Building Better LeadersI had a great conversation the other day with a talented twenty-something who just exudes confidence, competence and excitement about her career and her interest in professional development.  Her reviews are top flight, she has been managing a major client account to great results, and she is actively pursuing her M.B.A. degree.  This is one motivated young professional!

It’s too bad that her biggest dilemma is, “My job is fine, but I’m starting to get bored. I want some bigger challenges and I want to lead, and they keep telling me that they are working on a program for that. They also tell me that they are worried that any new projects will distract me from my main job.  But I have the time and energy to do more.”

First, let’s tackle the program issue. A program for what?  A program to figure out how to give an aggressive, capable person more responsibility?  A program to magically teach someone how to lead, when there are ample opportunities to begin learning in the workplace every day?

You don’t need a stinking program to sit down with your team members and talk about next steps and then work together to define some good developmental challenges. You as manager and leader must be interested in ensuring that people are challenged, learning and growing.  There’s no HR program in the world that replaces your responsibility to spend time challenging and coaching your team members.  You own this responsibility.

As a manager and developer of early career talent, here’s a newsflash.  Leadership and talent development is free. Your only cost is time and maybe a bit of creativity.

I like to apply Ram Charan’s “Apprenticeship” approach, where you as the manager are responsible for providing your employee with a series of increasingly ambiguous challenges. Over time as the individual confronts the challenges, they are gaining valuable and relatively risk-free experience learning to cope with the realities of more responsibility.  (Note: I guide participants through one of these programs in my course: Considering the Move to Leadership-What to Expect and How to Prepare.)

Often, the outcome of this program is that individuals begin to zero in on what they truly want to do next…manage others, manage projects or focus on developing their skills as an individual contributor.  Without the apprenticeship program to uncover interests and identify strengths and weaknesses, everyone is left guessing.

As for my conversation partner, I encouraged her to take the initiative to outline her own rough career plan and next general steps (she wants to lead) and then sit down with her managers and share this plan and ask for their help. She of course is responsible for convincing them that she is capable of executing here current role without missing a beat, and I encouraged her to position herself as someone both interested in contributing more and solving more problems as well as someone that welcomes coaching.

She will learn a lot about her managers if they continue to push her off, and she will learn a lot about herself if they appropriately support her.  Either way, it’s worth politely pushing the issue.