What if you took charge of your own development?
What gets in the way of development?
The things I hear most often are that opportunities are scarce, the objectives aren’t that attractive or motivating, and my leader doesn’t have time for me/isn’t great at focusing on my development.
What’s it really about? Usually, it’s that we don’t know where we are headed; we prefer comfort-zone development to the gritty stuff; and real development – the stuff that really grows us – is hard. Because that’s all challenging, we can get a bit spooked about what we’ll sign ourselves up to if we say it out loud. So then we default to letting our leader to come up with the answers for our development.
While I’ve worked for some outstanding leaders in the past, their best guess at what motivating development looks like for me has never been as on target as me coming up with my own options. And when we do abdicate responsibility for our development, we often end up repeating the stuff back in the top paragraph – my objectives are a bit boring, my leader doesn’t really get what I want to focus on, they never seem to find me the right opportunities. That all seems a bit powerless to me.
So, what if you started to own your own development? What does that even mean? To me, it’s about doing the thinking ahead of time and focusing on three things:
What does your team, group or organisation need from you?
What are you really interested in learning right now?
Where are you headed? Not in a 5-year plan kind of way, but in a way that gives you a sense of growth.
They’re big questions, right? I’m a fan of thinking about them as a way of balancing your development focus so that everyone wins. Check out the three circles below. What if you tested your development focus against those circles? Getting a balance of all three helps you find the development sweet spot. Always start with the bottom two circles – that is, think about you (if you want a resource for this, here’s one I share in my What Works for Development workshops).
For a few years before I started running my own leadership practice, one thing I knew I needed to learn was how to move an initiative from concept to launch. I’d had plenty of experiences contributing to projects, but never really gone end-to-end in a deliberate way. Putting my development focus there served all three circles:
I dived into some cool projects in the organisations I worked with, learnt new things about how to contribute to project groups in a more meaningful way and the organisation got new initiatives implemented that served their aims and objectives.
I learnt ‘now skills’ – things like design thinking, relationship building, rapid prototyping. I didn’t know if they would be things I needed in the future, but I loved that I was learning these concepts and getting to try them out on real work that had real consequences.
I made progress on my personal journey. Learning these things meant that when I did start my own practice, I knew how to get an idea from concept to implementation. While I contributed to the organisation I was working for, I also got a clear sense of personal growth and progress. It also meant that, when the mahi got difficult, I got laser focused on the lessons I was learning because I knew they’d serve me well when I did start my own business. That was way more engaging than feeling like I was just working through the challenge for the organisation’s benefit.
When you do this sort of thinking ahead of the development conversation, you create a completely different dynamic with your manager. Rather than putting all the weight of expectation on them to solve your development questions, the conversation turns to how they can support you to make progress in your area of focus. Sure, there may be some refining based on organisational needs, but you turn up having already done some good hard thinking and testing of your ideas. You shift from expecting your manager to answer your development needs, to sharing the direction you want to go in.
You start taking ownership of your development.