Where do you start with developing people?

What is your plan?

What is your target?

What has worked so far?

What is the gap to your target?

Why do you think that is?

What could you do different?

Here’s the conundrum:??you can’t develop someone. They develop themselves. At the same time, left on their own very few people have the oomph to ask themselves the basic, tough questions that will lead to personal growth.

No big surprises. We learn from feedback. As Peter Drucker put it so starkly years ago the way to accelerate learning is to write what you expect will happen when you take an important decision and then, months later, see what actually happened. The gap between what we thought would happen and what does happen reveals the weak points in our mental models of the situation. As Drucker explains “this shows him what he did well and what his strengths are. It also shows him what he has to learn and what habits he has to change. Finally it shows him what he is not gifted for and cannot do well. I have followed this method for myself now for fifty years. It brings out what one’s strengths are -and this is the most important thing an individual can know about himself or herself. It brings out where improvement is needed and what kind of improvement is needed. Finally, it brings out what an individual cannot do and therefore should not even try to do. To know one’s strengths, to know how to improve them, and know what one cannot do – they are the keys to continuous learning.” (Drucker on Asia, By Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi, Routledge, 2011).?

The difficulty is that our brains are not built that way. Most of our reasoning is?motivated: we cherry pick facts and arguments that support our beliefs and ignore what goes against what we already think. Our minds also have a lot of ego protection mechanisms to defend our sense of self – and stop us from doing precisely the exercise Drucker suggests. It’s not a bad thing. Optimists are happier than pessimists, and a key feature of optimisms is attributing successes to our qualities and failures to uncontrollable, unpredictable outside events. Good for feeling better, bad for learning.?

Also, beyond ego protection, serious thinking is simply hard. Reasoning things through and making new connections consume energy and sugar and are just as tiring as physical exertion. Not surprisingly, our brains will avoid it whenever they can: why plan a journey when you can follow your GPS? In these days of an app for everything (including, astonishingly, meditation which is supposed to be working with your mind, not enslaving it), why make the effort? Most feel they can either follow their gut, or at the opposite end of the spectrum, trust the AI behind the app, the ghost in the machine.

The two known countermeasures to our natural confirmation bias and mental laziness are exercise routines and coaches. Overall, this is what lean is about:

• Plan, check where you are against plan, and think through the gap
• Have a team leader, coordinator or coach help you to actually look at the gap rather than avoid it
• Combine both to come up with something new to try and learn to stay cool out of your comfort zone

This logic works at all levels, from the most detailed to the most strategic – although it’s not always seen that way. A few examples:

The logic is infallible, and experience shows that people do grow and develop with these techniques. At the end of the day, capability is the product of competence and resources (capability = competence x resources). Without resources, competence is not much use, but conversely resources managed incompetently don’t translate in capabilities. The Drucker method is the key to constantly challenge how competently we manage the resources we have to deliver results, how to improve that and so how to acquire extra resources to continue to progress. It works, there is no doubt.

But it requires an act of faith. Because our brains are set up to protect our egos from unfavorable information, such as an inconvenient fact or accepting a challenge we do not think we can achieve, our emotions rise easily and, not surprisingly, we vent at the very things that are meant to make us succeed: exercises and coaches. We spontaneously dismiss the exercise as a waste of time and argue with the coach because it’s easier than actually doing the exercise and following the coach.?

You can’t develop anyone – people can only develop themselves. You can, however, create better development conditions: propose daily routine thinking exercises and coaching. Still, each person must at some point commit to an open mind (accepting other point of views), understand their emotional need to lash back (and keeping cool) and grow a long-term change of their identity (see themselves as?better?future selves). Without these three commitments, development attempts are likely not only to fail, but also to sour relationships.

There is nothing so profoundly satisfying as achieving something that you didn’t feel capable of. Looking back from the top of the mountain and thinking “wow, I climbed it.” From the other side of the ocean and thinking “I crossed it!” Accomplishments are deeply satisfying, but also change us. They grow our fundamental self-confidence and resilience – the deep-seated trust that we will be better able to cope with whatever comes next. Indeed, achievements are the key to a healthy identity and why we seek them out. But getting there starts with learning, every step, every day. And this starts with the humble practice of laying out plans, visualizing targets, and investigating gaps without losing it. And thinking. Then thinking harder.