Become A People Developer

PEOPLE DEVELOPER’S GIG

I can mostly tell the leadership health of the organization by the way the leaders are developing their employees.  The growth of the organization will only be as good as the knowledge and behavior that is passed down, this is a daily habit that is evident over time.  The GIG is simple, but yet hard to master, because it takes one of the highest commodities of all businesses - time.  Every leader should be willing to develop the people that they have been given on their teams.  If your leaders aren’t directly leading teams or people, don’t turn a blind eye to this model.  Simply put, all leaders should be accountable for this GIG, whether they have a direct team or not.  Mainly because companies who cultivate the People Developer’s GIG will encourage their leaders to help others, such as highly effective people across departments of the organization.  The GIG is broken down into three parts that can’t be separated on their own or chosen as what best fits you.  It is also two-fold, each part is not only development for the people around them, it is also development for themselves.  

GROW

The first “G” is grow, this is essentially the concept of freely giving your knowledge to your team, but also continually learning for yourself.  This is important for all leaders to understand that you can’t be so focused on others that you forget about you.  But on the flip side, we can’t be so focused on ourselves that we don’t help our teams develop.  This equal balancing act of a game seems to be hard for most leaders.  We tend to have multiple seasons of shifting our focus from one side to the next, ultimately leaving us feeling a lack of consistency.  One of the answers to this problem isn’t earth shattering, BUT effective… one-on-one meetings.  First, ensure that you have someone who you meet with as  a leader to sharpen you. Seek to find someone who isn’t like you to help you grow and develop in your leadership. Second, meet with your team members regularly. Not just for business tasks and accountability, but also to leave margin for development-based questions. We can’t expect to actually share the knowledge that we’ve obtained over the years if we aren’t next to each other giving our time.  I specifically say “next to each other” because I've learned by observation that virtual calls or phone calls don’t quite invite open dialogue like being in-person.  Though, we all probably understand this, we will often take the easiest trail of efficiency versus putting the effort in for the long-term gain.  

THE KNOWLEDGE WE CAN GIVE

We had a client that was in the manufacturing business for a decade or so, he had built the business from nothing. By the time we had started doing business with them, they were annually gross profiting around 4 million. The president had started to believe a lie that crept into his leadership, “I don’t have any knowledge to offer.” He had started to think that his employees had far more to offer with their computer skills and new methods. This lie had taken root and affected his everyday interactions. Working with him over a period of a year, we started to help him see what knowledge he had to share with his team. His knowledge of grit, hard work and building something with faith is naming a few. Learning to draw on your past experiences to share with your team is a powerful tool. Though the work may look different, the way in which you achieve it will always require human talents and skills. We can learn to expedite experience when we intentionally give our time to discuss our past. Growth will almost always be a bi-product of the conversations. 

INVEST

The “I” stands for invest.  As in each section of the GIG, it is equally important to invest in yourself and your team. Invest isn’t what you typically think, it’s not just time and money. What we mean is to take risks. Investing is where risk collides with opportunity. Investing in someone eventually requires us to let go. It’s far too often that we believe we need to be right on the heels of our team and we mask this action with the word “accountability”. Though, no one should invest without accountability, we might have a tendency to call it that, but it’s really just our control that we can’t relinquish. An example of good accountability is when you meet with your personal financial planner quarterly. These accountability meetings help you keep in mind your goals while tracking the success and failures. If we called our advisors every week, they would feel annoyed, not accountable. On the other hand, avoidance is not investing either. I’ll spare you the many examples I have, but we can’t say we empower someone and then avoid them. Investing requires we take risks on them with the right opportunities, not giving them the things you don’t want or like. These might be hard words to hear, but it’s not uncommon to see both sides of control and avoidance being a mask for accountability and empowerment. 

The investment of yourself is a little different. Taking risks on yourself can be hard for some and easy for others. We need to define what risk really means, like most things, it is a little different for each person. Maybe investing in you is believing in yourself more, maybe it’s deciding to say the hard things to your team or worse, your boss. Whatever risk looks like for you, don’t forget to take risk on yourself and not just take it on others. We can often forget about ourselves, especially when we have a highly effective team. Taking the right risk on ourselves (investing) will teach us things that we can’t learn in a book. 

GUIDE

The second “G” stands for guide.  Guiding is different from telling or directing because developing people requires us to give our perspective and not always do it for them.  Guide is a two-way street just like the other two components of GIG. It is just as hard “to guide” for us as it is for our team members, it is a “stretching” process for both sides. You can probably relate to the expression “I can just do it myself faster.” Of course you can, but it isn’t the way of the People Developer’s GIG. We can’t just do the tasks or give direction, it doesn’t help them learn faster, it helps them become your shadow. Obviously, this doesn’t mean you can’t help by giving direction or doing the tasks, but when we are intentionally guiding them, we should lean towards letting them try to problem solve and learn with some mistakes. Guiding them requires us to put “safety nets” in place so they don’t fail miserably, but have sufficient learning experiences. 

HELD BY THE GLUE

The People Developer’s GIG is truly held together by these two outlining things, “Be willing to learn from anyone.” and “Accountability”. This is the glue of the model because without these two things we will revert back to our natural human state of selfishness. Willing to learn from anyone keeps us in a posture of giving, while being humble enough to receive. There should never be a stopping point, we should continually learn from all people and situations, whether the learning be from failures or successes. The second is accountability, this is for obvious reasons. We should constantly be trying to keep ourselves in the posture of a People Developer, but only when we have true accountability do we stay the course. The natural question is how do we hold ourselves accountable when we’re talking about being a People Developer? I think simplistic is best, so the first real accountability measure is time. If you audited your calendar, how much of your time is devoted to your team? And I'm not talking about task-driven discussions, I'm talking about real seat time where you have intentional development. Somehow, we have believed the notion that if our calendars are full, we are important. This notion can be readily identified through phrases like “Oh, sorry I was late, I was double booked.” or “I’ve been so busy I just forgot.” This “badge of honor” has stolen one of the best commodities we have as People Developers, our time! 

Author, Harrison Tash