Talent Development ..

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Adams

In my two decades of experience, my thoughts around talent development. Senior leaders who want to create a high performers, need to focus on following areas..

Be a role model. Walk the Talk. Be transparent about your own need to learn, develop, and share how you are able to do it. Leaders are never more powerful than when they are shown to be learning.

Compassion. Being thoughtful and aware of what others’ lives and experiences are like. Not seeing others as separate entities; it means seeing them as a part of yourself and relating to what they are experiencing at a much deeper level.

Set Standards: Be ethical and expect everyone in the team to practice the same. Ethics are the building blocks upon which success of any kind is based. Strive nothing less than excellence.

Strengthen the value of learning. Go beyond the baseline conversation about goals. Ask about what they want to accomplish and what they feel their gaps are. When someone completes an assignment, celebrate both the outcome and the learning, especially if the assignment was not completed as smoothly as everyone would have liked.

Design sustainable processes to support development. Managers should be expected to coach and develop their people. At a minimum, everyone knows what areas they need to improve, and for those with particularly high potential, career tracks are developed that give them a sense of where they can go inside the organization.

Shared values. Employees should be able to link their everyday tasks and responsibilities to the values in the organization. People need to understand why what they do is important.

Problems as opportunities. What's an acceptable failure needs to be clarified and that way, by incorporating stretch assignments, employees can seek out challenges where they can develop without feeling like mistakes will set them back in their career or jeopardize their job. Learning organizations see problems as opportunities.