You develop people — you mean like developing film? Or developing software? Or developing subdivisions?
How do you develop people? What does it mean to develop people? When we say “I’ve built a team, I’ve hired smart people and I’ve grown them” or “I’ve groomed them,” what on earth do we mean? I care about your personal and professional growth and I want to do everything I can to see you succeed. Let’s talk about where you want to be in five years. Let’s set you on a path to success and make sure you have the tools you need to grow into your role.
We say things like this. Some of us do, anyway, and while we’re saying them we often don’t realize how insufferably full of it we are.
What we’re really saying is “I get some credit for the work you’ve done because I hired you.” Or worse, “I didn’t hire you, but I do all the mindless administrative BS it takes to ensure you get a paycheck, so I want to have a bunch of conversations and write down a bunch of plans for classes to take, books to read, certifications to get, etc., so that when you do those things, I can take credit for the additional value you may or may not bring to the team.”
But when we sit down with someone and talk about where they want to be five years from now, and we’re taking them out of the work to have a conversation about work we’re going to do five years out, taking them out of their value-creation pattern to ask them questions about things they think they should do to create even more value, do we really think we’re doing anything at all? In front of me is a professional, maybe young maybe old, with maybe a lot or maybe just a little experience, and I’m asking them how they can be better at what they do. Or maybe I’m telling them the things I think they should do to be better at what they do.
And they’re going to go and get that certification, get some alphabet soup in their email signature, hang the certificate in a nice picture frame on their office wall, and we’ll have a sheet cake in the breakroom or maybe even a few beers after work to celebrate, because we want other people to see that we value those pieces of paper, those standardized exams where you show up for a pat-down and put all your stuff in a locker and sit at a computer that was built during the Clinton administration and shave about two years off the end of your life studying and cramming and stressing out about it. They’re going to go and learn a new thing and come to work the next day and…and what? What will be different? Will they be better at the work the next day? Will they have gotten better at the work while they’ve been cramming and staying up late and listening to exam prep podcasts while jogging, flipping through Quizlet flashcards while in line at the grocery store? Maybe so.
But they’ve gone and leveled up because we told them they should. Because we told them that leveling up is part of the game we’re playing. We’ve told them to go and seek this professional kitsch they can put on their wall to signify to the world that not only are they doing the work, but they’re serious about doing the work, and they took a test to prove it.
But ask anyone at the very top of their field how they got there and they’ll tell you they got there by doing the work. Every single one. Literally no one will tell you they became the best by taking tests. And where some leader in their organization had a hand in their growth, they never say “yeah, we sat down and he asked me where I wanted to be in five years, and he told me to go take this test, and then I just grew and grew and it was really life-changing.”
Instead, what people at the top talk about are the conditions that led to their growth. They don’t talk so much about “Bob was a great mentor and leader and taught me a lot about spreadsheets;” rather, they say things like “we had an environment where we were encouraged to take risks, to learn from them, to learn from each other.” They say “I wanted to make a dent in the universe, we all did, and I wanted to be more like the others on the team.” The ones at the top got there because the conditions were in place for a dent to be made in the universe, and they saw that potential and didn’t want to waste the shot. So maybe they went and read those books, took that course, learned that language or got that certification; not because they wanted a longer email signature or some piece of paper to hang on the wall, but because the work was worth doing, and the goal was worth achieving, and they needed to grow to get there. And maybe along the way a leader gave them advice on where to go, or recommended a book, or turned them on to some new body of knowledge, but that’s not what they remember. They remember why they read the book, took the test, got the certificate.
And if we, as leaders, really want our teams to grow and succeed and thrive in our respective spaces, it’s not going to happen just by sitting down once a year and writing down all the books someone should read, courses they should take, and letters they should have in their email signature. It’s going to happen by finding that work that’s worth doing in the world, finding people who care about it and want to do it with us, and creating the conditions where they can level up when the work calls for it in order to make the dent.
