Nurture a climate of development

People have survived and thrived all over the globe because they are naturally adept at learning and adapting to changing circumstances — in general whatever is thrown at most people, somehow they find it within themselves to cope.

Organisations need to spend more time though on becoming places where training, learning and development occurs naturally as a critical business activity and where any intervention is earned by people rather than becoming the norm.

The trick is to ensure that this happens without everybody having to be the highly driven, high potential population where "development" is an expected activity (some might say a burden) that is commensurate with the label of being tomorrow's future leader.

Everyone can develop and improve, and training is not the only route to capability development. The messages that come from an organisation's culture, and in particular their leaders, are closely linked to the organisation's strategy and its leadership and management practices, and have a great impact on the people who work there.

Momentum

Apart from that, there is a growing momentum of research-based information that proves the relationship between a constructive culture and corporate performance, organisational quality and effectiveness, customer service, excellence, employee engagement, motivation and retention.

Therefore, if development is to be an important ethos for the organisation there are a number of practices that need to be in place to support this.

People need to start thinking about both the long- and short-term as far as their capability is concerned but starting to do anything differently takes time, motivation and energy.

Organisations need to have some slack (easy to say, hard to do) so people have time to think, plan, try new things and reflect. Of course, short-term objectives and activities are vital to business performance but development is very difficult if there is insufficient time to learn because every moment is taken up with "doing".

Of course if you try anything new or give people scope, mistakes are inevitable. If you make a mistake, apologise, think about what happened and why and how to avoid making the mistake in future.

If someone else makes a mistake, you can talk with that person about what happened. By working together, without blaming, you will create cooperation and learning. Blaming will create defensiveness and mistrust and so is much less constructive.

Of course, in this region where a whole diverse range of different cultures exist, it takes a confident person to admit their vulnerability by asking for help in the first place.

However, no one is good at everything and one of the advantages of an organisation is that there are people around whose job it is to help. Asking for help is actually a sign of strength, not weakness.

A climate of development doesn't come overnight and certainly isn't easy with a range of new behaviours that will be required by the organisation, its leaders and by its employees. Yes, that makes it hard to implement but in terms of retention and engagement, it is a longer term strategy that organisations have to face up to if they truly want to keep their talented people.

Dave Millner is Consulting Director of Kenexa EMEA and Director of Kenexa HR Institute.