How to Align Business Needs with Employee Developmental Events

A couple weeks ago, I explained 5 Strategies for Growing Employee Competencies, including developmental events, the on-the-job opportunities that help employees grow specific competencies. These events are a critical part of the process of building new skills and growing as a leader.

Once you’ve identified competencies your employee needs to work on as part of his professional development action plan, it’s vital that you find opportunities for him to learn by doing. Most of the professional development learning people do on the job comes from things they’ve actually done -- not things they’ve observed others doing, read about or attended a training session on. Although those other learning methods are all important, they aren’t as powerful as jumping in and learning by doing.

Some managers and mentors may worry that providing employees with practical, hands-on learning experiences will just create extra work, but that doesn’t have to be the case. If you start by identifying real work that needs to be done and matching those tasks with competencies your employee needs to develop, you can efficiently and effectively align your business needs with your employee’s developmental events.

3 Developmental Events that Align with Business Needs

Let’s take the competency of process management as an example. This is a competency most leaders need to possess and many high-potential employees need to develop before they can become effective leaders.

Consider connecting your employee with these sorts of hands-on experiences to help her get better at process management while helping make progress toward fulfilling your organization’s needs.

• Creating a new process. If your company has a new project, or an old one that’s being run without a defined process, assign your employee to come up with one. You can be there to answer questions and evaluate his work, but she’ll be the one doing it and learning along the way.

• Improving an existing process. If there’s a process that’s been in place for some time, but may not be working as well as it could, encourage your employee to take on the task of revising, improving or overhauling it. Have her engage key players in reviewing the current process before she works on improving it.

• Reviewing and refining an existing process. After implementing a new process, have your employee go back and review it two months down the road. She should then note any improvements that need to be made and take steps to put those changes in place.

Success Labs is a full-service, strategic organizational and leadership development company located in Baton Rouge, La. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.