Whose responsibility is employee development anyway?

Author: Caroline Green

In today's ever-evolving workplace, a structured approach to staff development has never been more crucial. But when time-poor managers meet with their high-expectation employees, it begs the question: whose responsibility is development anyway? The answer, says career development expert Caroline Green, is all about balance.

With a backdrop of the cost-of-living crisis, new technologies and new ways of working, the expectations on employees and their managers in the workplace have never been so high. To manage these choppy waters, skills development is crucial, but a coordinated plan of approach is required for it to be truly effective. Organisations wishing to create a robust framework fostering growth and achievement while meeting performance requirements must strike the right balance between managerial guidance and individual initiative. And HR has a crucial role to play in this.

Where does development start?

It's a common scenario. A busy HR office, a desperate manager seeking help with developing a member of their team but struggling with the how. The reason they're struggling? They're not building on solid foundations.

For employee development to happen successfully, the line manager's role begins long before any development conversation takes place. If they want to foster a culture of innovation and high performance, they must set the right culture to empower individuals to achieve that. This starts with building psychological safety, where employees are unafraid to try and potentially fail, but to learn from the experience with no fear of recrimination. This is where real growth happens, and the more they are comfortable with that, the more they will take their learning destiny in their own hands.

Establishing a culture of learning is also crucial. While HR can support this as an organisation-wide approach, a manager role-modelling this is very powerful. An employee witnessing their manager always learning and growing, whatever their seniority or tenure, will inspire them. This will create the perfect environment for employees to drive their own development.

Building on those foundations

With the learning culture foundations in place, now is the time for an individual development conversation. All too often, managers and employees will be straight back in that HR office, cap in hand, asking for budget for a specific training course. However, often they will have missed a vital step in the process: identifying the actual need for it.

Development should never be haphazard, signing up for the latest shiny training course simply because it has landed in someone's inbox. Instead, it requires a systematic approach based around:

• what the job needs now that the individual can't (yet) do/needs further support with;
• what the job needs now that the individual is great at, but could develop further;
• what the job will need for the future, and assessing the individual's current knowledge, experience and skills to do it; and
• what the individual wants for their career.

Only after discussing this strategic plan should the detailed activities be established. 

Role of the manager

When establishing the development plan activities, the manager will have a greater handle on resource allocation and what may or may not be possible. It is up to them to communicate this effectively, feeding back to employees on their ideas, sharing their own ideas and explaining the "why" of agreed or denied development requests.

Their role, however, does not end there. They also need to empower employees to drive forward their plan, encouraging autonomy while offering support. This includes setting regular check-ins, assessing progress rather than simply waiting until the end, and providing regular feedback. It may involve having critical conversations when things aren't going well, and reward and recognition when they are.

Responsibilities of the employee

With an empowering culture established, employees should flourish, driving forward the agreed plan. They will require a positive attitude where they're not afraid to try, and potentially fail, and to learn from that. There is also a need for practical logistics such as organising development activities and not having a fixed mindset about these.

Employees often feel their organisation is only investing in them if they attend a paid training course. On the contrary, extensive research shows that a 70/20/10 approach to development - where 70% is on-the-job training, 20% is informal learning and just 10% happens in more formal settings like training courses - has a much greater impact.

An employee who can reach out across the organisation, get involved in projects they wouldn't normally be part of, liaise with new stakeholders they could partner with or even sit in and observe meetings they wouldn't usually attend, will develop extensive skills before they even step into the meeting itself. One who doesn't and becomes fixated on training courses may well require a different performance and development conversation altogether. 

For development to be truly successful, the employee also needs to reflect on their learning and seek feedback from others, listening and acting on it, safe in the knowledge that they won't get everything right first time (this is after all a learning experience). As part of their self-reflection, keeping a learning log, using it to reflect and feeding back to their manager and other relevant stakeholders, will be the key to success and embedding any learning.

Communication and collaboration

Communicating effectively, including timeframes and logistics, is crucial to the success of any development programme. It will be the responsibility of both employee and manager to liaise on this and to make it work. The employee needs to organise their time effectively to do the development while maintaining productivity, and the manager needs to support with further resources where required. 

Effective communication is also required in liaising with HR. To some extent, the involvement of HR will be dependent on your particular organisation, including whether it has a central training budget or not. However, as individuals skilled and trained in people development, HR can support with any challenges with development and performance conversations, as well as having a good knowledge of what is happening across the organisation. This means they are well placed to suggest areas where an employee can add value to develop their skills, for example working on a particular project with another team.

The part played by HR

HR can also play a key role in helping the organisation as a whole to understand the need for balance between who drives what when it comes to development.

There are many ways HR can support individuals and groups in the organisation, including delivering line manager training on the topic, or other related skills training to assist the managers in having these conversations. They can also ensure there is regular communication with the business, such as whole staff or senior manager town halls, to explain development requirements and really focus on support at key times such as during appraisals.

This is a time where HR can get involved and show that, rather than simply being a paperwork exercise, these are conversations that are crucial to developing a coordinated approach to action planning and can really support employees to move forward in their performance and career. HR can assist with this in many ways, including running appraisal workshops for both line managers and employees, where each can learn about their roles and responsibilities in the appraisal process and how to take any action forward, not least development opportunities.

Key takeaway - work collaboratively!

As always, the greatest development and performance initiatives will be achieved by the employee, manager and HR working collaboratively, resulting in the best outcome for the individuals and the organisation as a whole

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