Does your job pay you to get better at your job?
It’s an interesting question. I assume most do not have the luxury of “professional development” programs or budgets, but that is normally the way a company will tout being able to answer “Yes” to that question.
Professional development is range-y: it can be workshops and training programs, it can be attending conferences to hear lectures about specific topics. That paired with books, blog posts, and even following various “thought leaders” in your space can lead one to feel very well-educated in their expertise.
Earlier in my career, I would consume this content & be excited about bringing that knowledge back to my colleagues, but I eventually found myself in a pattern of learning interesting processes and techniques, but not ever having an opportunity to apply them in the workplace.
Of course, some of that is in my own hands; I can work harder in evangelize new things our teams can do and even do proof-of-concept work on the side that showcases the value of the new idea I learned. This process can be challenging though as everyone may know, especially in fast-moving work environments that are output-driven.
Professional development options are mostly educational. Team members need opportunities to exercise their professional development.
It can be challenging to carve out time and resources for team members to exercise what they learned via professional development, but as a company or business owner, knowing you are investing in professional development opportunities should beget a subsequent investment of getting team members to utilize what they’ve learned.
Using what was learned professional development amidst deadlines
Work is mostly deadline-driven by default. With deadlines, there can be limited room to experiment with new methods of doing work.
Experimentation with new methods may be welcome though, but there are risks there such as more time than expected being taken, introducing tech and design debt, and a lack of contingency for maintaining experimental outputs (I know I still have a flash message on some screen in our app that don’t match the others - 🤫).
Repeat work opportunities
Another challenge to exercising professional development is the lack of opportunity to do the same type of work to iterate on the methods they learned from professional development resources. Team members may only apply one practice once or twice, especially if there are gaps in time between being able to use the technique again. That makes the method high-stakes and team members may feel like they need to do what they’re trying for the first time with proficiency (like we always ask for in our job descriptions, but I digress).
Most positions put team members in a place where they have repeat work opportunities though, that are similar enough that one can experiment with methods all-the-while bouncing between different projects.
Repeat work opportunities let team members try new techniques in their work as individuals: a Sketch plugin, a new Javascript framework, etc., but there are often techniques that extend beyond what is solely in their toolkit.
Resourcing
That said, resourcing can be a blocker in professional development, especially for more junior team members and team members with no “direct reports.” Some methods require knowledge and expertise outside of our personal skillsets, that may require a range of collaborators to be part of the process of evaluating the new method.
It can be tough to get other people in the company on board and, the path to evangelizing can be difficult amidst all the other goals these team members are looking to accomplish in their work.
All that considered…
It still seems that there would be valuable if the room were made to exercise what team members learn through professional development. We need practice.
The value of workplace practice (with an athlete analogy…)
I want to introduce this idea of “practice” in product development. In all, it probably isn’t difficult to understand the value of practice, so I hope not just to say “practice is important,” but more so “practice for your work is important.” Athletes know this, and we can see the impact of that in their output too.
The solid construction of expertise
Imagine if Serena Williams did not have practice within her profession. Repetition of common tactics and experimentation with new techniques to improve her on-court performance is likely a key part of her getting prepared for tennis tournaments, and all of those are happening outside of competition.
Mirroring that idea in the workplace, of course, it may seem out of the realm of imagination to have a majority of the effort an employee does not be a direct, quantifiable output, but all I would argue for is increasing the balance between time spent developing skills and time spent producing.
Flow
Athletes who practice and tinker with new techniques can also find themselves in flow states, where the game feels like it is going slower and can identify the finest details of their performance to make quick changes.
As I type this, I remember when LeBron James hit that running off-balance floater to win the game in the Eastern Conference Finals in 2018 (If you don’t care for the LeBron anecdote, replace it with Steph Curry and his half-court pull-up jumpers, or whatever). He was in “flow.” Even if this wasn’t a shot he explicitly practiced, he’s had so many opportunities to tinker with his skillset outside of the actual game and have the confidence to take and make this shot.
Surely if I was still drawing boxes and arrows like I was at the outset of my career and didn’t find time to synthesize what I’ve learned to better my arrow-box-drawing skills, my performance vs. my experience could be put into question. Some team members may be better at that synthesis than others, so giving those who may not be as sharp at developing their skills while producing more time to get better can be valuable in improving their performance.
These benefits of practice in sports can surely apply to other domains, including product development. It is not a concept we’re unfamiliar with either, with the whole homework thing from our schooling days and all…
Where’s our practice?
It can be challenging in the workplace to find opportunities to “practice,” or be enabled to exercise new things you’ve learned. Of course, you can use free time to work on side projects as well as venture out on your own to enable yourself professionally, but it seems like the workplace model needs an explicit shift to incorporate professional enablement in work alongside professional development programs like trainings and seminars.
Professional enablement is an investment in teams. Incorporating professional enablement in the workplace does require “slowing down” output. Much of the process of being creative and producing something new should be experimentation though, so making space to do so amongst production work can be valuable for individual and team growth.
Companies provide hack days, 10% time, and other activities that allow team members to work on something outside of the scope of their current work. These programs are fine, but if companies want to build talent, they should look to invest explicitly in professional enablement that has more of a natural flow in one’s work, the same way practice has a natural flow for athletes, and heck, most-all other aspects of life: cooking, wellness, finances, etc.
Professional enablement can be our practice.
Most opportunity to do professional enablement is created without systems in place to do so at work. Even high-up professionals will advise you and your team members to “go out and prove the importance of what you want to do!”; that “visionary” advice of enabling yourself to do work. It’s well-meaning, but why not put the onus on the company as well as the team member?
Make it easier for your team members to get it with some professional enablement. Showing your team members that you’re willing to invest in this and make space for them to build their talents will be recognized as mutually beneficial, for sure.
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