How to support learning and growth: Strategy #3.2 – Provide new challenges and responsibilities
We have previously published a series of people leadership strategies around the climate outcomes themes of people feeling supported, valued and safe; creating a ‘team environment’; supporting learning and growth; empowering staff and building autonomy; ensuring clarity of roles and expectations; and creating meaning and purpose.
We are now going to explore the actionable steps that you can take to enable the suggested strategies and actions. This is one in a series of 31 posts providing specific descriptions of the actions in practice.
So, this post focuses on theme 3 – supporting learning and growth. In a previous post we have talked through 5 overarching strategies to support the learning and growth of your team:
3.1 Plan for and support development.
3.2 Provide new challenges and responsibilities
3.3 Provide opportunities to learn from/teach others.
3.4 Champion experimentation and improvement.
3.5 Provide coaching and developmental feedback.
In this post we take a deep dive into the specific strategy of:
3.2 Provide new challenges and responsibilities.
One of the most effective ways to fast-track people’s development is to give people challenging work that stretches them (just) outside their comfort zone. Such experiences can both engender a sense of growth and of feeling trusted which, in turn, drive higher levels of performance and commitment.
So, here are some of the actions that can be taken to put this leadership strategy into practice:
1) Give people extra responsibility for a short period. This would likely involve providing people with opportunities for higher duties or acting roles while other team members are on leave – it could be acting up or acting across. Typically, these would be of a short-term nature, perhaps 1 – 4 weeks that give people a taste of what would be involved in these other roles. This demonstrates confidence in them, while also expanding their experiences. It is important that they are set up for success through proper handover processes and identifying someone they can gain guidance from if necessary. At the conclusion of the acting period, you would ideally hold a debrief conversation about what they learnt from the experience and what future development might be appropriate that builds on their experience.
2) Identify secondments, job rotation and stretch project opportunities that align with an individual’s motivational drivers. Ideally this should be a proactive leadership activity – rather than waiting for such opportunities to emerge. Perhaps just prior to the annual development planning process and/or half-year review, think about which people in your team might benefit from these types of opportunities and some options that might be possible to engineer. These ideas can be explored in further depth through development conversations. If you are a member of a leadership team, it may be a quarterly conversation within the leadership team to identify and facilitate opportunities across the broader group.
3) Consider expanding the scope, responsibilities or decision-making authority for people in their roles. It can be empowering for people and a demonstration of your trust in them to, over time, expand their work within role. This could include such things as handing over some of your responsibilities to them, enabling them to participate in higher-order meetings or conversations, supervising or mentoring other staff, broadening or upping performance expectations, or adding additional responsibilities/functions to their role. It is vital that this be done in collaboration with them to ensure they understand the intent is around development, not just dumping more work on them, and to also discuss and manage the potential workload implications.
4) Work with individuals to ensure there is sufficient challenge in their roles, and that they are supported through their learning curves. It is important to help people grow within their role. There may be times when people are doing a good job they may drift into a comfortable zone and over time become bored and their motivation wanes – this may affect work performance, or they may start looking for other jobs. The challenge is to provide them with enough stretch that keeps them growing without being overwhelmed. Again, you may want to the annual development planning process and/or half-year review to explicitly explore how more challenge could be built into their roles and how they might be supported to optimise their learning from these challenge experiences.
5) Encourage people to actively reflect on their learning from experiences. Learning on the job is arguably the most impactful method of learning for individual and team growth. Unfortunately, many people, while having varied experiences on the job, don’t take the time to extract their learning from experience. There are various on-the-job experiences where people can gain learning insights – a project delivered, delivering a presentation, dealing with a difficult situation, preparing a report, taking up a new responsibility etc. Seek to build a habit in your team where people ask themselves some basic reflective questions, such as: What were the 3 key things I learnt from this experience? What might this mean for my future practice? and capture their thoughts. To build a culture around this, provide opportunities at team meetings for people to share their learning reflections.
6) Delegate parts of your role with the intention of both getting the job done and for development. There may be parts of your role that could be undertaken by your staff, while being a growth opportunity for them. This could include such things as attending certain meetings, signing off on other people’s work, preparing certain reports, taking a bigger role in the budgeting or planning process, leading team meetings, or supervising other staff. At the commencement of a year, critically review your own role and identify such opportunities and engage in conversations with your staff about some practical changes, ensuring the intent around development is clear.
7) Find opportunities for them to be the ‘expert’ where they use their key strengths.Most people feel good about themselves and perform at their best when their strengths are being actively used. One way of achieving this is to assign people with ‘expert’ status. This could be around certain technological applications, content knowledge, particular organisational processes, key relationships, technical expertise etc. It can also be more efficient than trying to have everyone expert at everything. For certain topics individuals can be publicly assigned ‘expert’ or ‘champion’ status as someone from whom others can seek advice. Further investment in formal training in their expertise may also be beneficial. Their knowledge is also enhanced as they are called upon to teach others.
8) Find opportunities for supervision of others. One of the best ways to help people grow, especially to enhance their leadership skills, is to provide opportunities for people to supervise others. This builds such skills as providing clear direction, delegation, reviewing work and providing feedback, supporting people and building trusting relationships. Such opportunities may be of a short-term nature – supervising junior staff on a project, an acting opportunity, organising a conference or a workshop, overseeing a new graduate, or playing a coordinating role in preparing a report. These are just a few examples.
Having read this list, some questions you may want to ask yourself might be:
- Are there one or two ideas emerging for me that I might want to put into practice?
- What is the smallest thing I could do that might have a positive impact?
- How will I hold myself accountable for following through on my actions?
Good luck!