Leaders provide development opportunities by moving team members into roles that are above that person’s current competency, but in line with their potential. Developing employees this way eliminates a need for separate Leadership Development programs because it’s built into the way you manage assignments.
Today I want to talk about matching the person to the job. I want you to imagine that this yellow sticky diamond is the description of the requirements, all the skills, knowledge, capability, etc, that you need for a particular position. And these are the abilities of the person that I have on my team. Now, you might think, okay, yeah, let’s match them. So there is perfect overlap. The problem with that is that it feels very static. And for the person in the job, there’s no growth because as soon as they come into the job, day one, they already know everything, they can do everything. At the same time, you don’t want to have it way out here, because then it breaks because they’re just overwhelmed and there’s problems. Then you need to replace them and get somebody else. So this is not good. And this is not good.
What you want is just enough overlap so that they can barely hang on at the beginning. But then they have this sense of excitement and challenge and growth. And then with time, they grow and pretty soon, and just when they’re about to know everything and get super comfortable, you move them to a new job or you increase the scope of their job by giving them bigger problems to think about in your company.
As a leader, that’s sort of the way I think about developing your people. When you embed this in the company’s DNA, there’s no need to have leadership development programs because the way we run the company is a leadership development factory.
I’m David Marquet. That’s your Leadership Nudge.
