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Top 5 Take Aways

1. Reciprocal reviews
2. Concept of expanding horizons
3. Six conversations
4. Personal board of directors
5. 90-day work plans

Obstacles to Developing People

• Don't know what opportunities that are available
• Not enough time (or "I'm too important to take time away from my job/task")
• Lack of interest
• "Waste of time," not effective
• Budget
• Lack of opportunities to apply what you've learned
• Mistrust
• History (equals bad)
• Change (equals bad)
• Lack of a reason to train
• Manager's insecurity (they'll know more than me)
• Schedule
• Too much of a pain
• No easy way to sign up
• No easy way to get feedback on quality

Expanding Horizons

Thoughts and ideas from ITLP participants regarding expanding staff horizons:

• Career planning
• Succession planning
  • Penn State uses formal tools to help define career paths
    • Directives that limit buy-in are ineffective
  • University of Chicago takes advantage of new endeavors and projects that then offer a clean slate
• Shadowing
  • Helps address the high rate of change in IT
  • Exposes staff to customers
• Cross-functional teams and roles
  • Adopted at Stanford
• Pushing outside of the institution
• Cross-functional projects
  • Create a comfort zone
• Make time and set priorities
• Middle managers are dead ends
• Wrestle with job vs. career

Training & Professional Development

Thoughts and ideas from ITLP participants regarding training and professional development:

• Bring training to the staff
• Schedule early
• Work with the training units to tailor professional development needs to staff requirements
• Talk to the training folks!
• Customize general offerings
• Let others know about what has been done in your area to provide ideas and inspiration
• Collect successes
• Relate competencies to jobs
• Regularly communicate professional development and training opportunities
• Tie training to a plan
• Share training information and experiences
• Have post training "show and tells" to share what you learned
• Develop a professional development positive culture
• Professional development is part of succession planning
• Have staff think about opportunities but be careful of the message as to not turn training into disconnected entitlements, strange rewards, etc.
• Align training to career goals
• Professional development should be continuous
• Training should have continuity
• Follow-up and follow-through as appropriate to make sure people apply what they've learned
• Encourage short write-ups of experiences that all can see such as on a wiki

Performance Reviews & Goals Setting

Thoughts and ideas from ITLP participants regarding performance reviews and goals setting:

What works well?

• Parallel structure with preparation
• Tie to merit review process with enough spacing to actually impact the process
• Explicit disconnect between merit and performance appraisal
• Specific goals for development
• At least an annual performance appraisal
• Periodic goal setting and adjustment
• Self-evaluation
• Feedback forms such as the 360 evaluation
• Public balanced scorecard that helps align individuals with the priorities of the group
• Dissemination of goals

How often?

• Penn State: informal but realistically, every two months
• University of Chicago: no formal performance appraisal process across all units, some groups do have performance appraisals and fewer still have a reciprocal appraisal process
• MIT: annually, but there's no penalty for not doing performance appraisals
• Yearly (required as a minimum)
• Informally, more often is much better

Observations

• Quality of performance appraisals varies widely
• Need honesty

There was considerable interest and discussion in the MIT model of 90-day work plans and the "six conversations" that take into account both performance appraisals and professional development programs as part of an ongoing and regular dialogue with staff. For more information, contact Kyle Pope at MIT.

Mentoring & Coaching

Thoughts and ideas from ITLP participants regarding mentoring and coaching:

• One-to-one sessions with an experienced mentor
• Manager sets up one-to-one mentoring among staff around specific areas of growth and development
• Establishing a personal mini "board of directors" that can help spot check priorities in life
• Institution-wide mentoring programs that include both mentor training (guidelines, expectations) and mentee training
• Include coaching as part of staff one-to-ones and explore areas by asking about where they want to go to in their career, what they enjoy doing, etc. ASK! ASK! ASK!
• Informal "how are you doing" encounters that allow for the sharing of experiences
• Peer-to-peer coaching around structured meetings and unstructured content that seek common ground
• The "bowling trip" for team building, coaching styles, and personal abilities coaching
• Be direct by reviewing work and providing tangible feedback
• Let mentees provide the agenda for mentors and guide toward situations, etc. In other words, "how would you handle...?"
• Establish mutual respect
• Take mentoring and being a mentee seriously
• Take appropriate time and establish ground rules early

ITLP: Developing People

Leaders need to be able to develop the people around them. Growing the capability of the people is essential if you are interested in increasing capacity, or delegation or engaging people in the changes required to ensure the future.

from the IT Leadership Program Assignment
Strategies for Developing People/Capability

Faced with this challenge our team broke the task down into four major areas and worked with the larger group on collecting ideas. These few pages on Developing People represent the ideas we came up with around mentoring and coaching, training and professional development, performance evaluations and goals setting, and expanding horizons. We hope you find these ideas useful.

Team Members:

• Joyce Dickerson, Stanford
  
• Remy Evard, Argonne National Laboratory
  
• Chad Kainz, University of Chicago
  
• David Mycue, MIT
  
• Kyle Pope, MIT
  
• Mark Silis, MIT