How to Design an Effective System for Developing Managers and Executives. Maxine Dalton

of HR believed that development was critical to the organization, he was supportive of the initiative within his group. The members of the group not only personally benefited from the intervention, but they had the skills to give the program designer some useful feedback about the program itself before it was exposed to a larger and more critical part of the organization.

Educate Key Decision-makers

      Another tactic to sell the program internally is to employ what has come to be known in our Tools program as the “key-events questions.” Senior decision-makers in the organization are asked to respond to the following questions:

      When you think about your career, certain events or episodes probably stand out in your mind—things that led to a lasting change in you as a manager. Please identify a key event in your career, something that made a difference in the way you manage now. What happened? What did you learn from it? What were the challenges of the experience? How did you learn what you learned? What was going on in the environment that allowed you to learn?

      As the group shares its answers, the facilitator takes the opportunity to point out that just as these executives have experienced major learning from the events of their careers, it is also possible to incorporate that understanding into a program of development that makes experience intentional and purposeful, fully integrated with the work of the organization. A part of CCL’s initial research on how executives develop (McCall et al., 1988), these questions have remarkable impact. Almost all managers enjoy reviewing their personal key events. They are eager to talk to others about them, and they quickly see how important job experiences have been to their own development.

      They will discover, like our research samples, the kinds of key experiences that truly develop. They will also find that their organizations are doing remarkably little to assure that executives have the opportunity to experience these key events for themselves. Their stories illustrate that development occurs within a variety of experiences, including challenging job assignments and work tasks, working with especially competent (or incompetent) other people, in targeted coursework, and even during hardships (McCall et al., 1988; McCauley, Ruderman, Ohlott, & Morrow, 1994; Wick & Leon, 1993).

      As the HR professional, you can use the following exercise as illustration and example of how it is possible to structure and prescribe developmental activities; to move from the serendipitous to the intentional.

      Here is how one company used the key-events questions to get the attention of its senior management:

      Because the president of the company was vaguely interested in establishing some sort of system of succession, the HR development specialist was able to get on the agenda of the quarterly meeting of the president and division heads for a two-hour presentation. Interestingly and coincidentally, each of the divisions was facing a very different set of business challenges. One was in retrenchment; one was in a growth mode introducing some exciting new products; and another was recovering from a downsizing experience two years past. In other words, each division required a different set of managerial and leadership skills and, therefore, provided individuals with the opportunity to learn and use those skills.

      There was no history of individuals moving across divisions. The HR specialist used the key-events exercise to get this fairly gruff and reticent group to talk about their own careers and how they had learned. He introduced the notion of intentional learning from experience, using the divisions as the classrooms, each with a different set of lessons to be learned. The exercise “took,” and the HR specialist was asked to spend the remainder of the day with the group to discuss ways that such a system could be implemented. Because the key-events exercise reflected their own experience and the developmental strategy was integral to the business problems the group was facing, this group of managers decided that a program of development built on the experiences of the workplace was reasonable, practical, and desirable.