From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

How do you cultivate employee development?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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How do you cultivate employee development?

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(upbeat music) - Well there's two types of development where they go past. One is they've eclipsed you. Nothing makes me happier when somebody's eclipsed me, then they should have my job, or maybe it's time for them to go strike out on their own, or do something different. They should go expand their reach. Maybe we can't offer that, and how do you support that? It's an interesting thing. We often look at that as like oh they left, they're dead to us. Well instead what if we look at it as they're still friends of the family, and they always continuously give. If we think about it in those terms of the compounding effect that that delivers, it's extraordinarily powerful, but that's the first part. There's the other side which is, you know what, sometimes people, like the pitcher has to be taken out of the game. And you've just been in too long, it's the role, it's the team, maybe it's the organization, maybe it's even the company, and it's time to go. Almost every time I've had to let somebody go from an organization, the real question that comes about is how do we find a place where they are going to be maximally impactful. And if we are not setting them up for success to be amazing in that four to six year horizon or whatever time period we want to pick is, then as an organization we are failing this person. That is breaking the notion of intellectual honesty as well, and if we're being intellectually honest with the person about their ability to be successful, sometimes it's like, look, we need to help you find a place where you will be maximally successful. A lot of times people say, we're in conflict. And you're like, are you really in conflict? Because conflict to me means if we're in conflict, I am in the way of your objective, or vice versa. Most of the time we're actually out of alignment. My priority is not your priority. So then oftentimes what I try to do is I try to come in, I'd say to go in there and try to say, well, let's not have a no conversation, let's have a how conversation, and then figure out what that looks like, and then flip it into, well, let's figure out is there a possible path here, or what would it take to get a possible path. Inevitably, it's like well, I would like to do this, but I don't have the resources, or I can't because I have these other things. And so it's like, okay, that's fair, now we're getting into the richer kind of thing. Now there's plenty of times where there's a conflict that also is of a nature that is outside the bounds of a person just from simply being able to handle it. There's just such, the organization prevents somebody from being able to do their job efficiently because of the way that things are structured, technology choices, budgets, those types of things. There's also the other class that has to be handled immediately and deftly by anybody's role, and those are the ones around any type of what you might call it, a classical HR issue, anything from being bullied to gender bias, you name it, and those need to be handled in an expedited way. (upbeat music)

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