When it comes to talent development, three essential investments stand out for their impact: best practice, assessment, and experience.
Everything else pales in comparison.
Becoming more skillful and making significant improvement both depend on learning and practicing more effective behaviors and routines. Without the tools to get better, most leaders won’t make the progress they could. That’s why learning best practices is so critical to professional growth.
Assessment also plays a pivotal role in talent development.
Understanding a leader’s strengths, assets, and foibles is essential in the climb toward improvement.
Assessments, and the feedback and insights they offer, are the building blocks of awareness. As leaders learn more about themselves and how others are different, they are better able to adapt to situations and people more effectively.
As important as best practice and assessment are to improvement, it is experience that has the most oversized influence on professional growth and development.
Ask any group of seasoned and successful leaders what has changed them the most as leaders, and they will point to specific experiences that taught them critical lessons, both broad and narrow.
Experiences, both planned and unplanned, shape how leaders view the world, themselves, and their leadership. By engaging new challenges, people, and situations, leaders learn a set of guiding principles and new skills that they can carry forward as they progress in their careers.
Transformative experiences like job rotation, leading in a different culture, turning around a failing enterprise, managing through crisis, and planning major events serve to change a leader’s self-identity, stretch their capabilities, and force them to grow in unexpected ways.
Like other “crucible” experiences, they force leaders to confront uncertainty and adapt in a dynamic environment.
The best organizations consider what experiences would most propel development and work hard to facilitate or broker them for leaders at different levels. Many of the experiences a great organization will promote reside outside the enterprise and typically cost nothing but interest.
Coaching youth, serving on a community board, spearheading a charity effort, and test-piloting new technology can be added to stretch assignments, reverse mentoring, and leading cross-functional teams as experiences that often have a profound effect on leadership development.
When designed thoughtfully, an organization can create a library of experiences from which leaders can select at different points in their careers. In the best organizations, some are sponsored, others recommended, and a few are required or built into development plans.
In addition to best practice training and qualitative assessments, many organizations and teams would benefit from designing an experience library to accelerate learning and development.
Leaving the experiences a leader encounters up to chance is just too risky. A runway full of curated experiences provides the lift leaders need to reach the highest altitudes.
What experiences are in your organization’s library?
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