Before I start, I wanted to share with you the power of AI. For the first time, I decided to use AI to generate a picture to go with my blog, so I asked it to give me a cartoon man shrugging with the word DEVELOPMENT beneath him. I have a number of questions, but I'll let you be the judge of how it got on...
With everything I do professionally and a lot of the things I'm involved in during my non-work time, development and growth are the name of the game. Whether it's holding the space for individuals to reflect and challenge themselves and grow, or whether it's more overtly teaching people things through delivering training, the desired end result is always (hopefully!) that someone has made progress through our interactions.
And when I do, there's always a part at the beginning of the conversation or the session, where we're reflecting on the areas in which the client wishes to develop. What do they want to be different once they've worked with me? What growth? What change? And how will they be able to identify or measure that the change has taken place.
This is all pretty standard stuff in L&D and in any kinds of sports coaching. There's a particular focus to what you do in a given session and you want to be able to measure progress against that, formally or informally.
Lots of development programmes, however, also have a 360 element to them. What I mean by that, is that the learning or coaching intervention often starts with the client completing a 360 degree survey, where both they and their peers, manager, clients, direct reports and stakeholders answer a series of questions about how they experience that individual and the areas where they believe them to be strong and in need of growth. These can be incredibly enlightening and can allow the delegate to measure how they view themselves against how others view them and to get some perspective and some grist for the mill of reflection. In such programmes, there's usually a stage which comes after the 360 where they debrief the report that's generated with a coach, before spending time reflecting and developing a plan for their own growth. Again, pretty standard stuff - but this sets the scene for what I'd like to talk about today.
Often, in these debriefs, of which I've done many, using a wide variety of 360 tools, the client looks at the feedback on the areas where they've been rated highly by their stakeholders and they say 'that's really nice to see' or 'I'm surprised by that!' And then they look at the areas where the stakeholders have rated them lower and they say 'yeah, that makes sense' or 'I know what that relates to' and that's the end of their reflection on the results. Then what's their next step? Well the simple one is just to take the elements you're 'not good at' (those where you've been rated low) and use these as the basis for your development plan and the actions that this plan drives and you're good to go!
But I've identified a challenge with that, over the years: There's a difference between 'I've been told I should get better at this' or 'I know objectively I should get better at this' and 'I actually care enough or have a desire to get better at this'.
You see, the best plan (whether it's for self development or building a house) is the plan that gets done. I'm sure we can all think of times in our lives where we've either seen or maybe written plans which seemed fantastic on paper, but nothing happened with them and they never became more than a plan.
Simply put, there are two questions to ask with every development need
How much do I NEED to develop myself in this area?
How much do I CARE about developing myself in this area?
Because you can have all the gaps in the world, get all the feedback in the world, be facing all the challenges in the world, but if you don't actually care enough about developing or growing in a given area, then it's a total waste of time writing it on your development plan, you simply will not put in the work to do it. And there are few things worse than having a plan and looking at it and having no desire to actually do anything that's on it.
So where does that leave you? Well it takes us to a fork in the road. One fork is 'How do I develop my desire to grow in this area? How do I make it compelling?' and that's probably another blog for another day! So let's go down the other fork.
You see, for all of us, there are LOTS of things we could develop at any time. I could sit down and write down ten thing that it would benefit me to do better or be better at, without much challenge. So rather than picking the ones which you feel like you SHOULD develop, start with the ones in which you WANT to develop. Build a development plan for yourself around stuff that fires you up, things that will help you take advantage of the opportunities that you really want to take advantage of, things that will help you become the person that you really car about becoming. And once you've worked on those things and seen some progress, maybe your perspective will change and you'll develop a passion for growth in another area that previously didn't seem so interesting to you.
And there are lessons in those discoveries. If you really have zero interest or passion in developing in a given area, what does that tell you? Let's take a very general and exaggerated example just to make a point; imagine you have been a technical expert, an individual contributor for your whole career and then last year you were appointed head of the team. And as part of your development, you undertake a 360 and a big part of the feedback is, in effect, that you aren't a good line manager. And you read through the responses and the verbatims and you digest it all, and you don't disagree with the things that are being said, but you're struck by the fact that you don't really want to get better at line managing. It's not something you enjoy, it's not something you care about being good at. So where does that leave you? Well you can write down some actions and do nothing with them, because you're not compelled to do so. Or you can build a plan and labour over it. Or, you can take the message that line management isn't for you and that you're doing both yourself and the people you manage a disservice by staying in the role and seek to find your happiness elsewhere as an individual contributor again.
And I get it - that might not be possible. Sometimes people find themselves in places where they love and are good at 90% of their job but they have a real blind spot that's holding them back, and they have to claw and scratch and fight to get better at that thing. But that in itself is a burning platform, because them keeping and excelling in the job relies on developing in that area, but if that's not you, spend some time reflecting on not only your development areas, but how you actually feel about them. There might be a lesson in there for you.
If you recognise yourself or one of your team in any of tis and it'd be useful to walk it through, let me know. I'm always keen to help!
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