At some point in their careers, the good leaders discover inside themselves what Jack Welch calls a "generosity gene." When the traits of that gene...to continue the metaphor...manifest, leaders start caring about developing their teams, developing the people on those teams, and enjoying the growth and success of others as much as their own.

Since I have written elsewhere about how to build great teams, this post will concentrate on strategies for developing the people on your team.

One thing I notice is that when the generosity gene starts manifesting in leaders, they have the urge to do something, but they often don't know what to do.

A client of mine recently moved into a senior position and lamented the fact that he did not have a track record for developing others: there were no people around the Valley who had worked for him and gone on to do great things other places. He asked for my help in figuring out how to close that gap because he honestly didn't know where to start.

Here's a one sentence summary of what I told him: Leaders don't actually develop their people, but if leaders don't do their part, their teams will not develop as well or as quickly. I know that sounds like one of those Yogi Berra-isms... "Nobody-goes-there-anymore-because-its-too-crowded", but it should make more sense by the end.

By the end, I will also back up this bold claim: if you just do the five things I outline here, you will be better at developing people than 95% of the leaders out there.

Leaders don't actually develop their people, but if leaders don't do their part, their teams will not develop as well or as quickly.

Five Levers for Creating an Environment that Catalyzes Growth

1) Make Sure Your Direct Reports are Intentional. Here's the reality: the people on your team develop themselves. They have their own inner orienting mechanisms that they are consciously or unconsciously responding to. They paddle their own canoes. They keep driving and stretching and learning and getting up off the mat. Or they don't.

But leaders can nudge. One great nudge is to make sure each person on your team gets clear on what s/he is pointed towards, both short-term and long-term.

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, writes in his book The Alliance that leaders should work with employees to define a "tour of duty": a mission...something they want to accomplish over the next X period of time, usually six months to a couple years. Not only should the "what" of the mission be discussed, but also how specifically this particular mission will benefit the employee's career. Mr. Hoffman argues that work then becomes a mutually beneficial alliance with explicit terms about the value both sides will derive.

You will also be better positioned to help your people grow if you know the longer term career aspiration of each employee. This was recently brought into graphic relief for another client of mine. He went into the CFO's office to share and discuss the themes of his 360 feedback (which the CFO had provided input on). The CFO said, "Before I look at any of this and try to provide you some perspective, I need to know what job you are aspiring to."

So while individuals ultimately develop themselves, you can help by pushing them to get clear on what they want to get out of their current job and also the longer term position they have their sights on. Armed with this information you will be able to tailor your feedback and development suggestions and help them extract the lessons learned, in the areas you know really matter to them.

People need a target. Not just a numerical target. Not just an output target. A target for what good vs. not so good in their job looks like. People in all jobs are hungry for this, but few are getting it.

2) Define What Good-Better-Great Looks Like for Each Job. People need a target. Not just a numerical target. Not just an output target. A target for what good vs. not so good in their job looks like. People in all jobs are hungry for this, but few are getting it.

Here's an indication. In the mid 90s, Ben Horowitz, now a Silicon Valley VC and icon, got so frustrated with the Product Managers whom he was working with at the time that he wrote a post called Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager.

Product Managers in the Valley, in 2019, are so desperate for guidance about how to do the PM job that they are still using that paper, despite it having a warning label on it that it is 1) 20+ years old and 2) probably not relevant.

You help grow people if you can provide them with even a directional standard they can measure what they are doing against. My colleague and friend Gordon Curphy, whose Rocket Model is, in my opinion, the best team building resource on the market, puts it this way: Leaders need to show people how to win.

This is certainly easier if you are VP of Product and most of the people under you are Product Managers, that is to say, doing similar jobs. It would be much more work for a CMO with many different jobs under her/him to define what good and not so good look like.

But even a simple first pass is worth the effort: what are the key dimensions of each job and what does good-better-great performance look like on the various dimensions? (As an aside, when Horowitz wrote his Product Manager article, he was imagining he was training a dog...Yes, good dog. No, very bad dog. Let me be clear, I am definitely not recommending that approach!)

A corollary to this second lever is that you need to be able to role model what some portion of Great looks like, on at least some of the dimensions. If you tell people that someone great at their job demonstrates a passion for responding to customers but you don't...or that great at their job means being a good story teller, but you're not, helping them grow will be slow going because they have to figure it out on their own. You don't have to be able to do their jobs, but there are parts you should be able to role model if you want to expedite development.

3) Turn Your Op Reviews into Dojos, Imbued with "Coop-etition." Dojos are places for people to learn and practice...places to prepare for potential attacks, with much lower stakes.

One plain advantage of a training in a dojo vs. training on your own is the group. Groups provide a variety of people to practice with, imitate, and learn from. People also train harder in group settings than they do on their own (ask a Cross-Fitter). Why? Because a group environment introduces this element of coop-etition. Yes, you are cooperating and trying to help each other, but there is also an element of competition...you're assessing yourself relative to the others.

Baking coop-etition into your Op Reviews is a powerful growth catalyst. Most Op Reviews I have observed are, sadly, neither effective, nor oriented towards learning. Look no further than the number of people with their laptops open, catching up on email.

Done well, your operating reviews are a chance for people to get up and tell their story, ensure their strategy is clear, defend their position, outline their logic, show accountability for a miss, share concerns they have and what they are doing about them, spread a best practice, lead a pre-mortem so others can poke holes in their plan, conduct an after action review to extract the lessons for how to do it better next time, and let the team know what they can count on them for over the next few months in terms of deliverables.

Insisting that the rest of the team put the laptops away and engage by reacting, supporting, asking questions, challenging, and making improvement suggestions, will raise the stakes and increase the learning from each other so everyone gets more out of it.

Op Reviews, as a learning ground, will result in people becoming better story tellers, better on their feet, better at handling opposing views with aplomb, better at being accountable and not making excuses, better at taking a punch, getting up, and learning from their mistakes, better at asking for help, better at supporting each other and lifting each other up, better at thinking through issues, and better at setting achievable targets so as not to let their teammates down.

If that list isn't development, I don't know what is.

And besides, if you really care about them and their growth, that feeling is what they will carry with them through their careers, much more than the specifics of whatever feedback you provided.

4) Don't Be Afraid to Give Them Your View of "the Truth." Some managers worry about being judgmental. News Flash: Most of managing others is judgmental! Your model in #2 is a judgment. What constitutes "good" and "bad" and "great" in the model are judgments. How an individual stacks up against the model of targeted behaviors are judgments. Of course, some jobs have quantifiable metrics. But going one step further to sort out why someone is achieving their metrics or not achieving them will almost always come down to judgments.

Another opportunity for "truth telling" is that as the leader, with different experiences and perspective, you often see something that the other does not. It could be something that is a real gift they are not identified with that they could be leveraging more often or it could be a blindspot that is creating friction with those around them.

So don't hold back, even if they don't fully agree with you or other managers assessed them differently. Sharing what you see gives something to push off from as they figure out what is true for them.

And besides, if you really care about them and their growth, that feeling is what they will carry with them through their careers, much more than the specifics of whatever feedback you provided.

You would be hard-pressed to find a better example of my point here than the feedback Sheryl Sandberg gave Kim Scott while both were at Google (the story is in the first five minutes of the video).

5) Remember, It's the Job that does the Heavy Lifting on the Development Front. So Make Sure the Job is Providing Stretch. I saved the most important one for last. It might be hard to swallow, but the lion's share of the development people experience does not come from the coaching you provide, no matter how good it is. It comes from the the job. But that doesn't let you off the hook: you still have to help get the job right.

When I was 26, I led a study which gathered feedback from over 5000 managers and leaders at Honeywell about the key elements of their development over the course of their careers. The overwhelming response was that the biggest driver of their growth was not a mentor, not a coach, not a boss, and, unequivocally, not all the training programs they attended. It was certain jobs they had held.

Time and time again, the Honeywell leaders told the research team that their steepest learning curve occurred when they got thrown in over their heads, in the middle of a crossfire of intractable problems, and, not only survived, but actually figured out how to make the situation better.

You can verify this for yourself. Start informally asking people when they experienced the most growth in their career and what they think caused that growth. My guess is that you will rarely hear "I learned at the feet of...a really smart...or technically brilliant...or the most strategic guy/gal on earth." Chances are those types are actually not good people developers because they can be a little full of themselves and have a tendency to get involved in issues far below the level they should be operating at.

What you are more likely to hear is some combination of, "I worked for a boss who pushed me way out of my comfort zone. I had to confront my imposter syndrome. I was given measured doses of tough love when I made missteps. I was allowed to figure a lot out for myself. In the end, I realized how much I was capable of."

If that is true, one of your key roles as a developer of others is to continue to challenge people to get out of their comfort zones and take on new challenges. This quote from the late Miles Davis, who almost single-handedly ushered Jazz into new eras, not once but, multiple times, captures the essence of this: "The reason I don't play ballads anymore is because I love playing ballads so much." He knew that if he was going to grow as a musician, he had to stop doing what he loved and plow new ground.

Unless you are in a start-up, there are rarely many plum, blue ocean, high challenge jobs laying around to throw people into. In fact, odds are that your job is not even one of those.

But one lever you always have is good old-fashioned delegation. Keep taking stuff off of your plate and giving it to people on the team, especially the things that expose them to senior leadership or outside departments or functions.

Think about what each person is doing and decide, not who is working hard and seems really busy, but who is pushing themself into new terrain. But also keep in mind, the objective is to stretch them, not to bury them. So helping them periodically reprioritize is way better than being overly protective.

In addition to developing your directs, delegation has two ancillary benefits for you. Getting stuff off your plate will allow you to work on even higher leverage items or "new frontier" problems which might enable you to work yourself outside your own comfort zone.

Second, odds are you think you are the only one who can handle some of the items on your list. Delegating more than you think you should will allow you to disabuse yourself of that Hero story and make everyone's life better, especially yours.

It might be hard to swallow, but the lion's share of the development people experience does not come from the coaching you provide, no matter how good it is. It comes from the the job. But that doesn't let you off the hook: you still have to help get the job right.

That's it. Five levers to create a fertile environment for your people to grow and develop in. Is it perfect? No. Are there other things you can do? Yes. But as I said up front, these five levers will make you a better developer of people than 95% of leaders out there.

How can I say that when it is not perfect and incomplete? Because if you ask leaders what their mental model or framework is for helping their people grow, most won't have one. They're not deliberate. They're winging it and any growth people experience is episodic. And any scientist will tell you that having the wrong model is better than no model at all, because the wrong model will lead you to the right one by giving you something to test.

Purportedly, the Buddha's last message to his followers was, "Be a light unto yourself." He was reminding them to not take what he had said on faith and imploring them to go figure out for themselves if what he had said was true or not.

Ditto with this post. It's not gospel. It's something to test. Keep what works, throw out what doesn't, come up with a better approach, and make it your own. And then please, share what you learned so those feeling the pull of their generosity gene know how to answer the call.

A little more generosity circulating in the world wouldn't hurt.