The quality and the potential of a business depends on its people. It isn’t surprising that smart businesses invest a lot in growing people. Unfortunately, most of those investments are costly and ineffective. Although the approaches used are based on sound reasoning and observation, they are too incomplete to work well with real human beings in real business systems.
I group the popular approaches to growing people into four general categories. Here are some of the concerns I have about each category:
Moving People Around
The most traditional approach moves people around to expose them to a variety of situations and cultures. In this way, their inherent potential can be drawn out. I agree with this approach’s basic premise that automatic patterns need to be interrupted for real learning and creativity to happen. But failing to provide supporting education and reflection means people sink or swim based on their ability to rise to the occasion. That might be useful for sorting, but it doesn’t necessarily support growth. Also, it favors breadth of experience over depth of understanding and can encourage superficiality.
Training
The second approach grows people through training. It works on giving people new skills, often through a workshop immersion experience. At one time this approach focused on purely functional skills. More recently it has begun to address emotional skills, and even to work on critical thinking. Again, I agree that these skills help grow people. But too often these training programs are splashed across the whole company and rarely take into account the needs of the individual. They happen when a company decides that people need to be sheep dipped in a new skill or idea.
Also, trainings are rarely integrated. Emotional, functional and thinking skills tend to be taught independently. Learning is not integrated across a team, whose members are generally trained separately. And the subject matter is not integrated with what the business is trying to drive, so people have trouble connecting between the business and the skill they are being asked to develop. Non-integrative training programs fail to generate a close connection between growing the business and growing people.
Develop Demonstrated Talent
The third approach grows people by developing their ability to take on increasingly demanding jobs that are perfectly matched to their current existing talents. Although this approach may look at what people are good at, it doesn’t necessarily develop a whole person. Many people have been encouraged to pursue talents that they find personally unfulfilling. To compound the problem, managers generally make the decisions about what an employee is good at.
The whole approach is based on a false premise—that people can’t change. In my experience, what really causes people to grow is a challenge that stretches them beyond what they are good at, but that is self-evidently meaningful to them and important to their work in the world. Starting from the premise that people should work within their existing strengths blocks true development.
Mentoring and Coaching
The fourth approach, mentoring and coaching, plays a big role in many organizations. This approach seeks to help individuals, especially minorities and women, succeed within the organization. But as mentoring becomes common, I hear reports of a major hazard. Focus on the individual, without adequate attention to context, causes them to grow sideways from the company’s direction. This problem is especially acute with coaching, which is usually intended to help “problem people” adjust to their situation. Without a means to reconcile the aspirations of the individual with those of the organization, mentoring can actually undermine its original intent.
Each of these approaches shares the weakness of working on people separate from working on the business. In the minds of those who go through these programs, the link is never adequately built. Supporting personality is favored over serving a larger shared purpose.
Three things differentiate my approach from those described above. First, I always engage people in three lines of work simultaneously: a.) growing the individual, b.) growing the group they are part of (e.g. business, team, or family) and c.) growing the ability of that group to contribute to a greater whole.
Three Lines of Work
I begin by connecting people to the unique, meaningful, and extraordinary contribution a business wants to make to the lives of those it serves—customers, community, the earth, investors. Based on this it becomes possible to ask each organized entity within the business, “How do you have to grow in order to do that?” A genuine need for growth doesn’t arise until there is a significant contribution the company wants to make that is beyond what people currently know how to do. As long as a business is only expanding and extending, there is no real need for growth in people.
Because the growth of each person is critical to the business’s ability to evolve, the stage is set for first line work. If the group is to grow, then every individual has to grow. But now the context is neither personal growth, nor a company directive about how an individual must grow. Rather, each individual reflects on the question, “How can I grow my ability to contribute to the new purpose that the company is wanting to play in the world?” Each individual creates a personal development plan, a plan linked to serving the stakeholders.
Work from Essence, Not Personality
A second major difference distinguishes how I approach growing people. I work from essence, not personality. Essence can be hard to see, but it’s real—it’s what you hear people trying to describe at a person’s funeral. Every individual has a higher nature that is unique—an essence. Personality, in contrast, is adaptive and socially conditioned. We each develop personality to be able to function within the family, community, and culture where we grow up. For each of us, parts of our personality are useful and parts are dysfunctional. A lot of energy goes into fixing the dysfunctions, while the functional parts are called talents. But all of this is externally imposed or communicated to us as a way to fit in. Working with essence is very different. Essence can be seen from earliest childhood, before the need to manage the environment dilutes it. It is that shining quality that is special in each of us, though it can be lost under the layers of personality.
I have found that if you create an organizational culture that helps people find and operate from their essence, the majority of behavioral problems or issues evaporate. The simplest way to grow such a culture is to have a clear vision of the greater contribution the organization is striving to make. Once people see the meaning and value of that vision, they can ask themselves how to most fully participate in making it happen.
When work is delegated from the outside, a person’s personality responds. Their personality looks at its environment and figures out how to manage to succeed. But if you invite people to understand and help create a larger whole, one of great meaning and significance; and if you ask them what their part could be in creating that whole; and if you demand that they grow in order to play that part; essence is what answers.
I’m not talking here about “internal entrepreneurs”—an idea that has been in circulation recently. I’m not suggesting that everyone should work on whatever they want because that will motivate them. Although it will motivate them, it will also create a culture of selfishness and diminish the capacity of the organization to achieve even ordinary goals. The key to my approach is that motivation is maintained by the higher purpose which each person has been part of creating, imbuing with meaning, and finding their own connection to.
Develop Internal Locus of Control
Finally, I always work to develop internal rather than external locus of control (a distinction made by developmental psychologists.) Internal locus of control occurs when people see themselves accountable and responsible for outcomes. Whether the outcomes are good or bad, they take responsibility. When people experience external locus of control, they tend to blame others for problems. Even when they blame themselves, they believe nothing else could have been done given the circumstances. Such people tend to become victims. A great deal of research shows that people who are primarily directed by an internal locus of control are happier, work better with others, and make greater contributions to the world and their own communities than those with an external locus of control.
If families, companies, and nations were made up of people with internal locus of control, everyone would take responsibility for making the whole work. Assigning people to training programs, moving them around, determining their talents for them, even mentoring them—all these things tend to evoke external locus of control.