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Skill Up: Developing People

Hi, I’m Melanie Parish. I’m an author, a master certified coach, and a podcast host, and I’m excited to be with you today.

Hi, I’m Mel Rutherford. I’m McMaster University’s first transgender department chair, and I’m the co-host of the Experimental Leader Podcast.

Well, this episode is going to be our leadership skill up episode, and I just.. we were, we were talking, and we realized there’s opportunities for leaders to upscale their leadership, like what can they do to improve fairly rapidly in one area, and so it’s almost like a little leadership challenge for this month, and what I wanted to talk about, what I wanted us to talk about is how we think about developing employees over time, so the people that work for us come to us with some set of skills, and we pick them, like if we’re hiring them or somebody picks them to be on our team, and there they are, and then I think sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking they are the way they are, we don’t think of ourselves that way, we think of ourselves as like growing human beings who evolve, and we forget to think about the people that work for us in that same context. So, so this week, this month, I really want us to- I want you to think about how you can see the people that work for you as a resource you can develop that can change.

So what value will this shift in mindset bring?

Well, I think it does a few things. I mean, I think you’re able to fill gaps in your organization by skilling up people to fill them, rather than needing to get more budget for somebody else to fill in all the gaps. I think also sometimes when people stay in an organization, they forget to develop themselves, so I remember one time having somebody who worked for me, and I said, “You know, I want you to grow while you’re here, I’m going to want you to read books, or you know, take courses, or learn, and this person actually said to me, “I’m never going to do that, Melanie, and I was like, “Wow, you’re going to be really obsolete in about five years, because you will be five years behind the business in the marketplace, and so I think that having a culture of developing number one, I think it feels really good to the people that work for us to say here’s what I see for you, here’s how we could chart a path to help you get there, and here’s the resources I can free up, so I could pay for a training here, or here’s some books I’d like to read. Can we discuss them? There’s there’s a variety of different paths, and it kind of depends on if they’re technical or not technical, where the dollars might go.

This sounds like a long-term ongoing project. What’s the most impactful place to start?

I don’t know, and you might have some ideas about this too. I think I think you’re mostly looking for their next milestone, like you’re not looking 20 years down the road. I mean, I think this fits well in a performance eval sort of cycle, like to remind yourself to look here when you do a performance eval. So, if you do annual performance evals, what do you want to have happen in the next year? It’s just a good question to ask yourself as a leader, and if you do twice a year, you may want a six month time frame, like if your performance evals, I think it fits well in a performance eval cycle. If you never do performance evals, I’d say annually you should at least put this hat on and. To have a dialog with people, I think you have to be careful not to tie it to some sort of triggering event that requires a raise, like it needs to be a part of conversation regularly, so it’s not like, oh, if I do this, I’m going to get paid more, because some organizations have that budget and some don’t. What do you, what do you think?

I was thinking that the idea of the specific idea of what this employee’s next step is, is probably going to come up collaboratively. 

I agree.

Have some ideas, but probably the, you know, the employee has some ideas too, and it might be worth querying what their longer term goals are in order to get back to the very next step.

Yeah, I think it’s interesting, and it reminds me of a quote, and I can’t remember who said it. I could maybe Google it and find out, and we could put it in the show notes, but someone, when talking about professional development, someone asked a CEO, well, what if you develop your employees, what if you invest in them and they leave, and his response was, What if I don’t, and they stay?

And, and I think that’s sort of the quintessential, like, you want an evolving workforce; you don’t want to be caught in, you know, 1978 in your workforce.
Yeah, I, I work in academia, and it’s part of our mindset that we’re developing people so that they’ll leave another position,

Right? And I mean, you work with grad students, so you’re actually developing them, and I mean, there’s not a lot in it for you, other than it’s your job, and it raises your stature. I mean, I think that actually academia is really cool, because, like, if you have students that publish, then it raises your stature, and the same is true for leaders to develop their people, and their.. it raises their stature, and then wherever they are in the world, it reflects well on on you.

Well, when I write grants, the grant reviewers are looking for evidence that I have succeeded in mentoring people and that they’ve gone on to to fruitful positions elsewhere.

Well, and I think about, I’m actually thinking about Karen Ander egg, so Karen Andera was married to your father and was my mother-in-law, and she worked at Vogue, and then she brought Elle magazine to the United States, and then she was the CEO of Clinique, and in her tenure, I think, at Elle, she mentored people who went on to start MTV, and and it was an amazing legacy for her, something she was always really proud of, even though she, you know, had amazing accolades in her own right, she was also really proud of her proteges.

Right, and there wasn’t a direct fiscal reward for this mentorship, but there was this satisfaction that you know that she’s, she’s made the world a better place.

Yeah, and I think I mean all the research on satisfaction shows if you’re being paid at a fair market value, then satisfaction gets way more complex after that, and and so I actually think that that seeing people develop, you do it with grad students, I do it with helping coaches as a mentor coach, and I think this development thing is really cool, and I think it applies to anyone who supervises anyone that you want your team to be better tomorrow than they are today.

Yeah, interesting topic. Thanks for bringing that.

Well, the one thing that I would add is, as you’re developing all of your people, don’t forget the quiet people.

Well, and yourself. I’ll say, don’t forget yourself too, like, you don’t have to stay the leader, the. You’ve always been, you can develop, there’s conferences, there’s courses, there’s discussions, there’s masterminds, there’s also there’s executive coaching, there’s all sorts of ways to push your own limits as well. If I want to ask you, I want to go back to that quiet people thing, like, how do you think the needs of quiet people are different in development than the loud people?

Well, I think there are people in your organization who are interested in leadership, and you know they’re interested in leadership or professional development, and there are people in your organization who have those same interests that you don’t know, you don’t know that they’re out. Last weekend we went to see The Devil Wears Prada, and that was one of the one of the character Stanley Tucci’s character was, you know, loyal for 20 years and did everything he’d asked for for 20 years, and then when, when it was suggested that maybe he wanted more leadership opportunities. The, you know, Miranda Priestly character was like, well, of course he doesn’t. He would have said it by now if he wanted to grow and develop.

And yet he did.

And interestingly, you know, back to the power dynamic that you sometimes talk about, the people who knew that he wanted more front-facing opportunity were the people below him, not the person above him. So, I do think it’s interesting how power plays into all of that too.

Yeah.

Well, it’s been fun talking to you about this. Go experiment,

Go experiment.

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