How understanding career-development will be useful for organisations

After the book release of 'The five great myths of career building', one of the friend asked me how this will be useful for organisations.

One of the immediate area of application seems to be leadership development. The concept of leadership is so 'loosely' used in management research and books, and that too by well known researchers, that one is surprised.

If you look at a typical organisation, you will realise that individuals play two distinct functions. One is that of a doer ( programmer, salesman, accountant) and another is an integrator. Integrator integrates the doers to produce a 'marketable' and sustainable output. At the worst, an integrator can be a coordinator, at the best he is , what we all like to believe, a leader. The choice is not completely in the hands of the 'person' who is performing that function; it is also the design of the job position. If a job position is designed like a coordinator, a person will have very little lattitude to become a 'leader'.

But unmindful to this, organisations have 'leadership development programmes' for all managers. Even though some managers cannot perform a bigger role than coordinators, the organisation expects them to be a leader. Every manager is put through the leadership development program, and then expected to display 'leadership' qualities. When most of them cannot do so, they are blamed for not taking the initiative, for not thinking out of the box. Managers also stop taking 'leadership development' seriously. They attend these programs only when they are at exotic locations or when they are at Harvard.

Managers are expected to learn from these programs and become leaders. Some companies become even more aggressive. They run competency tests, identify the gaps to become a leader, and conduct programs to fill the gaps. Although we know that no 'leader' is a perfect person, every manager is 'moulded' to become a perfect leader. Some twist themselves to change, some just show that they have learnt. No one can question the wisdom of a company which is spending huge amounts on 'developing them'.

One way to come out of the this conundrum is to understand human development, or what i call career development. Every individual has a different trajectory of development. An individual may or may not be able to develop the required leadership qualities in a given timeline. Luckily, organisations also require 'leadership' qualities on a wide range of spectrum, because each job position of manager is different. Organistions can therefore easily assimilate them.

Training managers need to focus on operational development

Training managers, not so surprisingly, focus on developing the leaders ( which are supposed to be managers), while ignoring the development of their operational staff who actually do the work.

I guess that this 'studied ignorance' could be happening out of two reasons; one accidental and another deliberate. Accidental reason is that developing operational executives is boring because they only 'do' the work. That is 'content download' and can be delegated to the juniors. On the other hand, leadership development is interesting and involves direct interaction with superiors and managers who ultimately 'navigate' the company.

Therefore, in a learning and development plan of an organisation, you will not find any mention of how operational executives should be developed.

On the other hand, operational staff are the staff who do the actual work, whether the work is of programming, selling, or support work like quality control. Because they require expertise to do their work, development of this expertise is a constant 'challenge' for them. More so, when the expertise sharing is not easy.

Imagine a new batsman like Wasim Jaffer entering in a cricket team. Do you think other established batsman help him/share their experience and wisdom? In 4 out of 5 cases, the answer is no. Manoj Prabhakar has mentioned in his interviews his difficulty in learning from seniors when he entered the team. Experts, by their nature, face a constant dilemma: Am i competing or collaborating? Without resolving this paradox, no sharing of expertise can happen.

I have seen organisations have excellent salesman and non-performing salesman. Do excellent saleman share their experience with non performing salesman? You know the answer. Some companies 'actively' evoke competition, while some do it 'subtely'. Every company talks about the team work, but no one shares their pearls of wisdom so easily. Mckinsey, a company of management consultants, also faced this dilemma. And a software company also faces this dilemma.

Until one carefully answers the difficult questions, and resolves them through policies, direct and indirect incentives, a company cannot develop the expertise of operational staff on which the 'work' essentially depends.

This is just the first challenge in developing the operational capability of an organisation. There are others. Did you encounter any?