Successful leaders understand that high-performing teams depend on more than just strong direction or high-quality outputs. Long-term sustainability relies on establishing a pipeline in which junior employees become future leaders and develop the qualities necessary to sustain the cycle of growth.
As such, leadership involves striking a careful balance between prioritizing the short-term, tactical outputs of a team, such as client deliverables, and more future-focused aims, such as employee learning. In my world of management consulting, this can be particularly challenging, as demanding clients and short project runways often leave teams scrambling to carve out time for focused instruction or to create development plans for associates just starting their careers.
When handled poorly, this balancing act usually results in dropped plates: developing junior team members takes a backseat to grinding out results. When that happens, individuals early in their careers find themselves focused on executing the “What” of a project output, with little opportunity to understand the “Why” behind it.
Having, at times, experienced that phenomenon early in my own career, I try to pay special attention to creating thoughtful learning environments on my own teams. What I’ve learned is that leaders can take a handful of small, but important, steps to ensure development is appropriately in scope, regardless of external pressures.
Create safe environments for failure
For junior team members, “failure” should represent an opportunity rather than a catastrophe. Leaders need to strike yet another balance by ensuring that early-career learners have meaningful opportunities to contribute to team deliverables, while maintaining an environment where setbacks don’t bring things to a screeching halt. What that means for me is never assigning a more junior team member a task that I’m uncomfortable with, unwilling to execute or that I’m inexperienced in executing myself.
Leaders need to be willing to coach on the field, which at times means putting a hand in the dirt alongside someone and helping them work through a process. I fundamentally believe that good leaders don’t take responsibility away from people, and as a result, it is essential that responsibilities are assigned thoughtfully and with a clear development goal in mind.
Schedule focused time for feedback, learning and development. Then, protect it.
While it may sound obvious, one of the best ways to ensure that junior employee development is taken seriously is to actually put it on the calendar. Regardless of one’s positive intentions, check-ins and daily standups can quickly devolve into tactical working sessions rather than focused time for offering guidance or strategic direction.
One approach I’ve implemented across project teams is ensuring that everyone I oversee has a standing “growth and development” timeslot with me at a regular cadence. This time is protected and belongs to them. While I might be tempted to ask about project deliverables or timelines, these sessions are focused entirely on bi-directional feedback (development areas AND how I can better serve them as a lead), and personal development topics of their choosing (e.g., professional presence, workstream delegation, presentation skills). While this scheduled approach isn’t a replacement for informal alignments or mentorship, it does help me keep team development firmly on my radar.
Help people find their voices, and encourage them to speak up
Having an “open door policy” as a leader is all well and good, but it’s meaningless if your team members don’t actually feel empowered to speak up. It’s important for leaders to accept and own their fallibility as decision makers. You will be wrong sometimes, and junior team members should feel like you’re open to input and perspectives beyond your own. Individual contributors can’t develop the skills necessary to lead if they never have the opportunity to engage with strategic decisions and ask meaningful questions.
Moreover, creating an environment where every team member feels comfortable speaking up also taps into a diversity of insights that you might otherwise miss. Individuals in the earliest stages of their careers bring not only different lived experiences but also often novel approaches to problems, new technical tools or techniques and fresh perspectives on your industry. By ignoring junior development, you deprive your team of a powerful injection of new knowledge. Good leaders create environments designed to capture it.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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