Professional development is dead. Long live personal growth.
Photo by Philippe Bout on Unsplash
The way we work is changing. The way we lead is changing. The way we look at performance is changing. How we think about careers is changing. So the way we think about professional development had better be changing too.
How do leaders help their people grow so their business can grow? How do individuals combine skills and passions to flourish at work?
A few years ago I had a conversation with a client where I mentioned personal growth plans for his team. He was quick to correct me - “you mean professional development plans, right?” It wasn’t just a jargon battle. His point was that a business has no business helping people grow personally - but rather to help them develop professionally. The former was the job of parents, pals and gurus. I remember being struck by how distinct he felt the two ideas were.
In the end it sparked a lively conversation about the relative merits of working with ‘whole people’ rather than ‘employees’; the benefits of teaching leaders the art of being better humans, not just better managers; the idea that taking an interest in people’s wellbeing might support rather than squash a more ‘professional’ level of performance.
You’re probably reading this thinking it would be bananas not to embrace the ‘personal’ in personal development. But you’d be surprised how recent a shift that’s been, and how long it’s taken (taking?!) to really drive that thinking into the way learning and development programs are designed and delivered in many companies. It was only during the pandemic, for example, that the idea of empathy as a fundamental leadership quality really took hold.
But like just about everything else in the employee experience, how people want to learn and grow is changing. “Growing” is one of the lenses in Within’s EX framework - inviting leaders to make promises about how they focus on balance, wellbeing and personal growth. And it has never been so hot as it is hot right now.
Here are three ingredients leaders need to be thinking about in 2023 to ensure they are supporting career journeys tailored to individual talents, committing to equal opportunity so that everyone has a fair chance to advance and understanding what each person needs to thrive in their personal and professional life.
Skills: pathways and power-ups
How do people chart their own growth pathway by gathering skills that align to their passions and the vision of your business?
We’re starting to look at people differently. Instead of badging them with titles they’ve occupied and experience they’ve gathered in their careers to here, we’re starting to see a more fractional picture; a kind of tapestry of the skills they’ve assembled and applied.
That’s helpful as roles, and even whole industries get more fluid. (Read more here). As companies stop operating like silos and more like networks, they start to operate more like a marketplace of skills than a set of defined and rigid roles.
That’s energizing, because it doesn’t pigeon-hole people into certain positions, but encourages more creative mobility within companies, as people bring their skills to challenges faced by different departments. And that’s magic dust for innovation and resilient growth.
In this environment, employees stop seeing their future as a ‘career ladder’ they need to ascend, one step at a time. Instead it becomes a pathway, which might snake around a little more - guided and fueled by their passions as much as their prowess.
As businesses look into their own future, they’re asking themselves what skills they’re going to need to thrive there. Right now that’s not just a conversation about products and services they need to build capability to deliver, but the kind of skills needed to lead and thrive in a remote or hybrid environment, for example.
Ask yourself: From recruitment, through onboarding to development, how are you enabling people to chart their growth pathway? What menu of skills are you offering and incentivising, and how can your people ‘power-up’ both their own career, and your business’ capabilities, by getting them?
Wellness: Balancing strength and stretch
How are you encouraging well being as an enabler of personal growth?
The workplace wellbeing market was worth over $49 billion in 2022. That’s perhaps unsurprising when you learn that three in 10 employees in the US reported being burned out “very often” or “always” at work. And that only 24% of employees felt their employer even cared about their wellbeing (according to Gallup).
The relationship between growth and wellbeing seems remarkably obvious, yet there’s an enduring narrative in business that real growth comes from challenge and adversity. The ‘school of hard knocks’ theory has some truth to it - we really do learn a lot in times of challenge - but as an approach to lasting skill building it’s about as sustainable as an unwatered plant.
A healthier approach to personal growth centers more around the ability to find flow in increasingly challenging work. And for fans of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work - you’ll know that requires a proportionate increase in skill. As we build mastery, we are able to operate in greater challenge with less stress.
When burnout really hit its peak toward the back end of the pandemic, we had some really interesting conversations with clients, challenging their reaction that giving folks ‘time off’ as an antidote might sometimes be less effective than giving them new skills to cope with new challenges. In this case, wellbeing and growth aren’t just bedfellows, they’re spooning.
Ask yourself: How are you matching the challenge of growth with the care and support people need to be able to bring themselves fully into learning? (Hint if you are a ‘learning organization’ that allocates hardly any time for learning, you are not doing this well).
Equity: Access to growth opportunities
How are you ensuring everyone, including the most marginalized, has the opportunity to advance?
Building a personal development programme that is equitable is tough. There are so many factors that influence how people learn - from their lived experience of education, to their preferred learning styles and the practical constraints they face in their jobs.
Three things play a powerful role here. The first is understanding how people learn, and what stops them, on an individual level. Building out a blended approach to how people can learn new skills then allows people with different styles to find the one that suits them best. Especially in more self-directed learning environments that means leaders taking more marginalized employees by the hand and supporting them to step in.
The second is enabling people to learn through their work. Not making development something that always has to happen separately to the job - on a course or in a book, but rather making work a constant source of learning. This is particularly valuable for time- and resource-poor employees or programs. (We’ve seen the 70:20:10 learning model be a helpful guide here).
Which surfaces the third; the ability for people to seek and receive quality feedback on the work they do. A major challenge for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) employees traditionally, for example, has been receiving honest feedback. Either out of overt racial bias or an overcorrected desire to avoid that (white supervisors often avoid giving critical feedback to Black subordinates and peers out of a fear of being viewed as biased).
Ask yourself: How are you catering to the diverse learning needs of your employees? How are you enabling people to learn at work, and equipping leaders to provide honest quality feedback to everyone on their team?
Trying to peel professional development apart from personal growth has never been more impractical. If your culture is set up to develop employees without acknowledging their needs and passions as individual human beings, it’s not going to work.
Similarly, all of this must work within the larger container of the culture as a whole. Trying to encourage self-responsibility for personal growth in a system that hoards control at the top, simply won’t work.
How we change professional development needs to be addressed at source, not symptom. It’s just not going to fly anymore to see growth opportunities as a perk for talent attraction, rather than a promise embedded deeply into the experience of your culture.
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