Development

Development is widely equated with training, and training is the smallest of its three sources.

• Work that stretches, being tasks slightly beyond current ability with support available. This is where most capability is built, and it is allocated by managers rather than by a development function.
• Feedback and exposure, being coaching, working alongside someone more capable, and being told accurately how you are doing.
• Instruction, being courses, qualifications and structured content, which transfers knowledge efficiently and does not by itself build capability.

The practical implication is that an organisation with a substantial training budget and no deliberate allocation of stretching work is spending money on the least effective channel while ignoring the most effective one, which costs nothing.

It also means development is largely a management activity rather than an HR one. HR can provide instruction and structure; only the manager decides what work someone gets.

Capability that is built and not used disappears. Someone trained in a technique they never apply will not have it a year later, and the training was a cost with no return.

This is the most common failure in organisational development, and it is structural rather than individual: people are sent on courses without any plan for what they will do differently afterwards.

The second row is the practical rule: sequence instruction as close as possible to its first real use. Training delivered months before the work is largely gone by the time it is needed.

The fourth row is worth naming honestly. Sending someone on a course as recognition is not development, and describing it as such makes the development function look like it is producing activity.

Development is rarely distributed evenly, and the distribution is rarely deliberate.

It tends to flow to people who ask, people whose managers are attentive, people in head office rather than field or shift roles, and people already identified as high potential, which is frequently a judgement made early on limited evidence and then self-fulfilling.

• Check who actually received development in the last year, by team, level, location and group. The distribution is usually more uneven than anyone expects.
• Look specifically at shift, field and site populations, who are commonly excluded by delivery formats that assume a desk and a laptop.
• Notice whether high potential designation is doing selection or prediction, since a group given all the opportunity will outperform regardless of initial ability.
• Ask whether people who did not ask were offered anything, since a request-driven system rewards confidence rather than need.

The third point deserves care. Concentrating development on an identified group is a legitimate strategy, and it should be recognised as an investment decision rather than mistaken for a finding about who is capable.

Development functions are measured on activity because activity is easy to count, and it says almost nothing.

Training hours delivered, courses completed, satisfaction scores and budget utilisation are all inputs. They record that something was provided, not that anyone can do anything they could not do before.

• Ask whether the person can now do something they could not, assessed by someone who would know.
• Track internal fill rate for roles requiring the capability being built, which is the organisational version of the same question.
• Watch time to competence for new joiners in key roles, which is a capability measure in a different guise.
• Follow up months later rather than at the end of the session, since immediate satisfaction predicts almost nothing about transfer.

The last is the cheapest improvement available. A short check three months after a development intervention, asking what has actually been used, produces more useful information than any end-of-course form.

• Cutting development first in a downturn, which is understandable and produces a capability gap two years later that nobody connects to the decision.
• Buying content libraries and counting access as provision. Unused access is a subscription, not development.
• Making development conditional on a formal plan that most people never complete, which filters for administrative persistence.
• Delivering everything in formats that exclude the people furthest from head office.
• Treating development as an individual benefit rather than as an organisational capability question, so nobody asks what the organisation needs to be able to do.

The last is the most consequential. An organisation that develops whatever individuals request will build a scattered set of capabilities, some of which it needs. Starting from what the strategy requires produces a different and usually shorter list, and makes it possible to say whether the spend achieved anything.