Sometimes definitions can help. In improving leadership talent, it really does matter.
In the classic movie “Princess Bride,” Vizzini was fond of saying “Inconceivable!” every time something occurred that surprised him. Not once, but three of four times before Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinton of Criminal Minds fame) finally said, “You keep using that word—I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Great word, sounded neat, not used correctly. The same frequently holds true when we use words like “Training,” “Coaching,” and “Development” interchangeably. They don’t mean the same thing, and their differences matter.
Training is foundational. It’s providing information, processes and methodology, in a controlled setting. It makes someone qualified to learn the job. Note I didn’t say “qualified to do the job,” but “qualified to learn the job.” Too often we like to think that Training = Qualified. It doesn’t. After training, people need relevant application and experience to actually master the skills trained. And they’ll need Coaching.
Coaching speeds up the experiential process, ensuring that an employee is gaining applicable skills as quickly as possible, and avoiding undue distractions in their growth. Sometimes remedial in nature, other times aimed at making good performance even better, coaching is always skill-specific, connecting the knowledge gained from Training to the relevance and proficiency acquired through practice and experience.
Development is preparation for growth and further success. It’s not about honing skills required currently, nor is it Coaching for improved performance, even for high performers. Development is providing new experiences and understandings in areas, topics, and focus not specific to an employee’s current job. Those last seven words are important: … not specific to an employee’s current job. (admit it, you went back and counted those words, didn’t you?). And unlike Training and Coaching —both specific, finite efforts—Development is programmatic, an ongoing process. Empowering to do part of a supervisor’s job could be development, as could be rotational assignments, higher-level skills training (leadership for non-leaders, for example), and most real mentoring efforts.
Development gets a lot more press than its brethren mentioned above, since most true empowerment effort are a form of development, and those frequently create that holy grail, “Discretionary Effort,” simply defined as those added efforts that employees are not required to give.
Now you get to say, “I do not think it means what you think it means.” And of course, you can carry a cool sword.
