Driving Career Results How to Manage Self-Directed Employee Development by Linda Brenner

Today, companies increasingly need and expect their employees to own their  own career development. Employees and job-seekers shouldn't expect  companies or managers to 'develop' them; they should be prepared to develop  themselves. 

In Driving Employee Development, leading enterprise HR consultant Linda  Brenner shows both HR and smart employees exactly how to make that happen. 

Brenner offers proven HR tools for establishing and driving on-going, employee-driven development, and for helping employees create their own targeted, personalized plans to succeed. She offers practical exercises, templates, and assessments that employees can use to gain insight into their own strengths and weaknesses, practical tips for improving their most immediate areas of need, and practical guidance for improving overall performance in the long-term.

Brenner offers complete sections on helping employees build several crucial sets of competencies, including:

• Thinking and judgment
• Engaging and developing people
• Delivering results
• Communicating more effectively
• Becoming a visionary leader
• Excelling personally

In an era of short employee tenures and highly agile organizations, employee self-development is an idea whose time has come. But it's a radically new  paradigm, requiring new approaches and techniques. If you want to make it work - for your organization, and for yourself - this is the book that will get you there.

The Importance of Driving Your Own Development

Not long ago, most employees could sit back and wait for their manager to “develop” them. The burden was on the shoulders of the leaders to identify the employee’s needs, create a plan for how to address those needs, and then provide the employee with ongoing feedback and coaching.

Those days are long gone. Managers these days are rarely expected to, or held accountable for, developing their people. In reality, it never worked well. Managers often didn’t have the tools, expertise, or information to do a good job developing their employees. Over time, it seems that organizations have simply given up. And it’s easy to see why. In the last 20 years, it’s become nearly  impossible to expect such work from managers. After all, their span of control has grown to the point in which it’s unwieldy to do much more than share basic communication with their employees.

In addition, changes in the workplace have reduced the opportunity for managers to observe their employees and provide timely, in-the-moment feedback. The advent of the virtual workplace, global teams, and nontraditional workers, such as contract employees, have added even more challenges to the 
old model. Lastly, managers still often lack the resources and knowledge to develop their employees in a targeted, meaningful, and successful way.