Shadow Dancing: Phantom Development Practices Abound

Have you been fascinated with having special powers? As a kid comic book enthusiast, I would spend hours reading the adventures of various superheroes. When those stories came to life on the small or big screen, I was front and center (still am, truth be told). Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man, was a stud. He was the world’s first bionic man. For those of a certain age, do you remember this mid-1970’s TV Show intro? “Steve Austin. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic man…Steve Austin will be that man. We can make him better than he was before. Better…Stronger…Faster.” YES! I was hooked. He was built to be the best.

We may have fallen into a misdirected expectation of such a build for our employees. Obviously, there is no $6,000,000 budget per employee for such development (wouldn’t that be nice?). However, do we expect our employees to behave and produce as if that level of budget has been invested? Now before you shake your head no, think about it. How many times have you thought or said, “Why does {this person} act like this?” or more likely, “What is wrong with {this person}?” Admit it; you have.

What if the truth is that the person is operating at the level of awareness and education given? Our expectation of someone without confirmation of investment to that learning level or self-awareness factor is our fault, not theirs, right? Let’s pretend that I yelled at one of my children (imagine it…never happened…fingers crossed) for doing something that, in my opinion, they should have known not to do. Those big, beautiful eyes would look up at me in confusion. And that child would be right if I had not shared previously why to avoid or to act upon something. The knowledge would have been helpful. It may not have kept them from doing the opposite anyway (ah, kids), but that would be a different conversation.

And we may jump to shouting or scaring a child when they go running into the street. We go into quick-response protection mode. That’s not what we’re speaking of here. This is about development. This is about those competencies such as critical thinking, project management, time management and creative approaches. We often have this expectation of our staff with very little investment in their curation.

Our excuses will be that we don’t have a budget or time. We might be okay with the shadow of activity rather than the reality of productivity because of these constraints. Fine, but look at the performance appraisals of various team members. How many have ratings based upon skills, aptitudes and knowledge that the organization has not helped to foster? Be honest. Look at the real investment of learning that has occurred, not just the first-day sharing of user name and password for the LMS.

It is not going to be true that every organization is failing at this. It isn’t. But it’s worth looking at every so often.

For many of us, our organizations are cutting back. Trying to walk into Finance with a list of demands might be met with disdain. This idea of doing more with less is not a new concept to human resource practitioners. We know that we will still need to train and develop staff regardless. Let’s not grow weary of doing so, even if we don’t have that $6 million budget. We can’t build Steve Austin, okay, but we can build Marcy, Tim, Joann and Diego. We can work with what we have more deliberately. We have the technology. Our smartphones alone have more technology in them than the computers used to build the Six Million Dollar Man. Use those to start. We have the capability.