Engage and support line management regarding long-term planning,

talent identification, staffing and other talent requirements.

● The management of talent in an organisation in terms of creating a work

environment that is attractive, managing individuals so as to engage
and challenge them and recognising and rewarding different levels of
performance is the responsibility of line managers. Performance
standards/contracts for line managers should include a KPI/KPA on
development of talent.
● The role of HR is to provide frameworks, systems, support, advice and
coaching to line managers in talent management related activities.
● Talent management processes must be based on a philosophy,
principles and approach that is whole-heartedly driven by the top
management team, who must be willing to act as public role models in
the implementation of talent management interventions. It follows
therefore that the philosophy, principles and approach must be debated
and agreed on at the top management level and supported by the
Board. The public endorsement and drive of the CEO is critical. If the
top management team is only willing to approve basic or minimal talent
management interventions, then the design of the interventions must
reflect this. Financial resources (budget) should be agreed
commensurate with the anticipated criticality of talent management to
the future of the organisation.
● Part of the top management debate and agreement should be the
definition of the terms “talent”, “performance” and “potential” as they are
to be used within the organisation. Each organisation may have its own
 view of these concepts and it is critical to ensure a common
understanding.
● A second part of the debate should be the risk tolerance in relation to
appointments and promotions – what are “non-negotiables” and what
can be bridged or otherwise supported.
● HR should ensure that good practice (benchmarked from other
organisations locally and overseas), latest thinking and research are
presented to management as appropriate so that sound decisions on
the talent management approach can be made.
● The skills of line managers to perform their talent management
responsibilities must be adequately developed through regularly
updated training, coaching and mentoring.
● Based on the talent segments/groupings, top management should
agree on the sourcing strategy for each segment. Possible strategies
include build (develop own people); buy (recruit in the competitive
labour market); borrow (outsource, create partnerships, bring in experts
from overseas); birth (create long term development pipelines); bridge
(create a temporary solution for loss of a particular skill); bounce (move
people from another part of the organisation); or bind (ensure retention
in the short term through specific contracts).

Analyse the talent needs of the organisation by assisting managers to

segment and classify talent across the organisation to ensure talent
differentiation and management thereof.

● The decision on how to segment/classify talent is unique to each

organisation as it depends on culture, nature of business, diversity
 within the organisation in terms of types of skills employed, and future
plans (how different is the future from the present).
● Whilst it is often the preference of management to treat all employees
as “talent” to be developed, it is nonetheless important to identify key
groups which are critical to the organisation now or in the future.
● A popular set of groupings is: Core, critical, and scarce. This provides a
working basis on which to plan attraction, development and retention
strategies. Another popular set of groupings is derived from the “9 box”
approach, which uses 3 levels of performance and 3 levels of potential,
to classify each employee. Groupings may be different by organisational
level, depending on what suits the nature of the organisation.
● Talent pools are then defined according to the groupings agreed upon.
Talent pools should be broader rather than narrower, to allow for career
development and skills evolution.
● The decision(s) on segmentation/classification need to be made in
discussion by the executive team, and then a careful communication
strategy must be developed to ensure transparency to all employees.

Conduct a talent review linked to organisational objectives.

● Talent reviews are discussions amongst management teams about the

stock of available talent in relation to the current and future needs of the
organisation. Decisions are then made to rectify any problem areas.
These discussions could be formally structured as part of corporate
governance and titled Talent Board, Talent Council or something similar.
● Talent reviews should be structured, and based on data about
employees which is gathered in a comprehensive and objective manner
 and presented in a format which allows valid comparisons and scrutiny
of emerging trends.
● Line managers participating in talent reviews should be familiar with the
section of the organisation under discussion and should have some
personal knowledge of the people under discussion.
● Good practice is to hold talent reviews on a department basis and
consolidate upwards to the top level. An overall view on the availability
and quality of talent is taken and development actions are agreed.
● A clear policy and procedure should be developed that states, amongst
other items, how and when talent reviews will be conducted, who will be
involved, and what feedback will be given to affected employees.

Create a talent management system focusing on current and future

talent needs.

● A talent management system will typically consist of: All HR processes

and practices should be aligned with the overall talent management
strategy, especially recruitment, learning & development, performance
management and reward processes. A clear and simple model should
be produced which demonstrates the inter-linkages between HR
processes and how they support the talent management strategy.
● Job profiling to establish required skills/competencies
● Current jobs
● Future jobs
● Skills audit of current incumbents
● Development planning to fill gaps and provide for the future
 ● Succession planning to identify immediate (emergency),
short-term and long-term succession candidates to critical
positions
● Career pathing (defining progression routes through the
organisation)
● Review processes to critically evaluate talent pools
● Retention strategies for people identified as critical in the short
term for the organisation
● Communication strategy around key talent management
concepts, processes and results.
● The system should include expressions of the desired outcomes of the
talent management strategy, expressed in terms which can be
converted into meaningful measurements.
● The system should include regular reviews of outcomes against
expectations, to allow for system improvement.
● A budget for talent management interventions should be prepared.

Decide on interventions to define and develop leadership and other

competencies.

● There are many reputable leadership competency models available, but

care must be taken to adopt one which is compatible with the culture
and needs of the organisation. A model which balances different
dimensions of leadership, such as delivering results, engaging and
developing people and alignment.
 ● The leadership competency model should cater for future evolution of
the organisation, recognising that what is considered effective
leadership today might not be suitable for the future.
● A leadership competency model should not be imposed on the
organisation without thorough consultation.
● Leadership competency development interventions should be balanced
between formal and non-formal learning, using a wide variety of different
methodologies. Coaching and mentoring and planned job
rotations/project assignments/secondments are known to be among the
most effective methods for developing leadership competencies.
● Other competency frameworks should be introduced after careful
consideration of the job families that are critical to the organisation and
should be developed through consultation with line managers and
affected employees. Frameworks should include both technical skills
and soft/behavioural skills. All frameworks should be aligned in terms of
approach and methodology and should allow for movement between job
families as far as is feasible.
● Competency development interventions should be based on gaps
identified through a comparison of actual competency of the individual
against the requirements of the competency model for current and
desired/future positions.
● Actual competency levels should be determined through methods of
assessment which are accepted as objective and fair by both managers
and employees.

Decide on interventions to support effective talent management in the

organisation.
● Interventions should be planned around the life-cycle of employment,
that is: Interventions should preferably be tested on a pilot group before
rolling out to the entire organisation:
● sourcing (short and long-term, internal and external, “alumni”
groups);
● recruitment; assessment and selection;
● onboarding;
● development and career pathing including accelerated
development for targeted groups;
● performance development, reward and recognition;
● wellness and retirement planning;
● terminations (exit interviews and research into causes of
“regretted loss” labour turnover);
● past employment (alumni pools).
● The level of employee engagement is critical to talent management.
● An approach where an individual is held primarily responsible for his/her
own development and advancement is recommended.
● Individual development plans with a multi-year horizon are central to
talent engagement and development as are honest and constructive
feedback and career conversations.
● Open and transparent communication with employees on their
performance, potential and future development is fundamental to talent
management. Expectations must be managed.
● A strengths-based rather than a deficiency-based developmental
approach has been shown to be effective in individual development.
● An explicit and attractive employment value proposition must be
elucidated and communicated. This should reflect the actual
experienced culture of the organisation and should be designed to
differentiate the organisation from competitors so as to attract people
compatible with the organisation’s culture.
● A robust and diversified pipeline of external resources should be in
place to supply future skills requirements. Building this pipeline may
include creating partnerships right through the education and skills
development supply chain.
● Programmes such as apprenticeships, learnerships and internships
should be used to bridge gaps between studies and employment.

There are five trends shaping the future world of work. These are:
 New behaviours

Within the past 5-10 years there has been a shift in people’s behaviour.
Essentially, people are more comfortable living a public, collaborative, and
connected life where they can connect and engage with people and
information however they want. These new behaviours are now entering
organisations and this has given rise to new social and collaborative platforms
for business. These new behaviours and expectations are a key driving force
that many organisations around the world are trying to adapt to and they are
largely fuelled by the new behaviours being seen in people’s personal lives
today.

Impact summary:

New employee behaviours entering organisations are challenging the

conventional idea of how employees work and what they expect from
organisations.

Technology
The primary shift in technology that are impacting how we work are the shift to
the cloud and collaboration platforms, including the Internet of Things and Big
Data.

Impact summary:

Technology decisions are now in the hands of anyone within an organisation,

not just IT or management. Cloud-based technologies should decrease the
time to deploy, make upgrades and deployments easier and faster, and allow
organisations to out together their own “stacks” made up from components
from various vendors.

Collaboration platforms allow organisations to connect and engage people

and information, anywhere, anytime, and on any device.

Big data means more potential information that can be gathered about
anything. This can lead to better decision-making. Being able to filter the
information and make sense of it is crucial.

The Internet of Things refers to the ability for devices to connect to a network
or each other. Cars, refrigerators, cameras, credit cards and everything and
anything else you can think of will have the ability to connect to a device and a
network to share information wirelessly. The Internet of things is helping to
create the vast amounts of big data. Devices have the ability to “talk” to each
other and to people on their own without human intervention or activation.
This has the potential to make our lives and workplace easier and more
streamlined as well as to help us better understand ourselves, how we work,
and how we live.

The millennial workforce

By the year 2025, millennials are expected to make up 70-75% the entire U.S.
workforce. Although the millennial workforce is clearly a different
demographic, it’s not just the demographic itself that is significant. This new
workforce brings with it a new attitude about work, new expectations, a
different set of values, and different approaches to how work should be done.

Impact summary:

A new generational workplace is means new behaviours, approaches,

attitudes, and expectations about work and the workplace.

Mobility
With advances in technology around the way we work, employees can work
from anywhere, anytime and on any device. More and more employees are
working “on the go” while waiting in airports, sitting in taxis or standing in line
somewhere.

Impact summary:

Allows employees to stay connected and work even when they are on the go.
This helps make employee location independent.

Globalisation

Definitions for globalisation can vary significantly. According to Wikipedia:

Globalisation is the process of international integration arising from the
interchange of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture.
Advances in transportation and telecommunications infrastructure, including
the rise of the telegraph and its posterity the Internet, are major factors in
globalisation, generating further independence of economic and cultural
activities.

To simplify, it’s essentially the ability to do business around the world without
boundaries.
Impact summary:

Talent doesn’t need to be local. Organisations, both large and small can be
comprised of international teams. Organisations can also develop a presence
in any part of the world and work without boundaries.

The objectives of learning and development are:

● To create an occupationally competent and engaged workforce which

builds organisational capability, providing employees with opportunities
to develop new knowledge and skills.
● To focus learning and development plans on improving people’s ability
to perform to achieve organisational objectives and provide the means
for measuring the impact of learning and development interventions.
● To support and accelerate skills development and achievement of
employment equity and organisational transformation and limit the
impact of skills shortages.
● To create a learning culture and environment that enables optimal
individual, team and organisation learning and growth in both
competencies and behaviour.
● To capture and replicate and enhance critical knowledge within the
organisation.
● To ensure learning and development is a catalyst for continuous
improvement, change and innovation.
 Since learning and development should be highly integrated with the
other HR functions, HR practitioners must be able to play an appropriate
role in the following outputs:

● HRD strategy and planning;

● Competency modelling and competency assessment;
● Training logistics and administration;
● Training needs analysis;
● Management of learning providers;
● Design and delivery of development activities;
● Evaluation of learning and development interventions;
● Coaching and mentoring;
● Induction/orientation;
● Individual Development Plans (IDPs); and
● Knowledge Management.

Learning and Development Process:

In recent years, the scope of learning and development activities of
organisations has moved well beyond that of formal training in a classroom
situation. Learning and development functions are now required to act more
as learning and development facilitators, using a wide range of methods.

The South African Board for People Practices (SABPP) recommends the
following critical steps in the learning and development process:
Scan the learning and development environment and based on this analysis,
formulate a learning and development strategy and plans for the organisation
that are aligned with organisational goals and culture.

The learning and development strategy should take account of:

● The primary responsibility of each line manager is to ensure the

development of individuals in the team.
● The overall HR strategy in general and the talent management strategy
in particular (including the people and people development
philosophies). This will give the framework for the nature of the learning
and development challenges – for example, will the need be for specific
technical skills and at what level (artisan, technician, engineer,
researcher)? If the talent management strategy requires a “build”
approach, more learning and development support will be needed than
if the “buy” or “borrow” approach is to be adopted.
● From the strategy, learning and development policies and the
appropriate procedures should be drawn up to govern how learning and
development will happen and what the entitlements and responsibilities
are.
● Responsibility for the budget for learning and development activities
should be carefully allocated. It is seldom appropriate for a learning and
development function to hold the whole learning and development
budget, which should be devolved to line managers. However, for
certain strategic learning and development activities, or where the cost
 is spread over various accounting areas, it may be appropriate for the
learning and development function to hold the budget.

Identify, select and implement in an integrated approach the appropriate

learning and development interventions to meet the identified organisational
need and enable employees to develop new knowledge and skills.

Learning and development plans (detailing what learning and development

activities will take place for whom, where and at what cost) should be drawn
up on an interactive and iterative (bottom-up, top-down) basis. The following
steps should be followed to draw up the plan, and each step may be simple
and fairly informal, or highly structured, depending on the organisation. Even
fairly informal methods should, however, result in written plans per individual,
and the consolidated learning and development plan will have to comply with
skills development legislation (the Workplace Skills Plan).

A learning and development plan per individual (known often as IDP or PDP)
should be agreed upon between employee and supervisor and be drawn up
based on factors such as:

● Job profiles specifying the required competencies.

● Performance management processes to determine current performance
against requirements (learning and development is not always the best
 way to correct a performance improvement issue, except where the
diagnosed cause of the issue revolves around skills improvement).
● Formal competence assessments.
● Talent review outcomes.
● Career pathways and individual career preferences.
● Continuing Professional Development (CPD) requirements of relevant
professional bodies.

Once finalised and approved, the implementation of this plan should be

tracked and the plan revised at regular intervals, at least once annually:

● Learning and development plans should include a variety of learning

and development methods. Usually, a blended learning approach is
recommended – a combination of the various methods to achieve a
specific learning objective. On-the-job methods may include coaching,
mentoring, secondments and job rotation. Off-the-job methods may
include classroom training, self-study, e-learning, webinars, video
streaming, smartphone apps and academic study.
● Skills matrices for a department or job family should be in place,
specifying the skills and levels of skills required for that department, and
the level of current skills. From here, an annual plan should be drawn up
to ensure the desired levels of skill are available. This would include the
job family academies that are a recent trend.
● Learning and development activities for a whole work team may be
planned as part of a productivity or organisation development
programme.
● The organisation as a whole, or specific business units, may prioritise
some specific learning and development interventions in support, for
 example, of a culture change strategy, which must be rolled out to all
employees.
● Induction/orientation programmes should be available for all new
employees so that the organisation’s expectations, policies and
procedures are clear from the outset.
● These steps should be consolidated into the draft overall learning and
development learning and development plan. At this stage, the plans
will need to be costed and the total cost compared with the allocated
budget. Any adjustments that are required will need to be made back
down to the IDP level.
● Line managers’ skills in developing people should be specifically
addressed in any learning and development plan.
● Learning and development plans should be scrutinised through
consultative structures across the organisation.

Ensure the learning and development function has the capability to be fully
compliant with legislation and in conformance to appropriate service delivery
and quality requirements.

● Organisations must obtain expert assistance in applying the skills

development legislation.
● The consolidation of individual learning and development plans and
tracking of completion.
● A learning and development quality management system should be in
place.
 ● Where formal training is designed and/or delivered in-house, the
competence of the designers and instructors/facilitators should be
defined, assessed and continuously developed. Both technical
knowledge in the subject matter and delivery skills based on adult
education principles must be assured.
● The management of outsourced training providers requires service level
agreements to be put in place and managed.
● Measurement of the impact of learning and development also requires
careful planning of the business process to collect the information
required, and the allocation of resources where necessary. Measures
involving financial information should be planned and implemented in
conjunction with the organisation’s financial department.

Define and implement knowledge management strategies and interventions to

distribute and grow knowledge within the organisation.

The processes by which knowledge supporting the organisation’s

sustainability and growth is acquired, used, renewed, transmitted and retained
may reside throughout the organisation, but it is recommended that
responsibility for engineering and documenting such processes be allocated
to a particular function, and this may be the learning and development
function.

The learning and development function can also support knowledge

management through such activities such as:
 ● Training employees in setting up and running Communities of Practice
to share knowledge.
● Training employees in coaching and mentoring skills.
● Sourcing of technology-enabled methods of sharing knowledge.
● Documenting instruction manuals in core skills.

Evaluate the impact of learning and development to assess quality, alignment

with strategy and impact on organisational capability.

● Evaluation of certain types of learning is straightforward – legislation

may set down examinations or other competency assessment
processes.
● For other types of learning and development, evaluation of the impact is
not so clear. Therefore a choice should be made at the planning stage
on how the impact of any learning and development activity will be
evaluated. This may range from the reaction of delegates on a particular
formal training course, to the measurement of learning, to the
measurement of changes in behaviour and/or performance, to business
results.
● The “line of sight” from the development activity to an individual’s
development and to the organisation’s needs should be clear (stated as
objectives) before the development activity is commenced. This will
make it possible to check after completion whether the objectives were
met.
● It is likely that some combination of quantitative and qualitative
measures will be selected to provide feedback on the impact of learning
 and development activities. These can be combined into some form of a
dashboard for monitoring on a regular basis.
● An annual review of the impact of all learning and development activities
in the organisation should be conducted by management teams against
the strategy and plan, and any possible improvements should be built
into the next planning cycle.

The creation of an employee's Talent Development Plan should be a two-way

conversation that considers an employee's goals and aspirations, and gives
supervisors the chance to make an investment in the employee's future.

Career advancement and skill development is highly important for most

individuals. If employees feel that their organisation cares about them and
provide the right path for career development then the employees' work
engagement will increase. As a result, employees' turnover and absenteeism
will automatically decrease. Developing talent is one of the best ways to
assure your organisation has the leaders it will need for a strong future and
pain-free transitions of leadership.

Culture of talent development

A culture of talent development starts at the top with senior executives. Senior
leaders can create a culture that nurtures talent development by:

● Acting as role models – leaders should share what they too want to
learn.
● Reinforcing the value of learning – ask what others see as gaps and
what they want to learn.
● Building a process to support development – managers should act as
coaches.
● Reinforcing shared values – employees need to understand why what
they do is important.
● Using issues that come up as real-world – training opportunities.

For the best results, your talent development programme needs to be agile
and include both planned and unplanned learning. Creating a culture and
having a viable plan in place for talent development will help you strengthen
your organisation now and for years to come.

Leadership Development processes are informed by the Talent Management

Strategy and form an important Talent Management Intervention.

Leadership Development is a special form of Learning and Development and

is a critical success factor to effective processes along the HR Value Chain
including Performance Management, Remuneration and Recognition
Management, Employment Relations Management and Wellness
Management.
It is crucial for leaders to have the requisite future-fit competencies as a
competitive advantage above their rivals.

Five key skills of future-fit leaders:

We need leaders who have a collaborative mindset, work comfortably in a

networked environment, cooperate with competitors, deal across cultures, and
navigate complex markets. Since employees list honest feedback as one of
the most desired skills in a leader, new protocols are being created to provide
a continuous stream of real-time and instant feedback.

New forms of mentoring include group-, reverse-, micro- and anonymous mentoring.
Team-based leadership options, such as collaborative councils and boards, facilitate
cross-team functionality. Leaders seek and consider input from all employees. Future-fit
leaders will factor in the input of various thoughts, experiences, and skills and deploy
them for fast, productive results.

Younger generations consider work an integral part of their lives. Thus, they need their
job to be fulfilling and hold the promise of advancement. On top of the open feedback
loop they want from bosses, they also want career guidance, relevant training, learning
opportunities, and to feel part of a community. A leader with a collaborative mindset
spends time building rapport and trust. Focusing on the individual will be the key to
retaining employees, as the future-fit leader forges teams that rise to the challenge of
networked leading.

The future-fit leader needs to be conversant in the technology of the newest generation
of workers. They will need to use social technologies as a means of keeping all the
outlying components of the company in a real-time, two-way information loop. Social
media tools invite transparency, inclusion, and instant communication to address
changing market situations. Beyond being digitally confident, they must seek new
means of revolutionising their company’s technical proficiency.

As companies become more global, they’re exposed to how the economic policies and
governance strategies of countries affect other nations. Leaders need to be competent
at working with foreign governments. Since their employees will be working with people
from different cultures, they’ll need to leverage the unique skills of all and create
cohesion. Our intertwined destinies call for leaders who can build companies that focus
on the triple bottom line: People, planet and profits.

Scanning the marketplace, identifying trends, and building new skill sets will ensure
long-term viability and sustainability. Competitiveness requires innovation proliferation
— creating a culture of ongoing invention, creative thinking, and multiple-horizon
thinking — the ability to rationalise the distribution of resources and effort across the
present and future to balance incremental and bold moves. Leaders who can take
collaboration to a new level in building their teams, and who can use the digital tools to
their greatest effect, will direct their companies into a dynamic future.
What is Accelerated Development?

The meaning of the word "accelerated" is that such development takes place
at a pace that is significantly higher than that of "traditional" development that
allows an individual to learn the intricacies of the current job, observe
incumbents in a higher level position (usually, one level up), practice elements
of the boss' job when being delegated tasks, undergoing formal training, or
benefiting from the knowledge accumulated by others and codified in the
knowledge management systems.

Accelerated development means, contrary to the usual, more traditional

developmental path, bypassing traditionally expected career steps, stretched
over a longer period of time learning opportunities, and/or age-related
developmental progression. Accelerated development is a necessity for
organisations of qualified individuals in the internal or external labour markets,
and significant pressures from other organisations that are ready to "poach"
talented executives and employees and offer them even higher levels of
responsibility and remuneration. Organisations also respond with accelerated
development initiatives to the individuals engaged in career entrepreneurship,
for example, those who make alternative career investments in order to enjoy
quicker returns in terms of career growth and progression.
Different people have different learning styles and development needs, and so
the development activities they experience need to differ too.

What are these external factors that can influence the rate of development,
and how can they be optimised?

Not everyone is equally capable of becoming a high-performing leader and

some people seem to benefit from development activities more than others.
As a result, some people develop faster and further than their peers. In the
face of limited development budgets, being able to identify who these people
are can be critical. The traditional way to do this is to be led by performance
ratings, but the ability to perform is not the same as the ability to develop. A
more effective way is evaluating people’s potential to develop. Interestingly,
there is evidence that just evaluating potential and giving feedback on it to
individuals can help accelerate their development.

Specifically, those who have had their potential objectively and formally
assessed, and then received feedback on this, appear to develop faster than
people who have not been through this. Why this is so is not certain, but one
obvious possibility is that it can help both firms and individuals identify what
they need to develop. People do seem to need help with this, given the
research showing that 89% of leaders have at least one blind spot – an area
where they think they are more skilled than they actually are. This being the
case, the first thing organisations should do to accelerate development is
evaluate people’s potential.

There was a time when big, generalised leadership development courses

were the development solution. This is not so much the case anymore. These
one-size-fits-all programmes are still popular and can still add value, of
course, but to really accelerate people’s growth, the development offered to
them needs to be individually tailored. Different people have different learning
styles and development needs, and so the development activities they
experience need to differ too. Practically speaking, what this means is
individual development plans that incorporate a blend of development
activities unique to each person. As a result, we are seeing an increase in the
use of development activities that allow individuals to focus on what they
personally need to, such as coaching and modularised development courses,
in which people can choose which elements to focus upon.

While there is solid evidence that different people benefit from different types
of learning activities, there is also evidence that one particular type of activity
– stretching roles, projects and experiences – can accelerate development
faster than any other.

It's clear that experiences that stretch us help accelerate our development.
Knowing the value of experience is one thing; finding ways to give it to people
is quite another. For many firms, the idea of actively managing people’s
careers and deliberately placing them in specific roles or holding so-called
‘crucible’ roles open for particular groups of high-potentials, is just not
feasible. All sorts of experiences can accelerate development, though. Role
changes are just one kind of stretching experience, and research shows that
too many role changes can actually hinder development. Other stretching
experiences can and should be used – from things as simple as someone
accompanying their manager to high-level meetings, through to leading or
taking part in special projects.

The key issue – the thing that makes an experience developmental – is the
degree of change or challenge involved. Any experience that involves this –
be it speaking at a senior forum, leading a difficult project, or moving
internationally – is likely to be accelerating. Of course, the specific
experiences people are likely to benefit from will vary between individuals, as
people differ in their development needs.
Just giving people stretch assignments is not enough to accelerate
development. It may work, but then it may not. Research shows that some
types of jobs are more developmental than others and that different types of
roles lead to different types of learning. If you want to help people develop
through experience, it needs to be the right experience. As we noted above, it
is the degree of change or challenge involved in a job or task that makes it
developmental. And obviously, people’s experiences and skills to date will
determine which future roles they find the most challenging. To help us think
about this, researchers have tried to categorise the different types of
challenges that new roles or projects can provide. One common such
categorisation distinguishes between four different types of challenges:

Another popular categorisation describes seven types of developmental

experiences: Early work experiences, first supervisory jobs, a switch from a
line job to a staff job, handling a project or a task force, starting from scratch,
fix-it/turnaround assignments, and increases in scope.

However you categorise things though, the key thing is that development will
be accelerated most if there is a careful and deliberate matching between
people’s development needs and the development experiences they are
provided.

Scaffolding is a term from educational circles and refers to the processes,

tools and other support put in place to help people extract the maximum
learning from developmental experiences and activities. The things you put in
place to make sure it has the impact you want it to. These are not just optional
extras, because scaffolding is critical in making sure that development really
happens. Some of the scaffolding methods receiving the most headlines
recently have been technology solutions, such as apps to collect real-time
feedback, track progress against development plans, and both prompt and
record development conversations. Networking opportunities are commonly
provided too, with an increasing emphasis on information-rich peer networks
rather than supportive social networks.

If you really want to accelerate the development of people, then you

need to accommodate the fact that the best recipe for driving
individuals’ development will differ between people.
Formal mentoring or professional coaching is also on the increase, as firms
look to support learning and ensure it translates into performance
improvement. With all of these, the focus is on embedding development
activities and experiences within a larger system that helps ensure that
development genuinely happens. This brings us to our next rule and the
scaffolding factor that can help accelerate development more than any other.

If you really want to accelerate someone’s development, then a good place to

start is with their manager, because research shows that it is the most
important scaffolding factor. Managers simply being involved is the first and
biggest step here, but they need to go beyond passive involvement. They
need to coach people, helping them reflect on and understand the challenges
they are facing. They also need to provide guidance and advice when it is
needed, and support and encouragement when things get tough.

Unfortunately, studies show that while over three-quarters of leaders are

confident in identifying development needs and giving people feedback, less
than a third are confident they know how to then help their people improve
and get the most from developmental activities and experiences.

Strategic thinking can be significantly improved through more educational

activities.
Growing awareness of this is why a rapidly growing number of businesses are
investing in ensuring managers are better trained to enable, drive and support
their people’s development.

Strictly speaking, this is also a type of scaffolding but is so important it

deserves its own place in the list. Research shows that the time required for
people to develop from a junior role into a mid-level manager can be reduced
by an amazing 30% on average just through organisations holding individuals
accountable for showing they have learnt and developed from experiences
and activities. Similarly, there is evidence that development can be
accelerated by organisations recognising and rewarding those who show
more development. What both approaches require is tracking whether people
have genuinely developed – and not just the so-called happy sheets of
whether they have enjoyed development activities, but visibility on actual
progress made – on whether performance has improved, or behaviour has
been changed.

One slight embellishment on this is to make individuals identified as

high-potential not just accountable for developing themselves, but also for
developing their direct reports. The idea being that through doing this,
development can be cascaded through the organisation. Again though,
visibility on progress and accountability are the driving forces.
Our final rule for accelerating development is a simple one: With all the
emphasis on learning from experience and customised coaching, do not
forget good old-fashioned training and development workshops. When
arguing against training, people often cite what is referred to as the 70:20:10
rule. The idea is that 70% of learning should come through informal,
on-the-job, experience-based learning; 20% should come through coaching,
mentoring and performance conversations; and just 10% should come
through formal learning interventions, such as training, and reading books and
articles. It needs to be remembered, however, that these figures are
essentially guesses that originally stemmed from a single piece of research
that asked senior leaders what had made them successful. It is neither a
scientific fact nor a recipe for how best to develop people.

Instead, if you really want to accelerate the development of people, then you
need to accommodate the fact that the best recipe for driving individuals’
development will differ between people. For some people, it may well be that it
is training that will drive their development the most. Different competencies
require different sorts of learning. For example, while there is evidence to
suggest that political savvy and networking are best learnt through experience
and coaching, studies also suggest that developing others is best learnt –
initially at least – through training. Likewise, strategic thinking can be
significantly improved through more educational activities.