In businesses, things can change very quickly – that makes the future very hard to predict. For organisations, this can make training and development difficult; what are you preparing your workforce for?
Having worked with organisations across most sizes, industries and locations, Discovery knows there is one area that is hugely important and often gets overlooked: your people. Whilst most training and development is based on helping your people be better, this is usually focused on providing them with job-related knowledge with little focus on them as individual people.
Developing individuals provides many benefits; however, it can be difficult to determine which areas to develop first. Reflecting upon our OPEN programmes, which are centred on ‘developing the person’, Discovery has identified three areas that benefit employees and their organisations the most. We’ve also included some tips so you or your employees can begin their journey of individual development.
Increasing personal effectiveness
Sometimes the biggest change can come from taking some time to reflect upon you. How good are you at managing yourself? Do you wait for others to give you direction or make decisions for you? Do you lead off in your own direction and others have to reign you back in?
Of course, taking this time to analyse yourself is only successful if you are fairly self-aware and able to be objective about yourself. This isn’t easy, so a good way to increase your self-awareness and personal effectiveness is to involve others. Enlist people you work closely with (not just your manager, but your peers too) to reflect upon your performance in particular situations and discuss it with you – this will help to indicate some areas of development and it will also help you to be more self-aware in the future.
Once you have a good idea of areas you need to develop in, start thinking about what needs to change to help you achieve your goal – you should think about what you need to do for yourself, what support you need from others in your organisation and if you need any further training or development outside of your day-to-day role.
Improving interpersonal skills
In the working world, interpersonal skills are absolutely critical for every stage of a career – whether you have a customer-facing role, you manage others or you’re a fresh graduate starting your first role.
Most people think they have strong interpersonal skills, however, often the strength of someone’s interpersonal skills can only be judged by other people, after all, they’re the ones receiving the communication. Without understanding your audience and how to adapt interpersonal styles, it can have a negative effect when leading & managing people, building relationships or during day-to-day communication.
To help you begin to see how others may perceive your interpersonal skills, start reflecting upon your style and the suitability for the intended audience. Try to recall conversations you’ve had – could your tone, body language or word choice have had an inadvertent result? If you’re struggling to recall conversations, review emails you’ve sent. Based on your audience, could one worded emails be perceived negatively? Equally, are long paragraphs of information right for your audience?
Once you start to think about your style and the intended audience, you can think how best to adapt it in the future.
Understanding behavioural impact
Every person can demonstrate a range of ‘behaviours’, but how they impact on others is particularly important in working environments. Unlike interpersonal skills, they could impact on people or things that you’ve never had any contact with – it’s like a ripple effect. These can be large scale and smaller scale – a small scale example is someone using the last drop of milk at the office and not getting more or telling anyone. A colleague’s clients come in, and when offered a drink, they either have to wait for an extended period of time or can’t have milk in their hot drinks. A small behavioural act has then had an impact on a client’s view of your company and brand, and on your colleague.
This is a small scale example that shows the person hasn’t taken responsibility or thought about the consequences of their actions. On a larger scale, this can have a huge impact, particularly given how important agility is in most organisations. Before taking action, it’s important to start asking yourself “What could the impact be of me doing or not doing this?”
As experts in behavioural change, the Discovery team know that making changes for individual development isn’t an easy journey, but the result will be huge for individuals and organisations alike. We hope these tips help, and if you’re looking for further support in implementing individual or team development, please visit our website or call us on 0121 665 4060.
