Turning Leaders into Developers of Talent

Every Leader is a Talent Developer

In today’s world of work, managers and leaders have many jobs and priorities, including maximizing and elevating their talent. Managers and leaders must become talent developers so their organizations can attract and retain their best talent. 

Talent and learning and development professionals understand this, so they design and build experiences, programs, and interventions that help employees gain the knowledge and develop the skills to perform their jobs effectively. While those efforts are essential, the programs, experiences, or interventions take time and are in traditional learning modalities, such as courses, programs, or events.  

It takes work for an employee to absorb information in a traditional learning experience and be excellent at that skill or behavior right away. The reality is that for many employees, the rubber meets the road during their workflow and day-to-day experiences. If we want them to develop, grow, and rise to their potential, what can we do?

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Find Others Who Want to Become “Developers of Talent”

One solution is to empower people leaders to embrace their role as “developers of talent.” By providing leaders with the necessary mindset, tools, and practices, we make development accessible to individuals more frequently and help them achieve their goals of finding the best people and maximizing their skills and abilities to effectively lead their teams. 

It may seem that we are “giving away” our roles and responsibilities, but we are building a movement and a coalition amongst leaders who believe in developing talent and making these tools accessible to use with employees. 

How do you build an organization that prioritizes talent development? If you’re a talent development practitioner, here are five principles you can apply today:

1. Observe what is already happening and working. 

In your organization, there are people who understand what it means to be a talent developer. These are often the managers or leaders people gravitate towards and want to work for and who consistently receive high praise. Talk to these people to better understand what they are doing and discover their approach and mindset. If there is evidence that what they are doing is working, there is already momentum behind it, which is better than trying to convince other people (something you will eventually have to do) to do something that hasn’t been tried or proven.

2. Identify specific moments of the employee workflow that would benefit from “practices of development.” (POD)

With moments of development, context matters. Discovering how employees work and identifying specific moments when a manager naturally incorporates a development practice into their workflow is critical to ensuring they actually take action. This requires you to understand how managers and employees work and, based on that, where there is an opportunity to incorporate development. 

For example, start with when a new employee onboards into a role. Getting specific and granular is more helpful in identifying where development can happen, so pick an employee or team you work with regularly and determine, based on a monthly, weekly, and daily schedule, the common steps in their work. Look for discrete and recognizable moments (e.g., a meeting, a deliverable, or a task) that are repeated or consistent. 

3. Create a lightweight tool that allows a manager to practice the development moment. 

An essential and critical step is making it natural for someone to take action, for example, by developing a lightweight “tool” that makes it easier for them to take action and create a development moment. While the format differs, the goal remains: Make it natural and accessible for the manager to create that development moment.  

Examples of Tools

• Template: Jenny, a team lead for customer success managers, built a template (PowerPoint slide) for her team to collect customer stories. These were shared at team meetings so other team members could learn and share best practices.

• E-Mail reminder: David, a software engineer manager, uses an email template to remind his team members at the end of each quarter to document their top projects.

• Embed: Sharon, a marketing leader, wanted her team to share their learnings and insights. She embedded a Slack channel called #learnings and encouraged them to post to it weekly. During team meetings, she read the best ones, and they discussed them in greater detail.

4. Find thought partners and experimenters

With your development moment and tool, find people interested in testing out what you’ve created. 

One way to test is “top-down,” where you ask the managers or leaders you’ve studied (or were nominated) who are popular and respected in your organization to try out your development moment example. The other way is “bottoms up,” which requires you to contact contributors who are respected self-starters and get their buy-in to bring your development moment to their manager and go through that channel. 

A development practice I previously implemented was a “bullpen session.” This was a 60-minute meeting where three people got together to present a project or deliverable they were working on and get feedback. The beauty of this approach was that because it served their interests and worked well, they started sharing this concept with other teams, and the practice spread through word of mouth.

Another example of a top-down approach came from an organization where we wanted people to talk more about their career development and growth. We went directly to managers in one business unit and asked them to take the language we provided and add it to the 1:1 document they had with each team member. 

5. Run a small test and measure your results.

Once you’ve picked the people to run this, you can test and measure the development moment’s results and isolate how well this tool/moment of development works so you can take that insight and improve the next iteration or build your business case for scaling. There several ways to do this.

• Construct a pre-post survey: For the population, do a baseline survey related to the specific development moment or tool, and then run a follow-up survey about 30-60 days after the tool gets implemented.

• Measure against existing measures: Your organization may already have measures in place, such as an employee engagement survey. Another option is to align the development practice against a specific question in the engagement survey.

• Get qualitative feedback: If you choose one of the first two options, it's important to talk to your employees to see how the development practice is going and how it can be improved. 

Bonus: Act into the behaviors you want to see

If you want others to get on board with becoming talent developers, implement your own development practices. Be the change you wish to see. 

Conclusion

Organizations that prioritize people development can evolve at the speed of the market. However, developing talent happens only when people take action and incorporate this into their everyday work. As talent development practitioners, we must empower leaders with tools to incorporate small development practices into employees' daily experiences.

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If you’re looking for some help for your learning and development, leadership development, I’d love to work with you: Here is how I might be able to assist:

• Leadership & Learning Programs:  Formal training and leadership development in your company, such as new manager or new leader training, or skill-based programs.

• Consulting & Advisory Services - Do you have a leadership development or onboarding program that needs a refresh or audit? Let’s chat about how we can improve your program.

• 1:1 Executive Coaching - Are you looking for an executive coach for 1:1 leadership support? Let’s chat about how we can work together

Feel free to contact me directly for more details!

Have a great week!

Al