Delegating for Development

Making the most of work-related opportunities for growth

Leaders have an obligation to help their people grow. It’s good for business. The more people know and can do, the more they can contribute. It’s also good for motivation. The more people experience opportunities for growth, the more energized they are by their work and the more likely they are to stay.

Unfortunately, developing people is not a subject taught in business schools and few companies provide good guidance for leaders about how to do it once they are put in the position. Sometimes, it’s assumed that HR is responsible for developing people, but HR can only play a supporting role by providing resources in the form of programs, coaching and online apps. The real action happens on the job, day in and day out, where learning matters because it’s tied to current performance and future opportunities. People care about learning when they sense that it has real consequences instead of being a “check the box” exercise.

John Dewey, one of our greatest thinkers on education, believed strongly that to have maximum impact, learning should be tied to actions where the outcomes of investments of time and effort to learn become visible. The feedback taking action provides, combined with the sense of accomplishment achieving a goal produces, energizes learning and cements mastery of the knowledge and skills required. A lecture is quickly forgotten; an experience of initial failure, followed by eventual success, is not.

The Center for Creative Leadership tracks with Dewey in stating that the biggest breakthroughs in adult development occur when there is a combination of, 1) a heat experience that disrupts the status quo and calls for a new response; 2) colliding perspectives are encountered, through which the leader is exposed to new thinking as they are forced to acknowledge that their existing understanding is insufficient; and 3) elevated sense making takes place, which involves experimenting with the application of new knowledge or skills to the situation at hand until the challenge is addressed.

The more consequential the action, or the “hotter” the experience, the greater the perceived need for learning and therefore the greater the potential for meaningful development. A leader interested in growing their people should keep this in mind as they set about planning how to move them up the learning curve. It’s not just time in role or attending the occasional class that helps a person get ready for a bigger job. It’s tackling real challenges, sometimes failing, and understanding that there will always be another challenge waiting around the corner for which more learning will be required. Churchill’s real gift wasn’t that he could execute a preconceived plan to save Britain during World War II; it’s that he could invent new plans as the situation developed, even following setbacks.

Practically speaking, this understanding of the process by which adult development takes place calls for the leader to do several things that go above and beyond what is often expected of them. First, the leader must be on the lookout for meaningful heat experiences that can provide grist for learning. These experiences do not consist of loading on more of the same routine work to see if a person can handle the load or the result of setting tighter deadlines to make achieving the goal difficult or impossible. They are real challenges that matter to the organization. They might involve responding to a demanding customer with a unique set of requirements; figuring out a solution to a nagging problem; responding to an impending crisis; or achieving a breakthrough in product design. The leader need not look far, because opportunities for real contributions to be made are everywhere if one pays attention.

Once an opportunity is observed, it is not enough just to set the person to work on it. Providing colliding perspectives requires that the leader stay close to the action, questioning the person on their thinking about how to tackle the task, adding their own wisdom, and perhaps connecting the person to other sources of knowledge inside or outside the organization. Depending on the depth and breadth of the challenge, this step of exposing the person to colliding perspectives could stretch over weeks, months or even years. The more strategic and higher level the challenge, the more study will be required before a breakthrough idea or plan can be discovered. Elliot Jaques, a Canadian psychologist, developed an entire theory regarding the work that occurs at different levels of organizations and noted that at the highest levels, the timespan between taking action and seeing the results of that action can be measured in years. If the action is not successful, it can take years longer to rethink things and try again. It follows that developing people to take on the most strategic heat experiences will also require a substantial investment of time. A single week-long class or a quick chat with the boss won’t do the trick.

Therefore, as the person engages in elevated sensemaking, it’s important for the leader to match the timeframe for development with the challenge that is being addressed. The leader needs to provide continuous support throughout by paying attention to what the person is learning and how they are applying that knowledge. For lower-level jobs, elevated sensemaking can take place quickly, through a series of short-cycle trial and error experiments from which the person gets immediate feedback. For higher-level jobs, the feedback cycle will be much longer and the feedback itself harder to interpret given the complexity of the actions being undertaken. The leader plays an important role during the elevated sensemaking process by asking questions, urging the person not to give up after making a mistake (or many mistakes), and providing access to the resources needed to finally learn how to address the challenge.

While simply moving a person into a new position is bound to trigger some learning, the same move could produce much greater learning if the process outlined here is followed. When a leader assumes a role as an active partner in a person’s development, versus either not being involved at all or expecting HR to be responsible for talent development, the potential for growth is much greater. What’s more, by addressing real heat experiences that matter to the organization, it’s possible that the leader will benefit as well. It’s a win-win.