I have realized that there are several reasons why development plans are so vexing for people:

1) “Development needs” tend to be identified in terms of personal competencies; qualities of the individual to be improved or leveraged.  They ultimately involve descriptions individual skills, abilities, characteristics, orientations, outlooks, mindsets…or whatever other term you want to use.

2) The most easily identified and packaged solutions for “development needs” are training  programs.  If you have a need to improve on communications skills, take a communications class. Problem solved. But these solutions are very limited.  They don’t address the important development needs of high potential employees.  So, you are going to put him or her into the company’s leadership development program. That is great, but will it really help them to make a larger contribution to the organization? To be more effective on a larger playing field? Probably not.

3) Real development comes from having experiences. But, we don’t know how to identify the right experiences for a given individual, and we are hard pressed to explain why we think a given experience is the right one in the first place.  When asked to describe why a particular experience will be useful, it is hard to get people to go beyond “It will just be a great experience–they will learn so much, and see different parts of the company, etc…” The point is, we don’t have a simple method of unpacking the learning potential in potential developmental assignments. And, if we don’t really understand the key lessons we want an experience to teach a person, why would expect them to?

So, I have developed a process for creating what some have described as an “experience-based development plan on steroids”–a robust process that guides the individual through a thought process that yields an insightful development plan.  The basic steps, which are supported in the FrameBreaking Leadership Development Workshop with a mixture of online and print tools and exercises, goes like this:

1) Clarify your long-term career aspirations.  While this can be a tough step for some, it’s an important that one’s development plan is put into a larger, career context.

2) Conduct a personal experience audit

4) Ensure your passions are aligned with the experiences you are having and need to have to achieve your long-term career aspirations

5) Document your plan in a simple form and approach it with a Learning Mindset. Adapting a simple reflective practice that I can an “ActiveLearning Routine” can help you to keep learning top of mind once you are embroiled in an experience-based development opportunity.

If you are interested in learning more about this robust approach to experience-based development, check out the workshop description or attend a free webinar on January 18. I have just recently finished a book on this subject, and will post details once it is available for purchase.

If you have achieved chess master status, these patterns are pretty useful. If however, you have not achieved grand master status and want to play chess well, the patterns that you have in your head may not be that useful. You may, in fact, need to unlearn them.

But what patterns are you carrying with you that might be hindering your game? Probably not long chains of chess moves.

The patterns that I am referring to are patterns that are not directly related to chess. For example, some common patterns that may need to be addressed cover behavioral patterns such as, “How do I respond when attacked? ” “How do I act when I have a valuable resource (e.g., the queen); do I hold it tightly, or, am I willing to sacrifice it to achieve a larger aim?”

These patterns can be dysfunctional because they limit how we approach the world, and they constrain us without our being aware of it. We become overly cautious, or overly aggressive; unwilling to give in order to get.

In an organizational context, the question becomes, “are you stuck in ways of thinking that worked for you in the past but may not be the most effective for you today or into the future?” For us to continue learning, it is often critically important for us to unlearn perspectives, behaviors, or routines that have become habitual because they have proven successful in the past. This requires a learning mindset–a continual habit of curiosity; questioning, and seeking meaning from the world around us.

In addition, I had the honor of presenting to the group my research and insights regarding “Frame-Breaking Development for High Potentials.”  Over the last fifteen+ years, I have been exploring ways of developing people more effectively through on-the-job experiences rather than just through formal classroom programs. In recent years, I have distilled my insights down to a simple framework for helping people to think about experiences (see some information about the framework here.)  So, this was a great opportunity for me to engage top HR leaders in a dialogue on a subject which is a personal passion. 

Thanks to all who attended!

Yet, when you talk to most business leaders, the general sense is that that is only one small part of the picture. People actually learn much more from experience (e.g., 70-20-10…).  While that is an important starting point, that is not, in itself, very helpful.  Which experiences? How can I recognize them? When should I seek them? What am I supposed to learn from them?  etc., etc., etc… This insight raises far more questions than it answers.

These are the questions that I have spent the last 15 years exploring.  By poring over the literature and conducting several studies myself as a consultant, where I interviewed over a hundred successful leaders, I have explored the question–”what are the most developmental experiences in the career histories of successful executives?”  While that research has yielded some very valuable insights and development resources, I recently revisited my research and had a more significant insight.  I can boil down the 40-50 key work experiences that I uncovered in my research into a much simpler set of experience categories: Delivering, Mastering, Broadening, and Frame-Breaking. 

It turns out that most rhetoric in organizations focuses on the category that I refer to as “Frame-Breaking Career Moves,” while most of what organizations actually do is push “Delivering” experiences.   

What are Frame Breaking Career Moves™?
Simply put, Frame-Breaking Career Moves™ are assignments, roles or jobs that provide an opportunity to dramatically develop or advance your career. They are unique opportunities that allow you to catapult yourself forward by learning new skills and new ways of thinking. At the same time these special opportunities allow you to accomplish something that will cause others to take notice. You can think of Frame-Breaking Career Moves™ as combining two types of on-the-job challenge: Intensity and Stretch.

Intensity describes the extent to which work demands the most of you. When you are put into an assignment that pushes you to develop new skills and think differently, success demands that you be fully engaged and in a high learning mode.

Stretch describes the extent to which work pushes you outside your area of expertise. For example, ask an IT manager to participate in a sales call that would be routine for a sales professional, and he or she is likely to feel outside of their comfort zone.

If we combine these two dimensions together, we create a

Copyright 2011, Mark Kizilos. All rights reserved.

useful framework for looking at our jobs, careers, and personal development. We can use this framework as a tool to explore four broad types of career experiences: Delivering, Mastering, Broadening, and Frame-Breaking.

Frame-Breaking Career Moves™ push on both Intensity and Stretch dimensions simultaneously – they involve high levels of challenge; success requires one to develop new skills and perspectives in areas where prior experience does not apply. As such, Frame-Breaking experiences are rich learning opportunities. But, spotting them in advance isn’t always easy, learning from them isn’t guaranteed, and failure is a distinct possibility.  The inherent riskiness of these moves makes most organizations reluctant to use them.  Which is why I find it interesting that organizations often talk about developing people through “stretch experiences” (by which they mean Frame-Breaking Career Moves) yet they do everything they can to avoid using these experiences, instead preferring to keep people in a Delivering mode.

Frame-Breaking Leadership Development

On September 21, I will be teaching a four-hour seminar at the Carlson School of Management to help people learn from all four types of experience, especially Frame-Breaking opportunities.  The program will focus on understanding the basic dynamics of on-the-job learning opportunities, and developing the ability to learn more effectively from the full spectrum of experiences. The program will also engage participants in thinking about their own experience with a learning lens by providing participants with the tools needed to create their own  Learning Resume™, as well as an experience-based development plan.

If you are interested, you can find additional details and sign up here: http://www.carlsonschool.umn.edu/executive-education/frame-breaking-leadership-development.html

Also, I was quoted in a story on MBA Alternatives.  A digital version of the story can be accessed here.   Carlson Executive Education’s Minnesota Management Institute, a trhee-week program targeted to high potential managers and directors, is often viewed as an alternative to a traditional MBA.  The mini-MBA market has been very hot lately.  So much so, that some are overselling what you can accomplish in a very short time (e.g., some mini-MBAs are just 5 days…!).  We have takent the perspective that it is better to offer a strong program to build skills that high potential managers and directors need than to offer a sampler of MBA topics.  Our MMI program is an intensive, three-week transformational program.  You don’t get a “mini-MBA” credential from the program, but you do get a powerful, perspective-shifting experience that can accelerate your career.  Enough said.  you can check it out on our website if you are interested…

This would seem to be a reasonable request, right?

Actually, I don’t think that providing examples of “good development plans” is the best way to help a person guide their own development.  Why?  Well, a good development plan doesn’t necessarily look much different from a bad development plan.  

The most critical components of a good development plan are all those things that don’t make it onto the development plan form–the quality of the process used to get meaningful feedback on strengths and weaknesses; the effort invested in reflecting on where you are trying to go in your job and career; the extent of personal insight and self-awareness behind the plan, etc… Of course, the problem is that all of this other work is the hard work of development that many people aren’t ready to do. 

So, the interest in “well-written development plans”  can be a sign that there is too much emphasis on the talent development process and not enough on the hard work of actually helping to develop capability. 

Don’t get me wrong.  Development plans are important and useful tools, and it is good to have one that is based on a thorough self-examination.  My point is simply that the writing of the plan is actually pretty easy when you know what you are trying to accomplish. It is every other part of the process that is difficult. As a result, looking at “well-written development plans” is not that instructive for the individual wanting to drive their own development in the most effective manner.

This reminds me of something once told to me by a college classmate that has stuck with me through the years.  He was describing his experience in trying to write a paper for our philosophy class:   

 ”At first, I thought I knew what I wanted to say, but I just didn’t know how to say it.  Then, I realized, that’s just another way of saying I really don’t know what I want to say.” 

It’s not that people don’t know how to write good development plans. Its that they don’t really know what they need to develop and how to develop  it.  Unfortunately, that is a much harder problem to solve.

His point was simply this:  “Would you want to have a surgeon operate on you who did not have a deep understanding of physiology?”  I know I would want my surgeon to have both a theoretical or conceptual understanding of body systems, and a lot of experience actually doing the surgery. 

So, why is it that so often “theory” is used as a dirty word.  As in, “that is just a bunch of theory,”  or “that is too theoretical.”  Yet, one never hears anyone saying, “that’s just based on experience,” or “that is just too practical.” 

But, perhaps they should. 

In the best sense of the word, “theories” simply help you to make sense of complex situations by helping you to understand the pricniples or elements that are in play.  We create and test theories–though we don’t call them that–all the time. Any time you use your prior experience to guide your actions in a new situation you are doing so because you have created an implicit theory about how things work and you believe that your theory will apply to the new situation.  Of course, the only evidence to support your theory is your own experience. 

In contrast, well done research leverages the experience of others in similar situations and distills down the essential lessons. In addition, since theories in the academic world are more formal, they must stand up to intense scrutiny, and can be tested with enormous amounts of data and well-designed experiments.  I don’t actually know any reputable academic who deals in the type of theory that some think of when they think of academic theory–the armchair theorizing that is disconnected from the real world. I think the last great armchair theorist was William James, and he died in 1910. However, I do know of plenty of consultants who sell themselves as experts based on their experience, yet lack even a basic theoretical foundation for their work.  For example, many executive coaches operating today do coaching that crosses the line into therapy…and don’t even realize it because they lack sufficient knowledge of psychology.

Good executive education recognizes the importance of practical experience and theoretical knowledge and presents a blend of ”theory” and “practice.”

I highlighted the Minnesota Executive Program (MEP) and the Minnesota Management Institute (MMI), our two robust general management programs.  While some view these programs as “MBA alternatives,” many who attend these programs are actually looking to refresh skills acquired during an MBA some 5-7+ years ago. 

The Carlson School has been offering these general management programs for well over 30 years.  The programs have evolved over the years, but the impact that they have on participants has not changed.  The clear message from every person I have spoken with about these programs is very clear: their lives have been changed–new perspectives on how organizations run, new career opportunities, advancement, and new levels of success.

Sorry for my blatant advertising here.  I generally don’t like to take your time to push brochure-speak at you, but these are some pretty powerful programs!

Increasing pace of change is making effective leadership more crucial
The pace of change has picked up so dramatically in recent years that most organizations are struggling to keep up with the competition, let alone stay ahead of the pack.  A hard fought competitive edge that might have set you up for 5 years while the competition scrambled to react may today yield you a  six-month headstart. 

While the pace of change is impacting all dimensions of organizational life in diverse ways,  the underlying implication of all the change we face is that it is increasingly important to have highly capable leaders.  While we still acknowledge the importance of creating robust organizations –as systems–there is an increasing awareness that even the best systems may not be flexible enough to respond to rapid changes in the environment without extraordinary leadership.  The extraordinary leader can anticipate, learn, shift, and help ensure that the system is adapting. 

So, the talent development system needs to be great at identifying those with leadership potential and helping them to develop as rapidly as possible.

So, what has this got to do with leaders as coaches? 

Coaching has some interesting advantages over more structured approaches to learning.  In traditional learning settings, there are well established means of mediating the relationship between a learner and a body of knowledge.  If you want to learn what you need to know about corporate finance, there is a well established process to follow–learning certain concepts, in a certain sequence, with clear means to confirm your learning along the way.  Moreover, the content and the process is all well articulated–there are books, instructors, videos, practice problems, and all manner of techniques.  Some refer to the traditional learning model, typified by the classroom experience, as having “the sage on the stage.”  As Assistant Dean of executive education, I am intimately familiar with the traditional model, and can attest to the fact that it has an important place in the arsenal of development approaches.

However, in order to develop leaders quickly, we cannot rely completely or solely on the traditional learning model.  To be effective in the rapidly evolving real world of organizations, leaders need to be constantly learning and adapting.  The body of knowldge to be learned is evolving with the context, and lessons need to be teased out of a swirling complex of interpersonal and organizational dynamics.  However, unlike the traditional learning context, there is no one there to mediate the learning.  There is no one to make sure that you are learning what you need to learn. 

Enter the coach. In contrast to the traditional learning model, the learning model based on coaching is typified by some as having ”a guide on the side.”

Coaches as learning facilitators

 A good executive coach can play many roles, but the role of learning facilitator is critical.  In this capacity, the coach helps the individual to process their own experiences, and ensure that the right lessons are being drawn from them. Rather than working from a predetermined curriculum that a “teacher” wants a “student” to learn, the coach starts with the individual’s own experiences, and helps the individual to learn from a process that involves dynamically processing experience in an iterative loop–>individual action–>result/impact–>facilitated reflection.   

I have written here and elsewhere about my strong belief in the power of learning from experience, and the coach is essentially an aid who helps the individual to learn from their own experience.  Given that external executive coaches are pretty pricey, and can’t be easily scaled beyond a small pool of the most critical talent, we are starting to hear more and more about helping leaders within the organization to get better at this critical skill. 

In fact, I decided to write on this topic because today is day one of a new program on The Art and Practice of Leaders Coaching Leaders offered by Carlson Executive Education.   While it is too late to enroll in this class, you may be interested in checking out some of the new half-day programs we are offering in the Momentum Series.

Once you have a process to identify top talent, you face a key question:  “should we tell high potentials that we see them as high potentials?”  This question is raised all the time by line executives (both those asking for their ratings and by those doing the ratings), and by talent management practitioners.  The question is frequently accompanied by one of several basic rationales (usually revealing the questioner’s intent): 

1) Transparency.  We need to be transparent with our development efforts, so that people understand the process is fair and don’t feel that we are keeping secrets about them.   This rationale carries with it the most intuitive, gut-level appeal.  Who wants to advocate for secretive HR practices…smoke-filled rooms, etc…?

2) Tell them or lose them.  If we keep it a secret and don’t tell high potentials that we think they are great, don’t we risk losing great people? 

3) If we don’t tell them, what’s the point of doing the assessment in the first place?  If we are aren’t telling high potentials that they are high potential, then we also can’t tell all those other people that they are not high potential.  So, how can we help them to develop?

There is validity in each of these views, and many other arguments are usually brought up in the course of  exploring this topic.

My view? 

I am all for transparency, but about the right things.  If the organization is caught up in the debate about the ratings, I see it as a potential danger sign.  The ratings are made in order to help the organization to have a robust dialogue about talent, reach common understanding about each person’s strengths and weaknesses, and, most importantly, to guide the organization’s development effort–espcially for certain top talent individuals. 

Given that actions speak louder than words, the question that we should be debating instead is, “what happens when someone in this organization is named high potential?”  Are certain development experiences cued up? Does the designation trigger a developmental assignment reserved for high potenials?  Is participation in certain learning programs reserved for high potentials? 

If the high potential designation does not trigger clear development actions for individuals, then who cares what the rating is anyway? If it does trigger such actions, then people will figure it out and the rating won’t be important.

The problem is that it’s hard for the organization to walk the talk in this way. Channeling significant development resources toward high potentials also  means channeling  them away from other non-high-potentials.  The unanointed in this scenario don’t particularly care for this sort of approach.   To follow this path, you need to have a pretty high level of confidence in your talent identification processes.   Otherwise, you will lose in two ways–investing in those who don’t have what the organization needs for the future, while disenfranchising those who do, but have been incorrectly passed over by your talent identification process.

Here are a few of my favorite tests for the quality of a talent identification process:

1) Do ratings depend upon the whims and perspectives of individual managers, or is the process sufficiently institutionalized so that it is not dependent upon individual managers? 

2) Do your talent assessments emerge from rich dialogue with senior management about each individual?  If talent assessments don’t get changed as they move up the chain, then the dialogue is probably not as robust or diverse as it should be.

3) Do leaders in your organization own the potential ratings, or are they something that they know HR wants them to do?

If your talent review and identifcation process does not pass these tests, then you might be best off keeping your potential ratings a secret.

If you are interested in this and other talent management questions, you may want to check out the upcoming Talent Management Strategies course (May 19-21 at the Carlson School).  It is a great program that can help you to better frame your talent management approach.