adopt new approaches to personal development, below are some of the key ones you should focus on as a leader.
Expansion and inclusion
Allowing people to grow into a role is a great development opportunity. When you first start your role, you are probably limited in terms of responsibilities. As you learn, you expand your skills, responsibilities and get involved in more tasks.
- Expand a staff member's job content to include a wider variety of tasks, risk taking opportunities, greater responsibility and/or authority.
- Ensure that different types of tasks and levels of responsibility are needed, not just more work in the same task.
- Monitor and review the staff member's progress.
Attend or get involved in wider meetings.
- Select the meeting(s) which will provide the staff member with the knowledge, exposure or broadening needed.
- Pre-plan the staff member's involvement in the meeting and determine the expected outcome for the staff member.
- Review the meeting with the staff member - emphasizing the areas related to the anticipated results (e.g. exposure to thinking at a more global instead of local level).
Mentoring
Mentoring is very heavily focused on the relationship between yourself and your team member’s. It is about the transfer of knowledge to make sure are continually providing support to developing those around you. It also acts as a development opportunity when a team member mentors a newer member of the team.
You can do this through:
- Buddying up
- Questioning
- Listening
- Clarifying
- Passing wisdom and advice
- Reframing
Mentoring is normally a more long-term focus and can help in situations such as succession planning because it means you can identify a suitable employee to fill a higher risk role and start the knowledge transfer gradually. This will reduce the impact of a highly skilled/knowledgeable team member leaving.
Secondments/interims
If someone is wanting to develop their skills or understand someone else’s role better to see if they want to work in a different area and enhance their knowledge, a secondment can be a good way to do it.
The following points highlight why they provide personal development opportunities to employees:
- It helps enhance the skill set of an employee. As a leader this will benefit you because the way you do things can be looked at through fresh eyes. It is also beneficial for the individual as if they were starting to get fidgety or bored in their role, they can demotivate themselves by learning new skills.
- Doing secondments can help less confident employee’s making stronger connections with other departments and areas of the business.
- Secondments can help with training needs within a shorter period of time as the individual is able to immerse themselves in a new role.
- While they are away, you can develop others in the team to learn the role and responsibilities.
- Expose the staff member to lateral job functions either on a project or observation basis.
- Identify and plan the expected outcomes with the staff member.
- Review and critique the exposure experience.
Formal training
It is well known that training helps to develop skills and knowledge of employees. Yet the right training is sometimes harder to both provide and also recognise.
The benefits of providing the training that is needed from both a business and employee perspective includes:
Coaching
Coaching is a short-term version of mentoring. It focuses on improving individual’s work through developing their skills so they can meet their goals and enhance their performance.
This tends to happen for a specific period of time, so for example 3 months. This is when specific skills are needed to be developed for something happening in the near future. Whilst mentoring centres around the long-term development and continual check-ins with your team members.
The CIPD podcast linked below provides more insight into coaching and the culture that has formed around it.
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