Profitably Healthy Companies: Principles of Organizational Growth and Development

But let’s take a step back before discussing the ways in which organizations promote employee growth. Many companies are not as concerned with developing their people as finding them. Conditions in several industrial countries converge to make the pool of eligible candidates slim. First, during periods of economic expansion, labor markets become extremely tight. Indeed, it was during the booming internet economy of the late 1990s that McKinsey declared the war for talent.¹ In these giddy days, there were too few people to go around. Competitive advantage could be won by those companies that were able to produce generous pipelines of job candidates and pools of choice talent. Second, education systems in some nations have not been graduating enough people with the prerequisite foundational skills for employment (i.e., reading, writing, listening, oral communications, and math skills) nor are they producing sufficient numbers of people who have degrees in the STEM (i.e., science, technology, engineering, mathematics) disciplines for which the emerging needs are great and are accelerating. Third, people of working age are declining in many industrial countries. Figure 8.1 shows the expected near-term attrition of employees from the workforce as they reach retirement age.² Fourth, people have been dropping out of the labor force at an alarming rate: at least in the United States. The labor participation rate of working-age men and women is the lowest it has been in over four decades, with technological innovations and trade responsible for a portion of the decline.³ Given the falling birth rates within the industrialized world, the prospects are dim that the numbers of people entering the workforce will replenish those who are departing.⁴ These influences, taken together, will continue to produce unsettling sociocultural consequences in some countries. The countries’ options will be to bring more people into the labor market who formally have been excluded (e.g., women); loosen immigration requirements, visa quotas, and guest-worker policies; or shift more work oversees and imperil a nation’s capacity to make and build.

As it happens, one area of special concern to employees in making job choices is their anticipated career prospects and the learning and training opportunities that are available.5 In this regard, the news is pretty good. The training and development dollars invested by companies has nearly doubled from 2012 to 2017, evolving into a $100 billion industry.⁶ The average training expenditure per corporate learner was approximately $1,000 in 2017. Many studies document the effectiveness of these training dollars on specific outcomes (e.g., safety, individual performance).⁷ Studies also have found that increased spending on employee development increases productivity, product innovations, and other aggregate measures of corporate performance.⁸ Although some research is numerically precise in showing the influences of training on company productivity, this research is complicated and the size of the effects will vary from company to company and industry to industry.⁹ The evidence, however, demonstrably reveals the benefits to training, which, as expected, reinforces the commonsense thesis that knowledge and information are central factors to competitive advantage. Thus, despite the difficulties in conducting research of this type and wagering conclusive quantitative statements, the research routinely finds that enhancements to organizations’ human capital (and its parent concept, intellectual capital) have positive effects on operating performance.10 Indeed, what is true for companies is equally true for nations. Human capital variously defined as the quality of schooling, learning, and health accounts for approximately 20 to 50 percent of the income dispersions among countries.

With the emerging Information Age and waning years of the Industrial Revolution, intangible assets are replacing physical assets as choice sources of organizational performance and value. Chief among these nonphysical assets is intellectual capital. The measure of intellectual capital is contentious, but the consensus is that intellectual capital is a composite of human, relational, and structural capital, where—

Unfortunately, no critique-free, agreed-upon measure has emerged, although a couple of measures account for a large body of the research studies. The most common measures have been Tobin’s Q and value-added intellectual capital, although literally a hundred measures have been proposed.¹¹ Because it is hard to assess the net benefits of everything a company does to foster the growth of its people, human resources frequently defines its contributions to intellectual capital through the outcomes achieved by the compendium of programs it installs to promote employee growth from recruitment to retirement. Therefore, effectiveness is gleaned by the programmatic results obtained from the talent acquisition through talent development phases, such as time to start (time to fill a position), offer acceptance rates, training participation rates, referral program success (jobs filled through referral), and absenteeism (average days absent per employee). If the company is able to function effectively and each program evaluated on its own merits appears to be doing what it is supposed to do, then it is assumed that the company must be doing many of the right things with respect to the workforce.

A viable talent management program is one in which a company has a well-identified pool of external job candidates, enough competent coverage of existing positions should the company experience unexpected losses in personnel, and short- and long-term succession plans throughout the organization. These staffing initiatives are accompanied by vigorous career counseling and development (discourse on an employees’ longer range goals and an attendant action plan), career planning workshops and vocational assessments, mentoring and coaching programs, and the availability of in-house training and financial assistance (e.g., tuition reimbursement) to support employees’ career objectives.12 A catalogue of some of the common training and development options is provided in box 8.1.¹³ Many of these approaches are enhanced by new delivery methods, such as distance learning, blended learning, and social media (e.g., discussion forums, virtual/augmented reality).

Having a thoughtful intersection of human resource programs is important to ensure that organizations have adequate pipelines and reservoirs of capable people who are ready to step into new roles or jobs when the time is right, but talent management also involves the panoply of decisions that have to be made about jobs and people. Because programs can be copied, the decisions that companies make within the talent space can set them apart from others. That is, while people-related programs can be emulated, the decisions surrounding the means and quality with which people are developed and deployed cannot.

A second cluster of issues concerns the definition of a career and how it is organizationally assembled. Do you conceive of a career as narrow or broad and, if broad, how might you modify your programs to accommodate this more expansive view than heretofore has been the case in corporations? Careers once were almost exclusively narrowly defined along clear pathways. Employee advancement involved plodding along that path with periodic exposures to developmental opportunities that would allow employees to take their next steps. In the extreme case, this progression was the laborious lifelong climb of the Organization Man.14 Although this avenue certainly remains prevalent, even here employers have enlarged employee options by creating dual career ladders: one ladder that accommodates upward movement in supervisory duties and breadth of responsibilities, and the other that accommodates greater depth of knowledge and intensification of duties within a specialized role. Overall, employers and employees recognize the inherent career limitations of restricted opportunities and the advantages of a more far-reaching view on careers. Most notably, a wider career berth gives employees more numerous and challenging work opportunities and relieves them of the breathtaking finality of a lost opportunity. Instead, should employees lose out on one job, they are aware that alternatives exist and will come along in due time. As such, corporate career paths, indeed, have become less linear, more abundant, and more lattice shaped, allowing employees to cross career bridges that once were viewed as prohibitively dubious job moves.

Other companies encourage intercompany moves by allowing job shadowing (observing the work of others in a natural setting) and holding internal job fairs and seminars to promote the work and projects taking place in different parts of the organization. Even in circumstances in which movement up or across areas is unachievable, however, organizations have “in-job” promotions that recognize targeted enhancements to employees’ skills and abilities. Promotions are based on fulfillment of personalized development plans that are grounded on achieving certain skill levels and successfully carrying out specific tasks and activities.

The preparatory work needed for employee advancement in management roles varies from company to company, but the general aim typically is to deepen technical skills, broaden operational exposure, refine leadership abilities, and provide new guided challenges. This process frequently is accompanied by pedagogical instruction in the following: analytical skills; strategic thinking; decision-making; critical/creative thinking; collaboration and teamwork; social skills; and special instruction on dealing with the media, government agencies and regulatory bodies, analysts, customers, and employees. Box 8.2 summarizes developmental options for leaders and future leaders.

Box 8.2
Grooming Successors

Special Assignments

Stretch Assignments

Exposure to Different Organizational Roles, Jobs, and Assignments

Opportunity to Start, Grow, or Transform a Business

International Assignments

Opportunities for Real-Time Feedback

On-the-Job Coaching

Participation in High-Level Meetings

Job Shadowing

Leadership Roles

Service on Nonprofit Boards

Task-Force Leadership

Involvement in Industry and Professional Groups

Volunteer Community Service

Instruction

Formal Leadership Programs

Self-Study

Coursework and Workshops

Specialized Training or Educational Programs

The fourth set of development-related questions pertains to the significant task of deciding what to train people on. Given scarce dollars, in what areas are training expenses most productively applied? In addition to applied job skills, development generally involves the following: communication skills, such as listening and giving feedback; group effectiveness skills, such as negotiation and teamwork; personal management skills, such as goal-setting; adaptation skills, such as problem solving and creative thinking; and influence and planning skills, such as leadership and project management.15 For the most part, the training that is conducted is initiated based on requests from the workforce, formal needs analyses, legal or regulatory mandates, or obvious necessity. Most training has the clear rationale of being job-focused or is designed to maintain a safe and secure work environment that is free of accidents, federal violations, hackers, and managerial miscreants. Additionally, if development pertains to advancing employees’ ability to perform to their potential, then the intersection between what happens inside and outside of work cannot be ignored.

The domains of home and work intersect and mutually affect one another. Indeed, life satisfaction (the combined effects of work and home life) is associated with greater career satisfaction, job performance, and organizational commitment. Therefore, one atypical, yet important, area that merits trainers’ attention is the vast arena that makes life, overall, more satisfying.¹⁶ It would be hard to argue that one had a successful career if half a life was diminished in that pursuit. Thus, researchers in the area prefer to speak about “whole careers” that encompass engagement with nonwork areas of life and attainment of personal goals.¹⁷ This more well-rounded and wholesome career outlook that encapsulates all areas of life makes life more satisfying and work more engaging.¹⁸

Caring for the whole person matters, first, because good organizations prefer their employees to live authentic, holistic lives rather than compartmentalizing behaviors according to whether they are at work or at home. Indeed, it is what employees tell us they want for themselves. Life is more satisfying when people feel at home with who they are.¹⁹ Therefore, good companies look for ways to incorporate the distinct aptitudes of employee skills into the fabric of the company. For example, one company we have worked with holds an annual developmental soiree. Unlike other developmental events throughout the year that are heavily focused on work-related skills, this one gives employees the opportunity to instruct on a range of subjects (e.g., learning to sail, cheese tasting, smoothie making, hip hop). Employees told us how much they appreciate the chance to share aspects of themselves with colleagues through this instruction, claiming “This is a place where I can be myself.”

Second, a holistic perspective on development makes sense because people who have richer work lives fare better at home, and those with richer home lives fare better at work—with both domains working in unison to produce more gratifying lives.20 Most people cannot escape the inevitability that work and nonwork time are interwoven. Studies routinely find that overall satisfaction with life is a good predictor of engagement in the workplace. Furthermore, life satisfaction seems to be the antecedent to positive work behaviors and not the other way around. Although these effects clearly are bidirectional, evidence suggests that in a chicken-and-egg scenario, it is life satisfaction that comes first.²¹ Developmental interventions, therefore, that increase life satisfaction, increase job satisfaction (which increases life satisfaction, and so on). That is, life satisfaction leads to more positive work attitudes and behaviors, with the reverse true to a lesser extent. Because of these results, we are proponents of measuring employees’ life satisfaction to glean insight into what companies might do differently or better—rather than concentrating attitude surveys solely on work programs.

Third, asking people to view themselves as whole people may prevent insular bottom-line thinking. Despite a modernist expansion of the institutional framework of industry from stockholder to stakeholder, the primary purpose of business is to make money. This fact would be easily confirmed if we sent a team of anthropologists into our minisocieties of for-profit organizations with the task to dissemble the values of these cultures. Would you be surprised to learn that money makes these places tick? The researchers would emerge with a neat list of the number of meetings, email exchanges, reports, presentations, and conversations whose central themes were financial results. Other topics inevitably would arise, but they would pale in frequency and intensity to discussions of profitability.

So? It seems perfectly sensible that humankind devised institutions to facilitate the manufacture and trade of goods for societal benefit and that people inside companies should have sensibilities to the profit motives of those institutions and of the business role employees are asked to adopt. We might applaud a person who is adept at making money as a fine businessperson, but the institutional value system of which they are a part may be hazardously narrow. Indeed, the corporate ontology of profit and loss is a precursor to bottom-line thinking. This mode of thinking creates tunnel vision in which financial performance overwhelms other concerns that a rounder role and self-conception may deter. The one-dimensional thinking of profit maximization has been associated with myriad ills, including social undermining, decreases in interpersonal helping, and outright deceits. In general, activating thoughts of money heightens self-interest and reduces feeling of interpersonal trust, empathy, and cooperation.22 It is like a game of whack a mole during which attention is concentrated before your eyes and you lose sight of what is happening all around you. Just hit as many moles in the head as you can and you will be rewarded. Thus, the mantra at Wells Fargo that “eight [accounts] is great” may have been attention grabbing, but it had consequences such as those found in research studies. People cheat to make their numbers, willingly piling on products to unsuspecting customers.²³

Therefore, some of the growth opportunities that companies sponsor enable employees to live healthier, richer, complete lives. The most direct and common means to happily reconcile employees’ home and work lives is to help them to manage the host of obligations they have at home and work through an assortment of programs. These include support programs, such as flexible work arrangements and part-time work, child- and elder-care assistance, parenting resources, employee health and wellness programs, favorable family leave policies, and other family-oriented supports, such as on-site dry-cleaning and postal services.²⁴ Research shows that these programs are effective in easing employee stress and enhancing organizational commitment when the company encourages the use of the programs without penalizing employees for that use—for example, allowing employees to actually take a full vacation totally disconnected from work.²⁵

A less apparent though equally important means by which companies support growth of the whole person is by devoting portions of their training budgets to offerings related to general life skills. For example, BambooHR offers a nine-week course in financial acumen, called Financial Peace University, that includes budgeting, building up emergency funds, and dealing with debt. FONA International sponsors programs in estate and financial planning, mental health (First Aid USA), and personal guidance through a spiritual lens (Corporate Chaplains of America). N2 Publishing conducts regular lunch and learns structured around three themes: financial security, relational and physical health, and professional development. On the sprawling SAS campus, employees can access grief, eldercare, depression, financial, and divorce counseling through a Work-Life Center staffed with social workers. In general, skills that generalize across different spheres of life improve overall well-being and life satisfaction. For example, teaching employees coping and problem-solving skills at work leads to higher life satisfaction, presumably because these are skills that are useful in any domain, not just at work. Employers have told us over the years how instruction at work saved their marriages, made them better parents, and made them more fiscally responsible.

Among the several different theories about how work and nonwork interact, most note that the two domains are inseparable—although some people may resort to mental gymnastics as a mechanism for coping with an imperfect situation. For example, unable to find satisfaction in one domain, a person may elevate the importance and significance of another.26 Perhaps an individual who feels confined to a job that is just a job will look to hobbies and interests outside of work to find happiness: life begins when they spin through the corporate turnstiles and out of the building. Few people, however, would find this an ideal outcome when the alternative could be satisfaction at work and at home. In general, positive events in one sphere uplift the other. Material, affective, and instrumental resources are usable across domains, with those acquired in one domain nourishing the other. Thus, money, skills, friendships and close relations, and psychological support transcend boundaries and lead to more fully functioning people wherever they may be.²⁷

That said, the most notable way organizations expect people to improve is in job-related ways by honing expertise. For organizations to increase their capacity to perform and stay at the forefront of the market, they must keep people moving from novices to experts on those elements of the job that are critical to performance excellence. Expertise pertains to the acquisition of specialized skills through training and experience in a domain. It is evidenced by increased sophistication in a discipline, complex problem-solving, and improved task performance—attended by high situational alacrity and refined sensibilities to standards and approaches that guide decisions about what has to be done and the best way to proceed.²⁸ Like Sherlock Holmes, the expert sees things and makes connections that an untrained eye does not notice and has the breadth of knowledge to understand the implications of the evidence before them.29 Succinctly, experts know more, recognize meaningful patterns and connections, and are quick to distill complicated problems to workable solutions. The work of the expert as opposed to a nonexpert is efficient, precise, and fast, occurring with fluidity as if the task was under unconscious control. Like experts in other domains, experts in business fields are more facile in structuring or organizing their knowledge than nonexperts as well as more adept at noticing what is most important within the business landscape and linking that information to other data of relevance.

The means by which this metamorphosis from novice to expert occurs lays on a theoretical continuum anchored by two extremes, one that entails a natural evolution and one that entails effort. One anchor is symbolized by Sir Francis Galton and the other anchor by John Watson. Galton studied the family trees of eminent artists and professionals, such as scientists, and found that achievements ran in families and, thus, attributed excellence to natural abilities. John Watson, one of the fathers of Behaviorism, claimed that under the right controlled environmental conditions, he could make an expert of anyone regardless of their native talents. With the proper contingencies and level of practice, a person could become a star performer. The theory—nature or nurture—we implicitly embrace makes a difference since one, the Watson approach, assumes that anything is achievable through conscientious practice and diligence, whereas the Galton approach assumes that people are naturally endowed and that one’s gifts will blossom in due time with experience.³⁰

The way people think about the development of talent or its more specific offspring, expertise, has practical implications for organizations.³¹ People who see personal growth as something that they and others can affect through their efforts have so-called growth mindsets. The assumption is that people can make significant strides in their performance through training and deliberate practice: practice that is goal-directed, effortful, and concentrated on specific facets of performance.³² In contrast, if most of performance can be explained by genetic proclivities, what people can do is largely fixed. Accordingly, people with this worldview on development have fixed mindsets. With this perspective, the job of the talent manager is one of keen selection, functioning more as a talent scout than as a developer.

The difference between growth and fixed mindsets is nicely highlighted in an intriguing set of studies. Heslin and associates have shown that managers with fixed versus growth mindsets hold more unshakeable views of employees’ performances.33 For example, in one study, the research team first assessed managers’ beliefs about people’s abilities (fixed or growth tendencies). They then asked these managers to watch a video of a poor employee performance and to rate the performance. In a later video, they watched the same hypothetical employee perform well, and asked managers once again to evaluate the performance. The performance ratings of managers with fixed mindsets did not significantly change from their first assessments. Conversely, the ratings of managers with growth mindsets evaluatively tracked the actual performances depicted.

Managers with fixed mindsets form opinions regarding the abilities of employees and they ascribe fluctuations in employees’ performances to influences that are external to the person, such as luck—because the person is presumed incapable of changing through personal will and tenacity. Within an attributional framework, people with fixed mindsets see variations in performance as fleeting chance occurrences that temporarily depart from their preconceptions.³⁴ In the vernacular of attribution theory, people with fixed mindsets may be hardened, error-prone attributionists who see the actions of others as due to internal factors, such as dispositions and abilities (fundamental attrition error), but excuse themselves when things go awry by viewing their own behaviors in the context of external factors, such as insufficient resources (actor-observer differences).³⁵ Performance improvements, therefore, do not create cause for celebration because the results are believed to be aberrational departures from a set point. The result is that we quickly give up on poor performers who ostensibly are beyond help. Conversely, people with a growth mindset believe that their capabilities, including creativity, are malleable and can be improved given the right environment and the right opportunities and challenges. Additionally, those who embrace a growth (versus fixed) mindset are more able to learn from their mistakes, are more accepting of feedback, and tenaciously persevere toward goals.³⁶ Fortunately, studies—mainly conducted in schools—have found that mindsets can be altered. Students who believe their poor performances are due to uncorrectable defects can have their belief systems retuned. Brief interventions that reduce the negative effort beliefs of students (the belief that having to work hard implies lack of ability) and fixed trait attributions (that one does not have what it takes) that inhibit students capacity to perform result in increased academic achievement.37

Since the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, we have encountered more and more people who falsely think they can master anything with ten thousand hours of practice (or in ten years).³⁸ In truth, as encouraging and optimistic as this viewpoint is, people have limits. Even if we overlooked the fact that expertise applies to a wide range of tasks and activities that take different amounts of time to perfect, some people will become experts more quickly than others—the prodigies—and some will never become experts—the very experienced average.³⁹ For example, more intelligent people (a largely acquired attribute) benefit more from the same amount of practice than less intelligent people on certain tasks, such as chess play.⁴⁰ Companies often conflate experience with expertise when in fact the former is a necessary but insufficient condition for the latter—that is, some people, despite lengthy experiences in a field, never develop past mediocrity. In fact, studies show that deliberate practice (i.e., really good practice) accounts for only about one-third of performance and, for some tasks, accounts for almost nothing.⁴¹ Obviously, then, becoming an expert and proficient in a field requires more than practice. What else is involved in the development of talent, then?

One obvious factor is anatomy. Physical features and body composition are important for many physical endeavors and motor-perceptual activities. These are inherited qualities and constitute a large part of the reason that artists, sports figures, and entertainers run in families. People are not going to be basketball stars at five-feet tall or great pianists with short stubby fingers. Second, expertise (and job performance) is highly correlated with cognitive abilities and personality that, again, are largely formed in the womb and are diagnostic of individuals’ vocational interests and the disciplines in which they choose to become experts. That is, native attributes are starter kits for what people tend to enjoy and eventually will be good at doing if they are fortunate enough to locate exactly what that is—their calling, so to speak. For example, people who score highly on verbal abilities on standardized tests tend to dominate the arts and humanities and those who score highly on mathematical abilities tend to dominate the physical sciences.⁴²

Getting the match between employees’ interests and work is critical, then, as people will perform better in fields that are more consistent with their inherent aptitudes and passions.43 The entire idea behind vocational and career testing is to help people find a line of work in which they will excel because of their interests and the related capacities they most enjoy developing and using (see box 8.3).⁴⁴ Companies help employees channel their energies to where they will be most effective by clarifying and guiding employees in considering their future career selves, asking, for example, “What were you doing when you felt most engaged and alive?” “If you could do anything at all, what would it be?” “What types of activities or jobs do you foresee yourself doing that would allow you to use what you enjoy most?”⁴⁵ The best companies, then, always are trying to calibrate the interests and abilities of their people to the work, backed by the conspicuous rationale that employees who are absorbed and energized by their work are more committed to the organization, perform better, and stay longer than those whose jobs are misaligned with their true interests and abilities. Because the things that people are extraordinary in performing seem easy to them, employees’ superpowers are not always obvious to them. Therefore, it makes sense to quiz employees on, and comment about, those things they do best. With a better understanding of employees’ signature strengths (i.e., the four to seven attributes that are especially appealing and deployed most frequently when the chances arise), it is possible for companies to find ways to play to those strengths.46

Box 8.3
John Holland’s Career Types

Relating employee interests to occupations has a lengthy history in industry, particularly as it relates to career counseling and job placement. Inventories designed to identify employees’ (or students’) preferences for certain types of work date to the early twentieth century. One common measurement that many companies as well as segments of the U.S. military rely on is Holland’s six-factor scale to assess the type of work people enjoy performing. This scale, abbreviated RIASEC, contains the domains of interest listed below. Read the summaries to see whether what you enjoy most is consistent with the activities of your current job.

Realistic: Activities that include practical, hands-on problems, and solutions

Investigative: Scholarly, intellectual activities involving the search for facts

Artistic: Unconventional, creative activities that involve working with forms, designs, and patterns, often requiring self-expression

Social: Activities that involve working closely with others, generally as teacher, helper, service-provider, caregiver

Enterprising: Starting up and carrying out projects that involve leading others, persuasive communications, and decision making

Conventional: Performance of activities that follow established procedures and routines

The theory behind strengths-use is straightforward. People feel most satisfied and fulfilled when they are growing, engaged in those things in which they take the greatest pleasure, and making generous use of their capabilities. The benefits are enumerable. People who regularly use their strengths are higher on engagement, self-esteem, efficacy, job satisfaction, well-being, meaning in life, positive affect, and quality of life. They also display greater resistance to stress and are more socially skilled in dealing with setbacks.⁴⁷

A few years ago, we attended a wedding in rural upstate Vermont, where we learned of a development process that is reiterated every generation. An old army transport vehicle carried guests down a dirt road to a lovely remote piece of land with stream and pond—a onetime meditative retreat for the bride. This hidden place was in Richmond, Vermont, which to most readers will be an unfamiliar speck in a vast and relatively unpopulated domain. The world’s ski community, however, knows the place well as home to the skiing Cochran family who have produced three generations of collegiate and Olympic champions. When we were there, another Cochran family disciple, Robby Kelley, was the reigning national giant slalom champion. Upstart Ryan Cochran-Siegle had just won gold in downhill and combined at the Alpine Junior World Ski Championships in Roccasoro, Italy, and more recently was part of the U.S. ski team at the 2018 Olympics in South Korea. We tell this story of family excellence because these world-class skiers all learned their craft on a small hill in their backyard—a gentle sloping mound of earth that stretches no longer than a couple hundred feet. The action is enabled by a self-installed towline and makeshift lighting strung from trees. It would be facile to attribute the family’s successes to the privilege of genes, for the real explanation is more basic. They owe their success to practice, habit, and astute and sensitive guidance.

First, an expert who truly understands excellence oversees skier development. This person knows what to watch for and attend to. These overseers know the skills that learners must master as prerequisites for success, and they focus on process versus outcomes. The Cochran’s have always understood that the fastest down a course at any given time is not necessarily the best equipped to compete on the international stage, where a nanosecond flaw in style and form can be costly. Said differently, the focus of training is on mastering a skill, not on achieving a certain performance outcome. Mastery goals repeatedly have been shown to foster greater interest and persistence in activities. Second, practice involves isolating skills and correcting performances in gradual increments. The best way for a neophyte Cochran to learn to ski is on a small hill. Skiers will not learn faster by starting on a mountaintop. There would be too much that is wildly wrong to fix, and too little enjoyment derived by the skier from the scary descent to persist in the activity. A mentor must be able to isolate features of performance for the learner to work on, so throwing a person into the proverbial fire would not allow for the necessary discriminations to be made. Thus, the best way to learn from practice is in small and steady improvements where the success rate is high, but not perfect. People are happiest when they are learning well and growing despite the occasional fall. Third, effort and practice need to be applied toward those aspects of performance that are most important, that will make the biggest difference, and that people are best at doing (and therefore are activities that are self-rewarding). It does not make sense to spend undue time mitigating weaknesses and closing gaps that may be superfluous to long-term aims and performance. Yes, fix what has to get fixed, but keep in mind that the goal is greatness versus proficiency. Skiers gravitate to events that use their strengths and where they can truly excel. Artists do the same thing. They work in mediums or with themes that they enjoy and are best at executing. They expand on their expertise by straying from proven abilities and experimenting with new ideas and techniques in adjacent areas. Some strengths naturally bleed into weaknesses, so improvements may be observed in once-troublesome areas. Nevertheless, rather than fixing what is broken in employees, managers should find ways to use and improve the most skilled dimensions of their talents.

One straightforward way to achieve these ends is through a deliberate career planning process and to buttress these efforts with the requisite psychological and material support. The one-on-one relationships between employees and mentors or coaches have been found to be one of the most effective ways to produce change and develop skills in proteges. Although the purposes of coaches and mentors are slightly different, the guided instruction and advice giving of each delivers timely psycho-social support and, over time, increases career satisfaction, skill acquisition, and individual and team performance.48 Another way to take advantage of employees’ full capabilities is to mold an existing job to the preferences, interests, and abilities of the jobholder through job crafting. Because jobs are essentially humanmade constructs, every job can be modified or fine-tuned to cohere to the capabilities of the position’s incumbent by adjusting the nature and scope of tasks.⁴⁹ And, sometimes the repetitiveness of our days causes us to lose sight of the importance of our work. Our work feels like the Sisyphean toil of rolling rocks uphill and never getting to the top. But we occasionally do make it to the top and we sometimes simply forget that meaningful work is not easy work. Meaningful events may be recurrently satisfying and uplifting, but often some of the most penetrating and declarative episodes in life are arduous, terrifying, calamitous, and sad; not happy occasions at all but gut-wrenching affairs that give us a newfound awareness and reignite our energies. We simply need periodic reminders from friends that what we are doing is valuable and worth the effort.

Although it is tempting to construe learning and development as passive consumptive activities, much of this growth depends on a person’s regulatory abilities to set standards, exert the necessary effort for improvement, and monitor gains against goals while fending off temptations to work on simpler, more easily achievable objectives. Overcoming the lure of appetizing diversions involves self-discipline, self-control, and grit. People who lose weight, eat more healthily, exercise more, and perform better are those who are well-equipped to regulate their attention, emotions, and behaviors. Indeed, the elite in the sciences, arts, and sports have one thing in common: they have developed good habits that allow them to do things even when the probability of a reward is quite low and elements of the task are painful (e.g., skiers who train in freezing temperatures and suffer aggravating falls). Therefore, although practice per se is important for development, the instrumentality of factors that make good practice possible cannot be underestimated.

We marvel at people’s raw abilities but lose sight of the competencies that lie beneath the surface—their capacity to challenge themselves when tired as well as their resilience to come back after discouraging blows, to listen to and accept difficult feedback, to keep a positive outlook and invasive impulses and emotions in check, to develop supportive and encouraging relationships with others, to remain focused on long-term goals, and to sustain conviction in their capabilities. They have the personal and social competencies that surround their skills and efforts, which enable them to grow. They have the self-regulatory capacity to form good habits.

Habits are amazing and critical to development. To illustrate how habits work, let’s put mice in a maze that looks like a cross.50 We teach the mice to turn right at the junction to find cheese. One mouse is trained just a little bit, and the other a whole lot so that it develops a habit. Habits are defined as learned patterns of behavior that automatically (with little conscious deliberation) occur in response to cues from the environment (when you get to the intersection of the cross, turn right). Habits are well-ingrained chunks of behavior that our brain has decided should be automated. Because we are doing the same thing over and over, our brains put those sequences on automatic pilot so we can attend to more serious concerns that could use greater reflection and our undivided attention. Certain things just would not get done regularly without habits. You can brush your teeth only so many times at bedtime for the self-reinforcing value of clean teeth; environmental cues and associated routines have to take over the chore.

Researchers know that a habit is formed when a mouse will run for the cheese even if it makes it sick, or the cheese has declined in value, or has been removed from the maze (diminutions in value are often manipulated in labs by allowing mice to gorge themselves before presenting a reward, or by injecting mice with a substance that will make them sick when they ingest the reward). With habits, behaviors are under stimulus-response (action) control internalized as a “get cheese” sequence, abbreviated as S > R. When I get to the crossroads (S), I take a right and run to the end (R). Under diminished rewards, the mice who have not yet developed a habit will stop running because the sickening cheese, for example, has lost its value. The behavior will extinguish.

In contrast to habits, many goal-directed behaviors are under instrumental control: people take actions based on the expected outcomes. These behaviors are sensitive to changes in the value of outcomes and to the contingencies between actions and outcomes. This relationship is represented by an action-outcome formula (A > O). When a lump of cheese diminishes in value, an experienced mouse will change course to find a more satisfying outcome. Assume that we have been dropping the mice into the maze from the south side and then decide to switch things up and begin putting the mice into the maze from the opposite, north side, so that everything is reversed from the mice’s point of view. The instrumental mice head down the corridor, pause at the intersection, inspect the area for potentially rewarding moves using their senses, and turn left toward the cheese (which is where it always has been). On the other hand, the mice under S > R control turn right, and right again—again and again. Using more advanced techniques than mazes, researchers have found the same results with people. The very thing that is supposed to help us navigate through life successfully has become our nemesis. The fact that the “cheese” is not there or makes us sick does not matter. Habits thus persist even when the outcome is no longer the preferred response.

Habits are important because they get us to do things that we ordinarily do not want to do but would keep us safer or make us better if we did them. Thus, we underscore the importance of hiring people with self-control, self-discipline, and sound coping skills who can establish their own contingencies for prescribed behaviors. For example, musical virtuosos or world-class athletes practice every day at the same time for a set period, at first under the nourishment of self-administered rewards and then out of habit—or selective cues. Many of the qualities that allow people to take control of their affairs and grow falls under the rubric of emotional intelligence, or the ability to identify, monitor, control, and use emotions and emotional content effectively in interactions.51 We variously describe people with high emotional intelligence quotients as empathic, self-aware, and self-controlled: as having the host of characteristics that permit awareness of internal states of mind and understanding how to respond to, or moderate, the real issues at hand in emotionally charged situations.

People who are superior at perceiving and using emotional cues are more effective, personally and interpersonally, than those without those capabilities. Many studies have revealed the advantages of emotional intelligence on work performance, leadership effectiveness, customer satisfaction, academic achievement, problem-solving, well-being, and life satisfaction.52 Teaching people to be more self-aware and to modulate their emotions, therefore, is a prescription for more enjoyable social interactions and more effective job performance. In social settings, emotional intelligence is mandatory. Awareness of the emotional strata of group interaction is essential in responding to group members’ true needs and in building a hardy base of interpersonal goodwill that provides a safe and trusting work environment. Groups with higher emotional intelligence unequivocally perform better and more effectively grow their abilities as a team. For example, when organizational needs arise, teams with higher emotional intelligence pursue a more genteel and incisive process to determine who would benefit most from an assignment as one key consideration in the long-term success of the group. People receive more opportunities and are more visible within emotionally intelligent groups.

Given the importance of emotional intelligence as a key element to interpersonal and organizational effectiveness, progressive companies such as PURE Insurance now make emotional intelligence a fundamental part of their development programs. At PURE, all employees, new and old, undergo instruction in emotional intelligence. Several controlled studies show that the instruction works. One eighteen-hour training program made up of understanding emotions, identifying one’s own emotions, identifying others’ emotions, regulating one’s own and others’ emotions, and effectively using positive emotions improved attendees’ well-being, life satisfaction, mental health, and social relationships.⁵³

Despite the fact that companies dedicate substantial resources to formal training, most personal growth in organizations (80 percent) occurs through informal, or incidental, means.⁵⁴ Therefore, companies can achieve the best developmental results by creating a stimulating, cooperative learning environment in which people help themselves and one another to grow. Informal learning occurs when employees make sense of the experiences they have in their day-to-day jobs through interactions with others, mentoring and coaching, and self-directed learning and personal exploration.55 The learning that takes place can be subtle. For example, Big Ass Fans outsources its cafeteria lunches to local providers and introduces different cuisines from around the world daily to expand employees’ experiences and tastes. Or, the learning can be less subtle as when engineers at Big Ass Fans have experiments running atop their desks for passersby to muse at. The intent is to arouse curiosity and a desire to learn. These largely unscripted measures can be used in tandem with more deliberate prescriptions to nourish employees’ inspiration. For example, PURE Insurance gives employees $1,500 per year to explore whatever interest they choose from yoga instruction to Jiu-Jitsu to Formula One racing. The program is part of a wider company effort to instill the habit of learning so that questioning, seeking, and creating are as natural as eating and sleeping: essential sustenance for a satisfying life. Similarly, sabbaticals can satisfy the same purpose of liberating employees from the humdrum and reigniting their zeal to achieve personally alluring goals and to passionately chase after growth-fulfilling aspirations. Employees who have been at Patagonia for one year qualify for a fully paid two-month environmental internship, typically as volunteers. Applications are reviewed by an employee review committee. Patagonia grants most reasonable requests, as funding allows, with 125–150 of two thousand employees taking internships per year. The Motley Fool allows paid sabbaticals of eight weeks after an employee has completed ten years of service. Although sabbaticals occur infrequently in organizations that have them, they have outsize effects on employee attitudes.⁵⁶ Sabbaticals are highly visible signs that organizations value employee growth and, therefore, are seductive attractors of job candidates as well as a proven means to heighten career satisfaction and organizational commitment.