The first quarter of the year is already coming to an end, and, as a good manager, you have probably made great plans for your team to continue developing its great potential along the year. You have established their goals, diligently, one by one, ensuring all your team members have SMART objectives, and personalized development plans to help each other be successful. You have defined some specific trainings they should attend, to ensure they devote some time to their own development. You have given them motivating challenges, for them to grow on-the-job, learning by doing as much as by learning from their seniors. For your top talents, you may even have defined mentorship plans, to help them grow faster in the organization, increasing at the same time your chances to retain them as key talents in the organization. Without a doubt, you are a good manager, and you have planned all this for your team to keep growing.
Now, here is the next question: what have you planned for yourself? What is going to make you become a better manager, or a better expert, concretely, in the next coming months?
If you are like most managers, you have probably not established your own development plan, as you probably consider you don’t have time for it… well… think twice, in three steps.
- Set your own development goals
I have often noticed that, managers who reach a certain level of seniority in an organization, are considered as the ones in charge of developing the rest of the troops, but often left aside with regards to developing themselves. A striking example that I saw recently was the one of a very, very senior manager in an organization – let’s call him Peter. Peter was sometimes upset by the lack of proactivity, and lack of entrepreneurship of his direct reports, meant to be very senior as well (Managing Directors for most of them) in the organization. And so he decided that, since these MDs were not meeting his own expectations, he should craft for them some advanced training programs and build coaching plans for them…. Has Peter thought for one minute that the behavior of his team might be due to his own leadership skills? I personally doubt it… I acknowledge the good intention to adapt trainings to senior audience, but the top management should be no exception. The instant you start blaming a majority of people in your team, the responsibility is most likely yours…
So, whatever the level of the organization we are at, I believe it is fundamental for everybody – CxO, MD, Directors, VPs… – to have individual development objectives. It is often hard, when you reach a certain level in the corporate ladder, to identify further development objectives. As a CxO or an MD, one might think that time is now about developing others, concentrating on building winning teams, and further developing the potential and the talents of the people below them. Well, if that is the case, I see two short-term consequences: (1) the winning team is going to start losing very quickly, and (2) the CxO or MD will very quickly become an “old guy” easily overtaken by the people below him who continuously develop themselves. The environment today is far too fast to afford to fall asleep on your own assets, or your past track record, or your own past successes.
Therefore, the only way to remain an effective manager or expert is to set your own development goals. Indeed, if you are the expert in your field, you are most likely more knowledgeable than your manager (if you have one) in your specific area. So you are really the only one who can define what your own development goal should be. And it does not have to be just in your own field; it could be how to become a coach in the basketball team of your son, how to start playing he guitar… anything that will put you in the situation of the one learning, instead of the one giving the directions. This way, your mindset is going to switch onto “learning mode” and not only you are going to learn a lot as a person, but you are also going to be a lot more understanding and forthcoming when you are asking your direct reports to learn and grow as well. You are going to start seeing pictures from various perspectives.
- Dedicate time to your personal development and evaluate your progress
Once you have decided where you want to grow, and defined your own SMART development objectives – don’t forget the timeline… – the critical next step is to make sure you have time allocated to achieving this objective by your defined deadline. How many people start the year by thinking: I am going to start reading books about psychology;, I am going to run a marathon this year; I am going to attend all my daughter’s tennis games… and as time passes by, nothing changes, nothing happens.
You know that well for advising your teams daily: until you spend time and focus on achieving your objective, nothing is going to happen! So, apply that rule to yourself since you are no exception to it. Define not only your own personal development objective, but also define how and when you are going to achieve it. It might be in the office by raising your hand to a specific ad-hoc project, it might be in your sports team, it might be at home: a dedicated plan to achieve your own goal MUST be set.
Yes, we are all guilty. We have good and true intentions at the moment we have them, but we are swallowed by the pace of our day-to-day lives. And we drop the ball before getting to the finish line. The only way to stay at the top and to continue growing is to truly dedicate time to develop ourselves, always and forever. And the challenge is that the higher up you are in an organization, the more difficult the development objective is likely to be, and the less time you are likely to have to spend time on it… choose it or leave it, but do not just think “I am going to do it”. If you do not truly invest time in achieving your own developmental goal, you are not going to achieve that goal.
An effective way to make sure that you are actually going to dedicate that time to develop yourself is to share your goals with someone else. For 2 reasons: (1) when you share the objective with someone, you feel a lot more committed to it, as someone else would know if you fail; and (2) people around you could help you achieve your goal once they know what it is. For these two reasons, I am a firm believer in the fact that management objectives should be shared with peers and direct reports. We often set objectives with our managers, so only you and your manager know them. And as a result, only you and your manager are able to evaluate your success or failure. This is, in my opinion, an unhealthy situation. I believe that everyone in the organization should be able to know the objectives of, at least, their manager, and their peers (ie people at their level reporting to the same manager). This way, you would know how you contribute to achieving the goals of the team a lot better, which would help you to define your own developmental goals, and define your own plans to achieve them with the help of your team if appropriate. Furthermore, the managers would be committed to meeting their own goals as much as evaluating the performance of their employees. Transparency across the organization on the performance of all the employees – top to bottom – would be a win-win.
- Reverse mentoring
Another way to share your own goals is to have a third party working with you. Senior managers or talents in an organization are often assigned mentors or coaches to keep developing, as it is widely thought that, once you have attended a certain number of in-class trainings and reached a certain level, the only way to keep growing is to have someone holding your hand and analyzing your personality and behaviors on scientific colorful charts that you can stick on your desk, and remind yourself every morning what you should stop, start and continue doing. It is proven indeed, that personal coaches and mentors tremendously accelerate career growth. So having one mentor or coach might be a good way indeed to help self-reflect, ie (1) define your own development plans to help build your career or personal goals, and (2) evaluate along the way how successful you are in executing the plan, and of course, adjust the road according to the destination to be reached.
This being said, senior managers often forget to learn from the people below them who are also a wealth of recommendations to keep growing as a manager. Indeed, who else could evaluate how good of a manager you are, best than the people you are directly managing? Who else could help you bring innovative ideas better than people younger than you? To push the reverse mentoring concept even further, I do believe that the standard evaluation process (manager evaluating individuals) is flawed. In my opinion, the evaluation process should be double sided: not only the manager should evaluate the employee, but each employee should also evaluate his or her manager. That way, the manager would be evaluated for his management skills, and the employee would be evaluated for his or her performance doing the job. 360-feedbacks are good as they allow to provide a broad feedback on the person, but I see three main gaps in them: they are anonymous, hence not allowing the people receiving the feedback to discuss with the people providing the feedback and putting things back in context; the people providing feedbacks do so on overall behaviors instead of on specific objectives and situations; the people providing feedbacks are often not so concerned or committed about the feedbacks they provide – they do it as a favor to the manager asking, but often take it lightly and do it quickly without having any stake in it. A bidirectional evaluation process (manager-to-employee and employee-to-manager) would be a lot more powerful for managers.
And also, reverse mentoring is an opportunity that should be taken daily, all around the organization. By informal discussions with people who are less senior than you, or less experts. By walking to anyone and asking for feedback on a specific situation that you felt tense or difficult. By looking around and observing how other people react in various situations. Reverse mentoring should be a conscious and self-assessing effort. That way, it can only bring benefits to your own development.
To conclude, being a manager or a strong expert should never be a development dead end, or a place where anyone could think they can afford to stop growing or learning. Self-development must be defined, planned, organized at every level, for very individual. As a manager, be a role model: start by developing yourself if you want to inspire others to develop; develop yourself as a manager, but also as a person who will inspire others and will get inspiration from others to continue growing and adapting to the ever-changing environment. Never stop learning from above and below, from people who know less than you in your domain, yet who see the same picture from a different angle. You might have the best manager in the world, if you don’t spend your own time and effort to develop yourself, nobody will be able to do it on your behalf. And as a manager, you might have the best team in the world now, don’t expect it to last if you don’t invest in developing your management skills, so that you can keep your team up to a winning team. Your team is no going to grow just because each individual grow, but also because their manager grows.
In short, if you under-invest in your own development – with regards to your individual performance, or with regards to your management skills – your golden area is, for sure, going to be very ephemeral. Think about it… how many managers and great experts can you see around you who had their golden age and now are questioning why people do not recognize them anymore?…. Don’t fall in the trap… start with step 1!
The Process Excellence String of Ariadne 