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STEP 1: Find and Use Organizational Support for Creating a Process, Not an Event

Finding support for creating a process of development involves helping the organization understand and thus commit to a program of development that acknowledges the reality of how adults learn, grow, and change over time. Adults learn what they need to know. This means that a program of development must be tied to business need and the day-to-day work of the organization. The HR professional must find support for building a program of development around these two basic requirements. As the following discussion illustrates, this is not as easy as it sounds.

Executive development programs abound in business and government today. The establishment of a program is often triggered by some untoward organization event: Attitude survey results show that the troops are unhappy with development opportunities; the “good” people are leaving; when an opening comes up, there is nobody in the pipeline, so you have to go outside; there is a high failure rate among high-potentials; perhaps the direction of the business is changing and executives are needed who have a “new skill set”; or maybe there is simply an amorphous wish to “do something for our people.”

Whatever the catalyst, when the HR professional receives the call to design a development program, the client organization often has a preconceived idea of what it wants: “Give us a training program that will solve these problems.” This is a seductive invitation—most HR professionals can design a training class that will hold people’s attention, receive high ratings, and not interfere too much with business as usual. Unfortunately, it is not likely that any single class will cause much change in the behavior of the participants.

Training programs may deliver content knowledge. They may increase self-awareness. They may unfreeze attitudes. They may model or describe a particular process or point of view. They may provide a wonderful opportunity to meet colleagues in the field. But the training program is, by itself, unlikely to provide much that is significant enough to be cited by executives as critically important in their growth or as having had much impact on business results (McCall, Lombardo, & Morrison, 1988).

A central theme of CCL research, replicated time and again, is that development takes place on the job far more often than in the classroom. And although development happens whether we plan it or not, the good news from our research is that we can increase the odds that it will happen more quickly and in the needed directions.

To design an integrative process rather than a singular event, job experiences must be built into the development program. We offer this, however, in the face of the fact that a training program is often the “tool of choice” for a number of attractive reasons: It can be handed over to the training department; it requires little disruption of the ebb and flow of daily work; it doesn’t take much of the manager’s or the executive’s time; and it doesn’t demand that either of them do much that they are not already well-equipped to do. We believe, however, that doing development planning properly means that it is necessary to integrate experience into the development program.

Where does the energy to support designing a process come from? First, it comes from tapping into the natural flow that drives the business toward results. Our key principle here is this: You, as an HR professional, can never overestimate how much the business manager is focused on getting results. Tie development into that central purpose and the demands for sound development programs will exceed your expectations. Our experiences have identified a number of approaches that work.

Seek a Developmentally Friendly Manager as Your Partner

Effective development programs are interventions, not events, so even though a program may in your mind be tied to results of unquestionable value, starting with a developmentally friendly manager makes your task easier. It will allow for building a pilot program, demonstrating success to the rest of the organization, and breaking free of the short-term, one-shot training model. Developmentally friendly managers come in all shapes and sizes, ages, and functions, and usually they are well-known within the organization: High-potentials want to work with them; they export top-notch people to other areas; they believe that people produce results. For example:

One HR professional told us that he was fortunate enough to be able to introduce and pilot his program with the CEO and the CEO’s direct reports. To demonstrate his support for development, the CEO wrote up his reflections about the experience in the company newsletter, even outlining his own developmental goals and presenting his strategies for working on these goals. He modeled for the organization that learning is a valued and even requisite activity for successful people in the organization.

Another HR professional piloted her program within HR. Because the director of HR believed that development was critical to the organization, he was supportive of the initiative within his group. The members of the group not only personally benefited from the intervention, but they had the skills to give the program designer some useful feedback about the program itself before it was exposed to a larger and more critical part of the organization.

Educate Key Decision-makers

Another tactic to sell the program internally is to employ what has come to be known in our Tools program as the “key-events questions.” Senior decision-makers in the organization are asked to respond to the following questions:

When you think about your career, certain events or episodes probably stand out in your mind—things that led to a lasting change in you as a manager. Please identify a key event in your career, something that made a difference in the way you manage now. What happened? What did you learn from it? What were the challenges of the experience? How did you learn what you learned? What was going on in the environment that allowed you to learn?

As the group shares its answers, the facilitator takes the opportunity to point out that just as these executives have experienced major learning from the events of their careers, it is also possible to incorporate that understanding into a program of development that makes experience intentional and purposeful, fully integrated with the work of the organization. A part of CCL’s initial research on how executives develop (McCall et al., 1988), these questions have remarkable impact. Almost all managers enjoy reviewing their personal key events. They are eager to talk to others about them, and they quickly see how important job experiences have been to their own development.

They will discover, like our research samples, the kinds of key experiences that truly develop. They will also find that their organizations are doing remarkably little to assure that executives have the opportunity to experience these key events for themselves. Their stories illustrate that development occurs within a variety of experiences, including challenging job assignments and work tasks, working with especially competent (or incompetent) other people, in targeted coursework, and even during hardships (McCall et al., 1988; McCauley, Ruderman, Ohlott, & Morrow, 1994; Wick & Leon, 1993).

As the HR professional, you can use the following exercise as illustration and example of how it is possible to structure and prescribe developmental activities; to move from the serendipitous to the intentional.

Here is how one company used the key-events questions to get the attention of its senior management:

Because the president of the company was vaguely interested in establishing some sort of system of succession, the HR development specialist was able to get on the agenda of the quarterly meeting of the president and division heads for a two-hour presentation. Interestingly and coincidentally, each of the divisions was facing a very different set of business challenges. One was in retrenchment; one was in a growth mode introducing some exciting new products; and another was recovering from a downsizing experience two years past. In other words, each division required a different set of managerial and leadership skills and, therefore, provided individuals with the opportunity to learn and use those skills.

There was no history of individuals moving across divisions. The HR specialist used the key-events exercise to get this fairly gruff and reticent group to talk about their own careers and how they had learned. He introduced the notion of intentional learning from experience, using the divisions as the classrooms, each with a different set of lessons to be learned. The exercise “took,” and the HR specialist was asked to spend the remainder of the day with the group to discuss ways that such a system could be implemented. Because the key-events exercise reflected their own experience and the developmental strategy was integral to the business problems the group was facing, this group of managers decided that a program of development built on the experiences of the workplace was reasonable, practical, and desirable.