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High Impact Development Activities Three steps to Development Action Planning: Identify development priorities Determine Development Activities Measure and Follow up
High Impact Development Activities High Impact development opportunities can be categorized into three areas: Training Job Experiences Coaching/Mentoring.
Research by the Center for Creative Leadership found that the most significant development in managerial and executive careers takes place on-the-job
Why Most Training is Useless 86% of people who attend training do nothing to apply what they have learned. Typically only 10% of non-customized course content is relevant to an organization. What are you going to do to ensure that what is taught is actually applied?
High Impact Development Activities Special Project/Task Force: discrete project assignment aimed at a specific outcome. Fix-it: turnaround, restructure and stabilize a failed operation, project, or organization, or customer relationships. Start-up: building something from nothing or almost nothing. Small Strategic Assignment: examples include doing a competitive analysis, writing a proposal for a new product, system, etc., writing a speech for someone higher up, writing a policy statement or summarizing a new trend/technique and presenting it to others. Deepening Functional Skills: changing from a generalist type assignment to a more specialized job/role that requires/builds very deep functional expertise.
High Impact Development Activities Stretch Job Beyond “Hip Pocket” Functional Skills: changing job/role/career to a functional discipline fundamentally different from previous work experiences; may include a cross-functional assignment. Significant Change Leadership: leading the efforts to design & implement major change to the company’s key business processes and core capabilities. Mentoring: receiving personal coaching, counsel and perspective from a valued/trusted and influential leader. Being a mentor for someone else. Build a Team: assembling & aligning a team of unique talent & skill sets to achieve a stated vision and strategy. Maybe a project team. Coaching Assignments: Teach someone how to do something they are not expert in and/or something they are expert in; design a training course.
Summary For yourself or for your directs don’t default to training activities when building development plans. Stretch out of the comfort zone. High impact development often comes from “trauma”. We’ve only talked about 1 of the three steps to effective development planning … make sure your plan includes all three steps.