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The most significant development for managers and executives takes place ON THE JOB (i.e. not through training or coaching/mentoring). However training is what is most commonly offered.
Why most training is useless:
- 86% of people who attend training do nothing to apply what they have learned
- Typically only 10% of non-customized course content is relevant to an organization
Don’t default to training activities for yourself or your directs when building development plans! If you do use training, think about what you are going to do to ensure that what is taught is actually applied.
High impact development activities include:
- Special project/Task force: Discrete project assignment aimed at a specific outcome.
- Fix-it: Turn around, restructure and stabilize a failed operation, project, or organization, or customer relationships.
- Start-up: Building something from nothing or almost nothing.
- Small strategic assignment: Examples include doing a competitive analysis; writing a proposal for a new product, system, etc.; writing a speech for someone higher up; writing a policy statement or summarizing a new trend/technique and presenting it to others.
- Deepening functional skills: Changing from a generalist type assignment to a more specialized job/role that requires/builds very deep functional expertise.
- Stretch job beyond ‘hip pocket’ functional skills: Changing job/role/career to a functional discipline fundamentally different from previous work experiences; may include a cross-functional assignment.
- Significant change leadership: Leading the efforts to design and implement major change to the company’s key business processes and core capabilities.
- Mentoring: Receiving personal coaching, counsel and perspective from a valued/trusted and influential leader. Being a mentor for someone else.
- Build a team: Assembling & aligning a team of unique talent and skill sets to achieve a stated vision and strategy. Maybe a project team.
- Coaching assignments: Teach someone how to do something they are not expert in; design a training course.
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