Why do people have no time for development?
I was recently asked by a Client to provide my thoughts and insights for a paper they were preparing for their Senior Leadership Team. They wanted to provide insights on why people across their organisation never had the time for development.
They asked me to answer this question with a specific focus on Leaders and Leadership.
Here are my thoughts:
1. The average age of a Leader of Organisation (C-Suite) or Leader of Leader (Head of Service) is 50 - 60 and 40 - 50 respectively which would indicate a large proportion of their career, and a critical time for developing a mindset and habits for professional development, was in the 1980s and early 1990s. Although development existed, the global business landscape at the time was very different. Development was seen as a nice to have, it wasn’t business critical. The concept of developing an employee experience didn’t exist. People had less choice; employment law was less developed, and development wasn’t a priority for businesses and in turn their people. Therefore, Leaders of today in pivotal positions will understand the need but is it engrained in them as a fundamental need for their business and teams?
2. Organisations develop visions, missions, values, job profiles, behavioural frameworks, and performance review processes. All fantastic strategies for clearly setting out the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of people’s roles and creating consistency throughout an organisation. It also supports the identification of the current and future technical and behavioural development needs. Should businesses take it one step further and write personal and professional development into everyone’s job roles? How much does a person’s desire for personal and professional development feature in the recruitment process?
3. Where is your business in its growth journey? If a business is in aggressive growth mode, that becomes the narrative. If your business is in a global pandemic and in survival mode, that becomes the narrative. If your business is coming out of a global pandemic and in recovery mode, that becomes the narrative. These three examples typically lead to development being less of a priority and signposted for “when we get past this stage of our strategy” (the growth journey becomes the excuse). The question is, is a business ever not in growth (aggressive or not), survival, or recovery?
4. Identification of talent is often based on the output of performance (numbers) and not the input into said performance (behaviours e.g. development).
5. Learning isn’t easy, it does take time and people’s perception is that it takes too much time (and a lot of effort). They don’t understand the different ways in which you can learn, the tools, techniques, and the science behind how you can best learn. Understanding how to learn and how easy learning can be (when done well) can remove the fears of too much time and too much effort.
6. And finally, when push comes to shove, how high up in order of priority does the people strategy sit versus, sales, customer, operations, finance, and technology?
The points above are reflections from working with organisations in multiple industries and sectors, globally. They are insights from conversations with Leaders at all levels throughout the organisations we partner with. The answers to the question are our leading 6 but we appreciate there are many more reasons that could be considered.
Written by Luke Hall
Managing Director