I recently facilitated an interim evaluation meeting with a group of young professionals participating in a talent programme and several programme stakeholders. What surprised me was how little the managers were involved in the development of the young professionals, and how little the young professionals were still experimenting with what they had learned in daily practice. Yet these two aspects of any talent or leadership programme are exactly what ensure that the investment pays off. As a talent or HR manager, you have advocated for a development programme and you want the whole organisation to benefit, not only the participants. For the programme to have impact within your organisation, you need the cooperation of the participants’ managers, as well as the participants’ own commitment to genuinely develop.
In this blog, I explain how to increase the return on your talent programme.
Involve managers in the talent programme
It may sound obvious: the manager is responsible for the employee’s development. Much has already been written about this. Research from Tilburg University, for example, shows that coaching by managers positively correlates with employee competence development. Employees who experience more coaching from their manager show, on average, more development than employees who experience less coaching.
And now the reality: managers are busy. Every day they have to prioritise plans, budgets, work checks, Excel lists and unexpected situations, to name only a few things. At the end of the day, there is still not enough time. Let alone time to sit down with a young professional and explore together how they can apply what they have learned in practice, preferably in a very personal way that fits their qualities. Managers say they do not have time for this in the daily rush. But that is only half the truth.
The other side is that managers often do not feel comfortable holding development conversations. Sometimes they simply do not know how to approach them. Supporting a young professional on content is not that difficult. After all, they have already worked in the organisation for several years. But when it comes to personal development, it is a different story. As a manager, you are then also confronted with your own skills around coaching leadership.
As a Talent or HR manager, you can respond in two ways
- Organise internal meetings with the managers involved in the talent programme. Explain the goal and structure of the programme, but also what managers can do to support their employees. In an earlier blog, I explained three things managers can do to take a bigger role in their employees’ development.
- 2walk: Let young professionals plan informal conversations outside the work context between themselves and their manager. The idea is to exchange experiences around personal development in relation to work. It is a mutual conversation about what each person is learning personally. Make sure the manager knows this is part of the programme. The participants are responsible for planning it. I receive very positive responses to this. During a walk or lunch outside the organisation, conversations unfold differently. Managers are more open, and young professionals feel more at ease because the environment also influences the quality of the conversation. When there is an open dialogue about each other’s personal and professional development, a manager no longer needs to focus so much on coaching techniques. It becomes a person-to-person conversation. And these are precisely the conversations that create trust and connection.
Remove optionality from your talent programme
As a talent or HR manager, you hope participants seize the opportunity of such a programme and apply what they learn in practice. The goal of a talent or leadership programme is not that participants learn something new, but above all that they apply it in their work.
My experience with young professionals is twofold. On the one hand, they value development. They want to get to know themselves better so they can make a difference at work. They can indicate what bothers them and what they want to learn.
On the other hand, they are still learning how work works: discovering what is expected of them and how they come across in the organisation. They also tend to say yes to many tasks. This means that, in their daily search, a training day can almost arrive unexpectedly. That affects preparation, such as pre-discussion with the manager and any pre-assignments, as well as expectations for the training day itself.
The training day flies by, participants go home enthusiastic because they have learned a lot. But the learning often fails to transfer to practice. The manager is pleased that the young professional is back, the young professional feels a lot of work has piled up and throws themselves back into it. If no one asks: what did you learn and how will you integrate it into your work? then learning becomes optional and the return on investment remains low.
Millennials often experience stress through their own perfectionism and fear of failure. They have been raised with a strong sense of individual responsibility: you are responsible for your own happiness and success. The flip side is that if something fails, they blame themselves. This attitude does not encourage them to seek out new situations and experiment. Yet that is exactly where learning in practice pays off.
As a Talent or HR manager, create accountability and add a form of “assessment” of participants’ own development. Not to judge them, but to stimulate action and facilitate learning experiences.