We recently hosted a free webinar, Transforming Employee Development: A Manager’s Guide, with David Berke, a principal at Lorsch, Berke & Associates, LLC. David has more than 25 years of experience as a manager, individual contributor, and consultant in the fields of management, leadership, employee, and organization development.
Over 200 people listened to the webinar live. You may view the archived webinar here.
Here is what some of our participants had to say about the webinar:
“Great webinar- Good ideas that I can implement immediately!”
“Nice job. Thanks for making this very easy as well as informative.”
“Nice that we can have our questions answered on the spot. Presenter seemed friendly and knowledgeable.”
The presentation began with a discussion of Basic Project Management. Berke said that can be broken down into four steps that essentially, “every project manager does whether the project is preventing a massive technology change in an organization or doing something a little less massive in a department or for the organization as a whole.”
Next he moved into Applying Project Management to Development and the six steps that are involved. There are two main benefits to this approach:
- It begins with what many managers already know.
- It focuses on business processes, not psychological processes.
Berke said, “The first thing that anybody does when they’re starting a project is to figure out who’s going to do what. You translate that here to agreeing on mutual expectations. The next thing they do is to figure out what they’re going to work on and then define a goal. The translation to development is to identify what people need to develop and then put together the development goal. The next step with the project is to figure out so how are you going to accomplish that goal and then if we’re looking at employee development, the next step ought to be but often isn’t, designing a development assignment because a development assignment is going to actually tell you what you need to do to accomplish the development goal.”
There are many layers involved with development and management as a whole!
The topic of motivation came up next. Berke said, “One of the things that I noticed, what a lot of employees want, they want the managers to manage. They’re not looking for a teacher. They’re looking for a manager. They’re looking for somebody who can take care of things so that the employee actually has the time and space and support to do the learning that he or she needs to do.
“The other thing I see is lots of opportunities for managers to act in ways that will help the employee to stay motivated. Now I tend to be one of those people who think that basically motivation comes from within. I can’t motivate you. You can’t motivate me but I also know from experience that there are things managers do that will make it more likely that people will get motivated and stay that way or make it more likely that they will lose motivation and so when you look here, one of the things that I see employees asking the managers is that they do those things that will help them to stay motivated.”
In the course of the hour-long session, Berke also talked about behavioral language as well as writing development goals. A key topic was making goals more than SMART.
Many of us already use SMART goals. They are:
S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Actionable
R – Realistic
T – Time Sensitive
Burke suggests making the goals SMARTESST. Adding the following letters:
E – Engagement
ST – Support Structure
Think about if that is something that will work for you!
Next, a quick poll of all participants asked, “After establishing the development goal, what is usually the next step?”
- Prepare a plan (21% of participants)
- Determine how to accomplish the goal and then prepare a plan (76% of participants)
- Send employee to HR to figure out what to do (3% of participants).
The correct answer is number 2. Many of the participants had it correct. Did you??
You can view the archived webinar here and learn even more. It is well worth your time and energy.
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