Development for All—Realizing the Hidden Potential in Your Business

Q&A with Tammy Sanders, Talent Development Director at V/G

Tammy Sanders has spent her professional career focusing on growth — not just her own, but that of employees at every organization she’s worked with. From UC Berkeley’s Center for Executive Education to Uber, she’s spent years learning about how organizations learn, and how they recognize and develop talent.

Research from Gallup has found 75% of the reasons people quit their jobs come down to their managers, a symptom of managers who haven’t been properly developed. But Sanders has seen a lot of organizations that don’t seem to understand just how essential talent development is to their business, or how early in an employee’s career this development needs to start in order to be effective.

So she came up with an idea: “Development for All.” What’s Development for All? We sat down with Sanders to discuss.

First of all, we know V/G is looking at talent on a more holistic level, but what exactly does that mean?

Tammy Sanders: When [V/G CEO] Wouter laid out V/G’s ethos of looking at tech talent holistically, I immediately knew how I fit in: I could take their talent development services to the next level. If a company is not structurally sound, ultimately, there are going to be people-related issues, and it doesn’t matter how many good people you bring in the door. That’s where talent development comes in — it’s one way to help your company be structurally sound.

What are the biggest problems with the way companies develop talent today?

Tammy: I see two fundamental problems: The first one is that we are so focused on the immediate. There are so many immediate demands; it’s hard to look beyond your nose. Talent development, however, takes time. It’s not an ATM withdrawal, it’s an investment.

The second problem is that, on the practitioner side, those in talent development have not done enough to reduce the amount of time needed to show impact, and we haven’t been rigorous enough in showing that impact. There’s a real urgency to tie development to business impact.

So talent development isn’t just training?

Tammy: Definitely not. Training is teaching people to do things. Talent development is not only helping people understand how to do things, it’s also helping them understand the expanse of what they could do, and growing that. It’s helping people understand that they can do more than they might even envision for themselves, and certainly more than just what’s expected.

And yet roughly half of all managers I engage with say they had little to no development before or during their first few years as managers.

Ah, is this where Development for All comes in?

Tammy: It is. I was working at the UC Berkeley Center for Executive Leadership, where a company’s leaders or directors or high-potentials get to participate in exec leadership programs. But that’s an elite experience. Your average manager doesn’t get to learn in that way.

That didn’t seem right to me, especially when your average manager is engaging with a team of direct reports day in and day out, affecting the business in a multitude of micro-moments every day. Are we really going to wait until they’re directors before we figure out how to substantially develop them? If we do that, they’ve already put their handprints all over the business with very little development.

And those managers have to come from somewhere, too.

Tammy: Exactly. Managers typically come from within the organization — they’re the high-performers. We look for individual employees who are delivering out-sized performance in their role or who have tenure on their teams, and we recognize these individuals by promoting them to manager.

But are we going to wait until we promote them before we start to substantively develop them? If we know we want to promote from within the organization, how do we then ensure development for individual employees? Are we cultivating a growth mindset in people before we promote them? That’s what Development for All is really about — anticipating growth needs throughout the employee life cycle and putting in place development initiatives for employees before they are put in manager positions.

Does the tech sector, in particular, have a problem with this kind of development?

Tammy: In tech, the prevalent notion of how to deal with people is simply, “Hire the right people and they will figure it out.” I don’t think we do enough to enable people to be successful, especially when it comes to development and professional growth.

A lot of people who start businesses don’t know what they don’t know about development — about people — and because so many tech companies are growing and moving so fast, they just don’t have time to consider people-related implications of that growth.

So, for example: You and two other people started on a team, and you’re an operationally strong high-performer, and in 6 months that team of three has become a team of 30. Someone’s going to have to manage all those people. So company leadership is likely to go to those original 3 and say, “Hey how about we make you a manager?”

V/G is a strategic talent search & development consultancy partnering with the world’s most renowned technology companies to help them find, retain and cultivate top talent in tech.