Transforming Employee Development: A Manager’s Guide

Sara:

Education webinar Transforming Employee Development: A Manager’s Guide
hosted by HRDQ-U and presented by David Berke. Today’s webinar will last
about an hour. Now note you can submit any questions that you might have,
and you want to do that using the chat window. It’s usually in your upper
right-hand corner. But you can type in there any questions you have
throughout the presentation and then we’ll either answer those right as
they come in. If we have time for the live Q&A with David at the end or as
a follow up by email but all of your questions will be answered so please
use that space. My name is Sara Montgomery and I will moderate today’s
webinar. I am in business development for HRDQ, a publisher of
research-based training solutions that improve the performance of
individuals, teams and organizations. Our presenter today is David
Berke.

He is a principal at Lorsch, Berke & Associates. David has more than 25
years of experience as a manager, individual contributor and consultant in
the fields of management, leadership, employee and organizational
development. He is the senior faculty member at the Center for Creative
Leadership for over a decade and he has worked with global organizations
across the United States, Europe and Asia. An author and co-author of
several books on succession planning and leadership development, his most
recent publication is titled Supported Self-Development: How Managers Can
Use the Skills They Already Have to Develop Their Employees. Welcome David
and thank you so much for joining us today.

David:

Well thank you Sara and I want to thank everybody who’s come on to the
webinar and I hope you find this interesting, entertaining and useful. So
why don’t we start by looking at a picture of somebody you may know or at
least you may know his fear because a lot of people, a lot of managers in
particular, look something like this either internally or externally when
they’re thinking about having a feedback discussion. But what’s interesting
about that is that in other circumstances, feedback discussions and
everything that goes with it, are standard operating procedure and the
kinds of circumstances I’m talking about really our project status
meetings. Now if you think for a minute what happens at a project status
meeting, they go something like this: the project implementer provides the
status. The manager and the project implementer talk about that; what’s
gone well, what’s not going well.

Some feedback probably gets exchanged. They may look at different plans
to see if things need to change in some way or if things are on track. And
if you think about that, that kind of discussion is pretty much the same
kind of discussion that ought to be happening with development. As a
manager and an employee sit down and chat about how the development plan is
going but for some reason it doesn’t and I suspect one of the reasons it
doesn’t is because development is treated differently than other kinds of
projects. I think those meetings work because we’re talking about basic
project management. Basic project management is something that manager’s
know how to do. Lots of non-manager’s know how to do it and even if they
don’t know how, they understand who’s supposed to do what and they
understand what’s supposed to come of it. Development is a little murkier.
Now let me explain what I mean by basic project management.

Essentially what you’re seeing here are the four bullets that I think
every project manager does whether the project is preventing a massive
technology change in an organization or doing something a little less
massive in a department or for the organization as a whole. Managers work
with the project implementers, with the employees, to set goals, develop
plans to achieve those goals, provide the resources that are needed to do
that and then to conduct regular status meetings. And the underlying
principle to the approach that I’m going to be talking to you today is
this, if a manager knows how to do these things- these four things- than
a manager has the basic skills he or she needs to support the development
of their employees. So let me say that again. If a manager knows how to do
basic project management, a manager has the skills that he or she needs to
support the development of his or her employees. You know what that manager
might not have, might not know how to do is to apply project management to
development and what we’re going to be talking about for the rest of the
webinar is how to do just that.

So let me turn to the next slide and talk about a framework for applying
project management to development. What you see here, the development plan
in the project. The employee, the project implementer, is responsible for
planning and implementing the project and for providing status updates. The
manager is responsible for providing the necessary resources and for
managing the overall project and both are accountable for results. Now what
I mean by managing the overall project is that there are some things that
the employee- the project implementer- can’t do either because he or she
is not at the right level or doesn’t have the same kinds of connections
that the manager does and I’m talking about things like getting assignments
to different sort of taskforces, getting resources to attend a workshop,
stuff like that and so the manager is sort of looking over the whole thing
and making sure that all the pieces play together. Now let’s take this down
to a little bit more detail.

Here are the steps that I’m suggesting you would use and again, what I’m
going to do it I’m going to talk about project management and then how it
applies to development which is these bullets that you see in front of you.
The first thing that anybody does when they’re starting a project is to
figure out who’s going to do what. You translate that here to agreeing on
mutual expectations. The next thing they do is to figure out what they’re
going to work on and then define a goal. The translation to development is
to identify what people need to develop and then put together the
development goal. The next step with the project is to figure out so how
are you going to accomplish that goal and then if we’re looking at employee
development, the next step ought to be but often isn’t, designing a
development assignment because a development assignment is going to
actually tell you what you need to do to accomplish the development
goal.

The next step for [7.05] is putting together a plan and it’s the same
really for development to put together a development plan and then those
last two steps implementing and so forth and then when we come to the end,
they bring out what was accomplished during lessons learned. Those are the
same regardless so what we see here really is how you approach employee
development through the lens of project management. Now I think there are
at least two benefits to this approach; there may be more but they’re at
least two benefits to this approach. One as I’m sure many of you know,
learning happens a lot more easily when you’re building on something that
people already know and I think there’s no question but that lots of
managers know a lot about project management. They know now to do that sort
of thing. And so we’re not having to teach people new language. We’re not
having to teach people new concepts. We’re not having to teach people about
files and things like that. This is something that managers know how to do
and they do it every day.

The second benefit of this approach is that we’re really focusing on a
business process. We’re not focusing on psychological processes. There’s no
mystery that lots of managers react negatively to psychology and the
language that’s associated with psychology. So I’ve intentionally used
business processes because I want to talk the language of business to
people who are familiar with that language instead of forcing them into a
framework that they’re not comfortable with. So having said all of that,
let me show you what we’re going to focus on for the rest of the webinar
and I want to talk about the first three steps in that 6-step process that
I just described. We’re going to talk about establishing mutual
expectations, identifying what to develop in defining the goal, and then
how to design the development assignment. I’m talking about number 1 and
number 3 because I think lots of times that doesn’t happen and it ought to
happen because it makes things a lot smoother and more effective. I’m
talking about number 2- identifying what to develop and defining the goal
for two reasons.

One, it makes talking about the third bullet a whole lot easier and
because when we define what to develop and define the goal, what you do
there is critical for assessing progress along the way. So let’s get to the
first step- establishing mutual expectations. Here’s why you want to
establish mutual expectations. You know it’s not at all uncommon if you
don’t establish mutual expectations that you’re going to generate some
misunderstandings at a minimum but beyond the misunderstandings,
misunderstandings can lead to mistrust and things can begin to break down
and there’s absolutely no need to do that and so establishing mutual
expectations is pretty important and very often what we find is that when
people don’t establish mutual expectations, the misunderstandings develop
on both sides. It’s not usual for example for managers to have an
expectation of themselves and employees to have that expectation too, that
managers are going to know all the answers.

And the fact is that most managers can’t know all the answers and even
if they did know all the answers, that’s hardly the point. The point is
helping the employee learn the answers that he or she needs to learn so
that they can be more effective on the job. It’s also not unusual for both
the employee and the manager coming from different perspectives of course
that the employee become an expert overnight and the fact is that that’s
totally unrealistic. The only time you become an expert overnight is when
you’re in a movie. So on both sides, it’s really important to be clear
about what’s reasonable and what’s possible so as we look at…here are the
questions that I suggest that people think about and answer and discuss
when they’re trying to establish mutual expectations.

The manager and employee should answer individually and then come back
and then discuss what should the employee reasonably be able to expect of
the manager during the development process and then what should the manager
reasonably be able to expect as well. So in both cases I’m emphasizing the
word “reasonably” because it’s pretty easy to have unrealistic
expectations. Now what I’d like you to do for the next say 30 seconds or so
and then I’ll talk about some of the answers that’s I’ve gotten when I’ve
asked these questions but what I’d like you to do is sort of think about so
what kinds of answers do you think you would have as you try to answer
these questions whether you’re a manager or not. If you’re a manager,
you’re also an employee and if you’ve been working with managers and all of
us have, either way you can put your head into both camps and get a
perspective in both ways. So take about 30 seconds or so and just think
about so what would your answers be and then I’ll sort of talk about the
answers- some of the answers- that I’ve gotten.

Okay and so as we’re talking, I’ll just say that what’s interesting
about expectations is that it’s very easy to assume that our expectations
are the same and for reasons I’ve never quite understood, sometimes people
are very reluctant to talk about what their expectations might be but
expectations really are at the foundation of having an effective
relationship. Okay so now what I want to do is I want to turn to the next
slide and talk a little bit about some of the answers that I got. It should
come up. Here we go. So here are some of the employees’ expectations of
managers. Take a moment or two just to read through these. I’m not going to
read them to you. Take a moment or two to read through them and then I just
want to say one or two things about them. So one of the things that I
noticed about this list is that what I see when I read this list is that,
what a lot of employees want, they want the managers to manage. They’re not
looking for a teacher.

They’re looking for a manager. They’re looking for somebody who can take
care of things so that the employee actually has the time and space and
support to do the learning that he or she needs to do. And what the other
thing I see when I look at this list is I see lots of opportunities for
managers to act in ways that will help the employee to stay motivated. Now
I tend to be one of those people who think that basically motivation comes
from within. I can’t motivate you. You can’t motivate me but I also know
from experience that there are things managers do that will make it more
likely that people will get motivated and stay that way or make it more
likely that they will lose motivation and so when you look at this list,
one of the things that I see employees asking the managers is that they do
those things that will help them to stay motivated. As we go to the next
list- the managers’ expectations of employees- one of the things I see
here…oh, take a minute or two to read it. I’m moving too fast.

One of the things I see here is that they’re opportunities for the
employee. What the managers are looking for is for employees to demonstrate
that they’re seriously interested in doing the learning. In other words,
what I’m seeing here is managers saying I want somebody who is motivated,
who is on top of it, who is not waiting for me to tell them and to take
them by the hand necessarily but to be proactive and move forward. And so
in the end, what I’m seeing when I ask people these questions are really
complimentary expectations. The employees want the managers to manager and
the managers want the employees to do what effective project implementers
do which is to take charge, move forward and if they have problems, to
bring them with solutions to the manager. So at this point, what we’ve done
is we’ve chatted about…we’ve talked a little bit about what it takes to
establish expectations between the manager and the employee. We’re going to
now move to step 2 and step 2 as you may recall- there’s two elements to
it.

The first element is identifying what to develop and then the second is
writing the goal. And so we’re going to start with identifying what to
develop. Now identifying what to develop really is a process of moving from
the general to the specific and what you focus on when you’re trying to
identify what to develop is knowledge and/or skills. I know this may sound
obvious but a lot of people think that development can do all kinds of
things and fundamentally when somebody is developing something, they’re
developing one or both of those things- knowledge and/or skills. Large
organizational impact may occur but it doesn’t occur necessarily just from
a development experience, it occurs from what else you do before, during
and after. So our focus here is on knowledge and/or skills. Now to give you
an example of process of moving from the general to the specific, here’s a
general statement that I imagine you’ve heard more than once. You’ve heard
managers say this to employees- your presentations need to be better.

Now the challenge here of course is what is it about the presentations
that need to be better? And we can have a list of what you see underneath
that when we look at the specifics. There’s four bullets. Now we could have
50 bullets or 100 bullets as we sort of dig through and try to get specific
and so forth. But this is just to give you an example. The point is is that
you have the general. Then you have specific elements of that and then what
you want to do is to look through those elements until you find the ones
that seem to resonate the most with whatever the employee needs and then
dig farther in those until you find the one or two or three things that
need to be addressed. Now there are other ways of identifying these
specific elements. The most traditional way is doing a task analysis.
That’s not the way I recommend and the reason I don’t recommend it is
because it tends to take a long time and it’s pretty difficult to do and
most people tend not to do it.

But there’s some other ways that make it a lot easier and are just as
effective for what we’re trying to do here. One way is simply to brainstorm
it and the other way is to use competency lists because if you look at a
competency list…there’s competency lists for doing effective presentation
and there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to find competencies that
will resonate just as when you brainstorm you’ll be able to do the same
thing as well. Now when you’re doing this, you should always use behavioral
language. This is probably familiar to many of you but it’s something
that…it’s easy to get away from. Behavioral language identifies something
you can observe. Generally speaking that means something you can see or
hear. Now because it’s behavioral, because it’s observable, it’s not
something that’s subject to debate. We’re not talking about intentions.
We’re not talking about almost.

We’re talking about things that either happen or they don’t happen and
the reason and the way you know that they happen or don’t happen is because
either you saw it or heard it or you didn’t. Now behavioral language
enables you do to do at least two things. It enables you to focus your
development because you can be very clear about what you’re looking for. It
also enables you to observe performance and assess progress. You’re looking
at something and then you can assess how it’s going and my suggestion is is
that you basically…assessment is about answering these two questions: Do
you know it? Can you do it? Because what you’re doing is when you’re
building somebody’s skill or knowledge, essentially what you’re doing is
you’re saying I need you to know something. I need you to be able to do
something and so that’s where writing objectives and things as we’re
writing goals, these are the things that need to be there.

So here’s an example; in fact, there’s two examples of what I mean by
using- Do you know it? Can you do it? So who knows and can apply the
procedures for returning merchandise; learn and be able to apply at least
two active listening techniques during a coaching discussion. For both of
these, what you’re seeing is acquisition of knowledge and then application
of that knowledge in particular areas and you can tell whether they’ve
learned it and you can also tell whether they can do it. And if they can’t,
you should also be able to tell what needs work. Now what I’d like to do is
to spend just a second or two- say 20-30 seconds writing using behavioral
terms can sometimes be a challenge for folks. And so what I’d like you to
do is just to spend a few minutes…not a few minutes but a few seconds
really, look at this list and jot down in the chat area, the chat box which
of these things is written in behavioral terms. Now maybe none of them
are.

Maybe two or three of them are but just sort of jot down which of these
is written in behavioral language. Now I sort of feel for this. I should
have like jeopardy music in the background but I promise not to sing.
Robert says arrogance. Okay and let’s see. Somebody said good communicator.
Somebody says aggressive. Somebody says none of them. Actually lots of
people say none of them. Okay. Well let me give you the answer which is
those who said none are correct. None of these are behavioral and the way
you can tell that really is just by looking at these things and then saying
well let’s take arrogance for example. Generally speaking, when somebody’s
arrogant, if somebody tells me that so and so is arrogant then the next
question I tend to ask is okay so what are they doing that leads you to
believe that they’re arrogant. Now if I can ask that question then I know
that there’s something underneath it and the word “arrogant” really is a
container for all those behaviors that lead an individual to say that so
and so is arrogant.

Now it’s interesting that you can look at certain behaviors and somebody
will say that an individual is arrogant but another person might say oh
that person’s not arrogant. They’re aggressive and it could be the same
behaviors. And the third person can say they’re not arrogant or aggressive,
they’re confident because very often those behaviors mean different things
to different people and so what’s important is to, when you see words like
this is to ask the question so what leads you to conclude that somebody is
arrogant or wise or creative or any of those things. Then you’ll get the
behaviors underneath that and then you can begin to address specific
behaviors that you need to address in terms of skill or knowledge
development. Okay so we have talked about what it takes to identify what
needs to be developed. Now the next step really is to look at writing the
development goal and what I’ve done here is most of us know about SMART
goals.

Most managers I know, know what a SMART goal is and even if they don’t
know what a SMART goal is, when you talk about what’s involved with a SMART
goal, they go oh okay. I know what that is. So because SMART goals are used
by so many people, it seemed to me to make lots of sense to use SMART goals
as the basis for writing a development goal. But I add one more element and
that is an “s” at the end for skill or knowledge level. But before I get
there, let me just go through these quickly because everybody…it’s not
unusual to have different definitions for some of these things so I want to
make sure we’re on track. “S” stands for specific and behavioral. What I
mean by specific is behavioral. Something you can observe. Something that
you can see or hear. Measurable- I add assessable and then the knowing and
doing because very often, you can’t use a numerical measure to tell whether
somebody has accomplished something but that doesn’t mean you can’t measure
or assess whether they can do it.

You can measure or assess it by observing them and so measure is not
just numbers. It fundamentally it’s whether you know it and/or can do it.
“A” is for achievable but I’m saying it should be achievable and
challenging. It’s really easy to write a goal that’s achievable but that
doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a meaningful goal in any way. Relevant-
when we’re talking about development, relevant needs to be…what people are
learning needs to be relevant to their job. That may seem obvious but very
often as you probably know with adults and adult learning is that adults
learn best when they’re learning something that they have to know to be
successful on the job. If they’re learning something that’s a nice to know
than there’s always a question of how relevant this is. And that’s one of
the reasons why compliance training often runs into some challenges is
because people say oh, I may run into that in the next 10 years or I may
not.

So relevant- it needs to be something that people are paying attention
to. Tying down just means you don’t have all the time in the world to do
this and then as I mentioned before, skill or knowledge level. Yes- so we
go from SMART to SMARTS and here’s why skill or knowledge level is
important. As you can see from this brief conversation here, the question
is, do you want the individual to become an expert or not? And the fact is
is that that’s a question that often doesn’t get discussed but it has
tremendous impact on the amount of time somebody spends learning and the
amount of resources that are put against that learning. If you want
somebody to become an expert, it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of
resources- primarily money but it also takes the individual away from
whatever else they’re doing. If you want somebody to just know about
something or be able to find it online or elsewhere, that takes a whole lot
less time and a whole lot less money.

So there isn’t a right or wrong here but it’s really important to have a
good idea of the level of expertise you want to accomplish so that that
way, you can judge accordingly. Now it may be that the employee gets
exposed to something and they want to become more of an expert than you
need. In that case, that’s terrific but the question is what will the
organization support and that’s a question that needs to be addressed in a
straightforward way. Now here’s an example of a SMARTS goal. What we have
here is identifying these two questions and their answers for each major
point in the next presentation and that next presentation could occur in
two weeks or three weeks but for the next presentation. Deliver the answers
with confidence that is by demonstrating knowledge and control of the
material by looking at the audience and no hemming or hawing okay so what
we have here is it’s specific.

Its observable and the one area where we have this vague word
“confidence” we have a definition of confidence. You’re looking at the
audience. You demonstrate because you know the material and you look right
at them and you give them the answers in a straightforward way without a
lot of um, hms, and things like that. Okay here’s one more question and I
think we’re going to do a poll for this which means Sara’s going to come
back and what I want you to do is to think about and give me the answers
for what usually is the next step. Do you prepare a plan? Or do you
determine how to accomplish and then prepare the plan? Or do you send the
employee to HR and let them figure it out? And I see the poll is now
open.

Sara:

Yes we’ve got some good participation here. So you’ll click on one of
those radial buttons and you’ll only be able to choose one answer of the
three. Okay we’ll give it another couple of seconds. It looks like people
are switching answers around here pretty quickly.

David:

That’s good.

Sara:

It is good.

David:

People know the right answer. It’s incredible.

Sara:

That’s right. I think they do. Okay it looks like we have the majority
of you in here so I’m going to go ahead and share the results.

David:

Okay.

Sara:

Wow.

David:

Well, this is encouraging. My experience has been is that most people
just prepare the plan and they don’t necessarily think about how to
accomplish the goal before they prepare the plan but in this case, it looks
like a number of you, a majority of you see that you should figure out how
you’re going to do it first and then prepare the plan. And almost nobody is
just sending people to HR to figure it out so that’s a good sign all by
itself because HR won’t necessarily be able to help with that. So that is
the right answer. Determining how to accomplish the goal and then prepare
the plan and here’s the reason why. The development assignment really is
what you need to do to achieve the goal and the development plan is how the
assignment will be implemented. Now development plan is pretty important
because development plan is how you schedule events so that you can
accomplish.

The development assignment is where you put milestones in. All the other
things that are in. You identify resources and things like that so they’re
very important. But to do all those things effectively you need to know
what it is you’re trying to implement and so that’s why I’m suggesting that
we do the development assignment first and then do the plan for how to
implement that. So this is step 3 in the process that we’re talking about.
So here’s my definition of a development assignment. Basically, it’s the
activities and experiences that when you put them all together enabling an
individual to accomplish their development goal. Now again, what we’re
going to do here is to build on SMART and again, the reason we’re doing
this is because with the SMART goal, people know what SMART is so basically
they know the first five letters of this thing. So you don’t have to
retrain people on what that means. We added S- for skill level and now we
add two others.

So E- for engagement and ST- for support structure. Now what
engagement is about is having the employee do some things that they will
find interesting because if they’re not interested in whatever the
development activity is, then there’s a good chance that they’re not going
to do it and the development activity is going to fail. And that serves no
one so we want to think about and often this means you got to either ask
the employee or you know the employee well enough so that you can figure
out things that the employee will find challenging or interesting or
something that really engage them. The other thing to pay attention to
here, the other thing we’re adding is an ST- support structure and when
I’m talking about support structure I’m talking about different things you
can do that will help the employee to know how he or she is progressing
because it’s not always easy to get direct feedback. Somebody may not be
available. They may not be very good at giving feedback. But whatever it
is, there are things the employee can do to help themselves figure out how
to do it.

For example, a simple thing to do is to have a procedure. If you have a
procedure or checklist that tells you how to do something, that can serve
as a check for them to see whether they’re doing everything they’re
supposed to be doing. Getting feedback from a subject matter expert is
something that they may be able to arrange. One of the things I like to do
for myself is actually I construct tests. I sort of say here’s what I think
I ought to be able to do. When I’m doing this I sort of write it down and
then I sort of see how I’m doing against that. Another thing to do which
we’ll talk about in a minute is recording. You know if you’re doing a
presentation and so forth, you can record that and you can take a look at
it and so forth. So there are a number of things that people can do that
will help them to know whether they’re succeeding, what they’re progress
is. So we look here and basically so we’re going from SMART to SMARTS to
SMARTESST.

I’ve sort of rearranged the letters slightly so that we can continue to
have an acronym that makes sense and here’s how it spells out. You know you
have everything and then at the end you’ve got engagement, skill level, and
structure okay- SMARTESST. Now here’s an example of how you might see
that. I’m not going to read all of these to you. I’m sure you can read them
yourselves but I just want to address two or three of these things. You
have the goal. You’ve seen this development goal before. The specific
development activity and there could be several that the individual could
engage in. The one that we’re talking about here is conducting a dry run,
you know, a practice presentation and then recording the presentation. The
assessment here- how are we going to know as we follow through with SMART,
how do we know how it went? Well you review the recording alone you also
can review the recording with other people so that you can get a sense from
other people how it went.

You could also arrange to get feedback from people who sat in on the
presentation. Now when you do that though, it’s very important to be
specific with those individuals who are giving feedback to let them know
what you want feedback on because if you’re just very vague and general and
say can you give me some feedback on this presentation when I’m done with
it, they may give you feedback that has nothing to do with what you want to
know or they may not be able to give you anything at all because they don’t
know what to look for. So help them out by telling them what you want. Okay
so when we look here at engagement, which is one of the things we’ve added,
the employee likes challenges and this is an area where she hasn’t done
well in the past so again, you know the employee. The employee knows
themselves well enough to know that they like challenges and they get
motivated by things like getting better at stuff and then when we look at
structure, what we have here is reviewing the recording and getting
feedback and so forth. And again, this tells the employee how they’re
doing.

Okay so these are things that are particularly easy to do but they’re
also things that everybody should…it’s not hard to do but you just have to
pay attention to this so you can get it done. Now, we’ve talked about
development assignment and I’m giving you the criteria for development
assignment but the question is so- how do you figure out what should go
into a development assignment? What are those things? And my suggestion is
that what you do is answer this question- what do I need to know or be
able to do to accomplish the development goal? So in the case of being
confident when you’re doing presentations so the question is so what are
the kinds of experiences I need to have for myself? And some of the answers
that you come up with when that’s the goal is you need to find a way to
identify potentially difficult questions and you need to be able to find
the answers to that. You need to be able to communicate when you’re
standing in front of people, be confident.

We defined what that looks like physically and then you practice that
and so forth. So you have some research that’s done. You probably have some
book learning that’s done. Maybe you go to a workshop on how to do
presentations. You also do some practice runs. So there’s a number of
things that go into the different kinds of experiences that make up the
development assignment. 70/20/10 is something that comes from research that
was done by the Center for Creative Leadership. I guess it was a few years
ago now but basically what they say is that 70% of learning comes from
different kinds of assignments; 20% comes from other people, in other words
behavior modeling, questions, discussions, things like that; and that only
10% of learning comes from classes or workshops.

And so I put this up here because as you’re thinking about the different
kinds of development activities that somebody could do as part of an
overall development assignment, it’s really easy to just focus on classes
and workshops. In fact, for those of you who generally just go directly
from development goals to planning, the only way that works is when you
already know what you’re going to do in advance and typically in that case,
what you do is you send people to a workshop. There’s nothing wrong with
workshops. Noting wrong at all but workshops are generally good for
introducing people to concepts and knowledge, maybe getting a little bit of
practice but you don’t get much farther than that. In fact, you don’t even
remember most of what you heard or saw if you don’t have an opportunity to
practice. And so that comes from assignments and different taskforce
assignments.

Maybe you’re giving a special assignment as part of your job but
whatever it is, that’s where you really nail down your knowledge and you
get better at something. Okay so we have talked about the first three steps
in that process. There are three more steps to go. We’re not going to be
talking about those today but I just have a brief description of what those
three remaining steps are. As I mentioned before, when I’ve talked about
the planning, with the planning you know the goal and what you need to do
but then you sort of break it down, figure out what steps you need to do.
You write milestones and by the way when you do the milestones, milestones
should be in terms of observable behavior. You figure out who’s going to do
what. You figure out the resources that are needed and so forth. An
important thing here is that often managers seem a little bit slow because
they don’t quite know.

If they don’t have experience with somebody learning something, they may
not know what to do but the truth is there’s almost always somebody else in
your organization whose learning what the employee needs to learn and so it
makes a whole lot of sense to have the employee go talk to those people who
had to learn what this employee is now having to learn and the employee can
get a whole lot of information about what it takes to learn it, how long it
takes to learn it and probably help on figuring out what the planning
process should be, what the milestones should be and so that’s something
that a manager ought to be able to assign to the employee or if the
employee’s not quite sure, maybe they can do some of these things together
but all this stuff is doable and it needs to be in terms of observable
behavior.

When we come to who conducts the status meetings and so forth, a
question that I sometimes get is- can you depend on the employee to
actually provide honest status reports on how they’re doing? And I guess my
response in general is often if you can depend on them to provide honest
and accurate status reports when they’re implementing any other project,
there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do that with this. The
trick…one of the reasons they can do that with every other project is
because the manager knows what the goal is and the manager knows what the
milestones are. That will work with development as long as the manager and
the employee know and agree on these things as well and if they’re
behavioral, which is to say if they’re observable. Finally, when we look at
the conclusion, when you’ve reached the end of things and you reach the end
of the project, you assess outcomes, figure out lessons learned and do next
steps.

It’s the same with any project so before I go to…we’ll do the summing up
and then I’ll say one or two other things. One is that the basic notion
here, the basic notion behind this, underlying this approach to development
is that if you have the skills to run a project, you have the skills to
support the development of your employees and the reason for that is that
basically, you’re doing the same thing it’s just a slightly different
application. Number 2- employees and managers have complimentary
expectations of each other. So it’s important to identify what those
expectations are because then everything will flow a lot more smoothly and
at the same time, recognize that what employees are looking for is managers
who are willing to manage and what managers are looking for are employees
who are willing to demonstrate through their actions that they really want
to learn what it is they’re setting out to learn. Use behavioral language
to target development and facilitate assessment.

We’ve talked a lot about that and to assess you simply ask and answer
these two questions: Do you know it? Can you do it? Both the development
goal and development assignment are built on SMART goals or at least on the
SMART formula and the reason for that is because that means that a manager
doesn’t need to learn a whole lot more to carry these out. So with SMART,
what we’re doing is we’re adding one thing. We’re adding skill level and
with SMARTESST we’re adding two more things. We’re adding engagement so
that the person will be interested in what they’re doing and we’re also
adding support structure so that the individual can know how they’re doing.
One last thing which is that development is a project.

There are lots of different kinds of projects that happen in
organizations and as I’ve talked to managers over the years, one of the
things that I found is that whenever you talk about development, it seems
like it’s something totally unique and different from everything else and
the truth is it’s not and as long as we allow managers to act and believe
that development is unique unto itself, then managers don’t necessarily
view development as something that they can do because it’s so unique and
so different. If a manager has the basic skills to run a project, that
manager has the skills to support the development of their employees. And I
think that’s it. So let me turn this back over to Sara.

Sara:

Wonderful. Thank you so much David. We do have some time here for some
questions so go ahead and send those in and whilst we’re collecting those
questions, I just want to share with people how to get in touch with David.
So you can reach him by email- David@supportedselfdevelopment.com. Check
out his book. There’s a link there and there will be a link in your email
as well. So be sure to check that out and reach out to him as well. And
keep in touch with HRDQ. Our next webinar is coming up in two weeks and you
can register for that at HRDQU.com and shop at our store.

That’s HRDQstore.com as well as keep in touch with us for various news
articles and pieces here through offers of social media. So why don’t we
dive right into it. I do have questions that are coming in so continue to
send us those questions but we’ll get started here. David our first
question here is from Michelle and she’s asking about coaching. Where do
you see kind of coaching fitting into this? She sort of mentions that she’s
maybe a little surprised that you hadn’t talked a lot about coaching and so
maybe you can respond a little bit to the coaching element to this.

David:

Okay well, basically this is very similar to coaching. I’m purposely not
using the term coaching because well for two reasons actually. One is
because the word “coaching” seems to evoke some negative reactions from
lots of managers I’ve dealt with and because coaching itself is so ill
defined. It can mean very different things to different people and so
there’s a role for professional coaches that is to stay probably a number
of people who’ve attended this webinar but being a professional coach and
being a manager who coaches is two different things. And so my aim here is
to really try to have people help managers to develop their employees in a
way that will really work and where language doesn’t get in the way and so
if a manager does the things we talked about today; I mean you call it
coaching or you could call it development; it doesn’t really matter. What
does matter is that we don’t put barriers between the manager and the
process of helping their employees to get more effective at what they’re
doing.

Sara:

Great. We have some questions around personality and how either the
manager you work with, different personalities. Kathleen specifically asks
– How do personalities play into the employee expectation?

David:

Well obviously some people expect everything and some people are a
little bit more reasonable. My suggestion is that if you…one of the
reasons that I’m using project management as the frame for this is because
when you’re managing a project, employees get pretty clear about what the
expectations should be and what they can ask for and reasonably expect to
get and so in that context, managers are pretty clear about what they can
ask for and expect from their employees so putting that frame on it as
opposed to say the traditional development frame which seems to remind
people of school. It seems to remind people of being in high school or
college and all kinds of dependencies stuff is sort of under the surface
when you have that kind of frame attached to development and so my aim here
is to eliminate that kind of thing by saying hey look. This is a project. I
expect you to do certain things. You expect me to help you in certain ways
so let’s work that out but beyond that, if you get too involved in
personalities and it’s really difficult then to pull back to talking about
observable objectives and so forth. So my recommendation is I mean I
understand that they’re there and I understand that it’s useful to know
what the limitations are of people in terms of their desires and
expectations. But beyond that, there’s certain things that in a work
setting that you should be able to expect the employee to do and that the
employee should be able to expect the manager to do and I would sort of
stick to that using a project frame as opposed to a strictly development
frame.

Sara:

And then as a follow-up question to that David, how do you work with the
reality that sometimes employees, do they always or maybe sometimes provide
accurate information on how their development is progressing?

David:

Well, I chatted a little bit about this in the webinar and this depends
really…I mean this is something that the manager and the employee together
need to work out. If you look at projects and you look at how people tell
whether projects are on track or not, it’s because people know and it’s
because the manager knows and the employee knows what the milestones are
and the employee knows that the manager knows what those milestones are and
so because of that, it’s mainly a question of them saying if the employee
says well I’ve reached milestone such and such, then it’s simply a matter
of the manager saying okay so milestone such and such means that you know X
and you can do Y.

So I want to see you do that. Let’s observe it and at that point, it
becomes and this is no different by the way. This is just a translation of
what happens on a project if somebody says well we’ve accomplished 60% of
this and here are the indicators that prove that we’ve done that. So this
is just a way of translating that into you say you can do this. Great.
Let’s see you do it. And so if there’s any fudging, it only happens once.
This means of course that the managers got to be willing to do that but if
you do it once, you really only have to do it once.

Sara:

And so we have several questions coming in now around the unmotivated
employee, that unmotivated person and so I would think your response there
would apply to an unmotivated person as well. Is there anything around that
unmotivated employee situation that you would add to that?

David:

Well, when I first put this together the unmotivated employee, people
kept asking me so what do you do with that person? And I think that the
unmotivated employee is really, it may be that they don’t want to develop
then either there’s really not a whole lot you can do to get them to
develop and then that becomes a matter really of a performance management
process and if that’s where it goes, then that’s where it has to go but
this whole approach is based on the idea that people are willing and
interested in developing and my own experience is that most people start
out wanting to develop and to get better. For those people who for whatever
reason don’t anymore, I realize this can be challenging so I’m not being a
pollyanna about this but at some point you have to have the discussion and
you have to ask because the truth is if they’re not willing to learn,
things are changing pretty fast and if they don’t keep up then they really
do fall behind in all kinds of ways.

Sara:

Absolutely. Wonderful. Thank you so much David. We really appreciate you
sharing your expertise and your time with us today.

David:

You’re welcome.

Sara:

It looks like we are out of questions at this time but feel free to send
in any additional questions you have. I do have some very unique, specific
ones to certain managers here and we’re going to reach out to you directly
to dive a little bit more into your situation. So feel free. Send us any
additional questions. We will be sending out questions with answers in
writing so you have those from David and that will go out in an email early
next week and we do really appreciate your time and hope that you really
found today’s session informative.

End of session