Pump Up Your Employee Development Process by Focusing on Strengths

May 20, 2013

Make your employee development process more effective by focusing on furthering your employees’ natural advantages.

In a recent session at the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago — where I have been commuting every Saturday for the last two years pursuing a degree in Management — I picked up on a new approach to employee appraisal and development: Identifying and amplifying strengths.
This can sound counter-intuitive to traditional HR practices, where employees’ skills and capabilities are evaluated according to some spectrum of competency, and the focus of performance management and appraisal is on addressing “weaknesses” or “areas for improvement”. However, research has shown that compared to these traditional programs, programs that focus on furthering areas perceived as the employees’ strongest capabilities can in fact result in much more effective performance enhancement, success, and promotion to higher responsibilities.
I think this is particularly applicable in organizations that employ knowledge or highly-skilled workers and expect them to excel and constantly renew their skills and abilities. And of course, those are the hallmarks of the fast growing expansion-stage technology companies we work with.

How to Encourage Employees to Shoot for the Next Level Rather than Just Hitting the Bare Minimum

It is true that the employee appraisal process must establish a minimum level of competency for each position in an organizational chart, and the employees at those positions need to satisfy these basic criteria, whether they are specific technical skills, domain knowledge, managerial skills or teamwork ability. However, in a team that is aiming to be best-in-class, if the recruitment and on-boarding process is any good, the team should already have those prerequisite skills and therefore should focus on excelling and taking themselves to the next level rather than ensuring that the minimum bar is met (you can read my 7 Tips for Developing an Employee Development Plan here).
This leads to the essential employee development question: Given their individual skill sets, what should employees be putting their time against to further develop themselves? If they have already met the minimum skill set required by the position, how can they determine the types of skills or capabilities they need to reach the next level?

The Case for Grooming Highly-Skilled Specialists Over Generalists

If we consider an economic model of a competitive market where workers are competing to offer their skills for new positions or promotions, then the best course of action for employees is to emphasize and further their current advantages. After all, that helps to set them further apart from other jobseekers, and makes them more valuable to the employer. In most cases, it is clearly better to be an expert than a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Given the existing advantages in certain skills, employees tend to gain far more in developing those skills than if they invest the same amount of time and efforts in addressing competencies where they are not as strong.
This approach ultimately allows organizations to develop exceptional domain knowledge experts and leaders who are at the top of their respective fields, and who are happiest and most gainfully employed because they are doing what they do best.

Employee Development Challenges

Building a workforce of highly talented specialists is not something easily accomplished, not only because of the tendency of traditional HR already explained above, but also because of the three following challenges:

  1. Employees may want to transition: Management still needs to consider individual employees’ preferences. Some people want to make a move into a field or a position that they are not familiar with or not assumed to be strong with, but they are passionate about it. While this is arguably not efficient in the short term, the employer does have the responsibility to be flexible and accommodate this attempt at transitioning by allowing the employee to explore these options and invest time and efforts in acquiring the necessarily skills.
  2. Employees do not always recognize the extent of their own opportunities and potential: Even if an employee is happy in a current position and is using skills that he or she has an advantage at, he or she might not be fully aware of other latent talents that are even more valuable and can provide even better opportunities. Making employees aware of this requires a skilled team manager or talent spotter who can recognize the potential and encourage a shift in the developmental direction, in a subtle and sensitive manner.
  3. Specialists are not always the best team players: This development approach will create organizations with very strong individual contributors, but not necessarily the most cohesive of teams. For example, a development team might be very strong in technical skills but weaker in collaboration practices. Organizations with this problem will need to seek out and develop the “glue” — individuals uniquely talented in bringing people together and coordinating projects. These are also special skills that need to be recognized early and developed, just like technical or analytical skills.

If you like this topic, check out my previous blog post on employee development programs.
 
 
 
 

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.