So how much of the responsibility for employee development lies with the employee?
I don’t recall the specific verbiage that was used, but that was the gist of the question as I remember it. It came in a Q & A session following atalkAndy Janningand I gave about employee development, during which I advocated for employee development to be thought of differently than it often is.
Some version of that question was probably running through the minds of others in the audience after I was fairly direct about some managers’ general apathy toward developing their employees. I had suggested that organizations stop acting like the training department alone owns employee development. On a related note I opined that organizations need to stop holding Trainingmoreaccountable for employee development than those employees’ managers. I said that we, in organizations, need to stop making it OK if managers aren’t developing their employees, and stop thinking that a manager sending an employee to a training session counts as them developing them that employee. And then, to top it off, I argued that organizations need to stop promoting people into management if they don’t develop people; just being a technical expert isn’t good enough anymore.
