More Tips to Maximize People Development

Well done! If you were able to notice and apply any of the tips from the earlier blog on Tips to Maximize Employee Development.  Since you may be extremely passionate on people development, read on for few more tips from the best practices as experienced or observed in leading organizations.

12. Create a simple Individual Development Plan for all your direct reports (for normal span of 7 direct reports). Discuss what capabilities that employees desire to achieve in their career in the next 1 to 3 yrs with specific development activities beyond classroom training, seminar or conferences. Please ensure that you review progress on career development activities with each of them for 30 minutes at least once in six months.
13. P&G as an organization provides opportunities for global assignments with a specific intention of developing capabilities like cultural sensitivity, global mindset, leading multi-cultural teams. So if you want to build specific competencies, provide structured assignments to your promising employees like launching a new product, fixing a bug or quality defect which has highest impact on cost, negotiating with the toughest client instead of assignments for just getting something done.
14. Organize frequent experience sharing sessions or forums to bring out the implicit learning of your team members from handling a situation. As a practice I always ask and asked my team members on what they learnt during and after working on an assignment especially during team meetings. This was done without causing any embarrassment. It is one of the powerful ways to share practical learning quickly amongst your team.
15. Create an internal Wikipedia of key learning of team members while working on various assignments. It could be either web-based, if that facility is available within your organization, or even on shared excel sheets or any databases. This will most likely ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated and that team members do not reinvent the same work already done in the past.
16. Share your own best practices, after checking with your team, on what you do to stay current professionally. Role model the behavior of self-development to build it into a development culture.
17. Identify and connect your team members with relevant in-house high potential expert so that he or she mentors them on a specific capability like high-end designing of a product, managing virtual teams etc.
18. Sponsor a championship award for those who acquired the highest number of relevant work-related certifications and participated in maximum self-development activities. This needs to be documented and closely monitored so that team members who were unproductive at work or missing from work are not rewarded. Reward for both self development and productivity.
19. Review this list after a day and later after a week. Continue to review this till you start taking action on any or all of the above tips. Demonstrate in action your passion for developing your team members!

Good luck !