Episode #461: Under Used People Development Techniques

Developing people should be a committed constant of leadership. That is not always the case though. Often the leader is actually still the manager and hasn’t made that important transition to be a master of leverage. We can work 80 hours a week and blow ourselves up or we can have ten people working their 8 hours every day, achieving the same level of output in a single day. The manager’s job is to make sure that those ten people are in the right positions, doing the right things and producing the right results. In addition, the leaders’s job is to set the direction for the team, create the environment where the team can motivate themselves to flourish and assist in the personal growth of the team members. This last consideration is often abdicated by managers and imagined that this is the responsibility of the HR Department. That would be a huge mistake in Japan.

HR managers are often on a rotation in Japan, where their previous job was heavy machinery export manager and their next job will be head of audit. In other words, they are not HR professionals. In big companies in Japan, HR can be the internal police department, making sure all the proper forms are filed out, that the leave records are correct and that the next years job rotations have been sorted out in advance, etc. Leaders need to guide HR to set the direction for the development of the team. This can involve external training and budgets are set for this and HR’s job is to go and source the provider.

The leader however has many options apart from this route to help develop their people. Mentoring people is an obvious one. Often we are mentoring people not under our direct accountability and it works well, because there is a high level of objectivity on both sides. As their boss, we can be too close to the situation and an outside mentor may be better placed to be an objective observer and be able to speak more freely with the staff member than we can. This builds the trust and corrective feedback is sometimes more palatable coming from someone perceived as a neutral person, who is not assessing your performance. Is there a mentor system in place in your company and if it is, is it working and how would you measure the outcomes? This last point is the rub. If we have a mentor scheme and no way of measuring its success, why are we doing it in the first place?

Job rotation within the firm is a given in Japan and over time everyone becomes a generalist within the organisation. Lateral transfers, temporary duty assignments and acting assignments are also valuable alternatives. The people stay on your budget line, but they are sent off to work with another division to gain experience and to assist in the coordination between departments. Usually the people connections are the secret to getting things done across departments within the firm and this is a brilliant way to build those connections.

Cross training is a very good idea to reduce concentration risk. If there is a key person for a task and that person becomes ill or leaves the firm then there is a massive hole, because everyone else has become so specialised in their own roles. This is particularly pronounced in smaller companies. Take a quick look at the team. If so and so suddenly left, what would happen to the business? If the answer is “it would be a disaster”, then it is time to get started on cross training people within the organisation. Having key roles cross trained is a good insurance against future disruptions to the business. Is this something which is part of the weave of your organisation, something built into the fabric of how you operate? I would guess that these opportunities are not as widespread as they should be. We only discover the value of cross training when a key person disappears and we have no one around with the required expertise to do the job and to do the job right now.

That happened to me by accident. My head of administration quit the company. She knew the systems, did the book keeping entry work and made sure all of the inside logistics of the business functioned very smoothly. Uh oh. Without any intelligence or pre-planning, it happened that a part-time person had been working under the administration head and knew most of the key functions of the role. He was able to keep us going until we made a new hire. It worked out, but that result had nothing to do with me and my “genius” leadership and had a big sprinkling of luck. I realised this was a close call and an important issue which I needed to plan for in the future.

Special projects, task force and committee assignments are a good ground for growing skills. There is a leadership and coordination aspect which allows team members to experience first hand, all the headaches associated with being the leader. It is easy to whine about the boss, until you find yourself in that role and all of the concomitant pressure and responsibility hits you. This is where you discover the areas where you lack the necessary skills to be given higher responsibilities and it gives you the focus to know what to work on, if you want to rise in the ranks. Giving project management opportunities is reasonably common and your firm may be doing this already. However, is it a series of stopgap measures or part of a strategic plan to fully develop your leadership bench strength?

Becoming the assistant to the leader or to senior people in the organisation is a huge learning opportunity. At this level, you begin to see the organisation as a whole and are exposed to all the complexities of running a modern business enterprise. It also gives deeper exposure to different leadership styles, as you see the good, the bad and the ugly of how senior leaders lead. One of the problems for leaders is we all tend to get very busy and are focused on our own work and we forget that these tools exist and we should be making greater use of them.

At a lower level, someone being groomed to step into a middle management leadership position can take on the role of the understudy to the boss. Instead of the boss quickly rotating out of the division and going somewhere else, the understudy has the chance to shadow the boss and be privy to how to run the section. This takes a degree of coordination and planning and often both are lacking and the handover between leaders is minimal. This well organised succession plan is something which is extremely logical. We all salute the idea but few companies actually are well organised enough to pull it off. How about your firm’s case?

When we review the various tools, we quickly realise there are a number of development opportunities available, which we are not making the most of and are missing some possibilities for our team members. This is natural when you have your head down, are surging from one meeting to the next and generally are run off your feet. Take a moment and reflect on whether some of these tool might be useful to employ in getting the maximum leadership leverage feasible, by developing your people to the highest levels possible. These ideas may seem like more work at first but we quickly realise we can organise most of them without that much difficulty.

We may think these ideas are too obvious and nothing new. That is too true but are we doing these things? Knowing, agreeing and executing are not the same thing. So what are you doing and are you doing enough with what you have?