People Development

"People Development "- it's a term thrown out at us managers lately on a daily basis. What IS people development? It's our company's desperate attempt to get people in the organization properly trained, well-equipped with skills to get promoted and move to the next level. In recent months, our company is faced with a crisis: important positions left vacant for months. There is no one ready to be promoted. No one has the qualities and experience the position requires. A group of people think they are very qualified, but senior management thinks not. So, both HR and managers are getting the heat for not adequately developing their people. HR's so-called solution is to implement a myriad of training and development programs -- an overly-ambitious plan that is too much too late in my opinion. Developing people takes time; the programs might benefit the company some day, but it won't do a thing for today. The company is finally realizing that when they did those lay-offs 2-3 years ago (read Archive Blogs) and downsized the organization down to its core skeleton, they didn't take in account that there will be a time like now...hands tied because we simply don't have enough experienced people to do the job. It takes 5 seconds to let someone go, but at least 5 years to get someone trained enough to take on a managerial role and to understand the complexities of our company.

And by giving the us managers added pressure to develop our people overnight is not going to make things better. I, for one, am getting a little annoyed by the company's direction to implement so many programs that will do little, other than take up valuable time on real day-to-day job training. One of the programs launched recently include critiquing yourself on what is your weakness, share it with your supervisor and then come up with an objective in how to improve that weakness. Oooooookay... that's very useful. That will just pissed off people more like it!

What really pisses me off lately is the whole "increasing your profile with senior management," that is directly related to people development. I guess in order to be classified as being "developed" or "deserving of a promotion," one must increase his visibility and presence in front of senior management. This is getting too out of hand. It is no longer about being able to do your job anymore. It's not about getting things done anymore. It's about your presence, your visibility, your profile... and how all that sits with senior management. So, bottom line, you can be slacker or incompetent, but if you know how to talk the talk, walk the walk, you'll do just fine. It's ridiculous. I've seen hard workers leave because they don't get appreciated the way they should be. Dang it, one of them just might be me!

Wikipedia

I have a passion for useless fun-fact trivia - like what is the longest highway in America, why do we have daylight savings time and what on earth is Sudoku? These facts fill up memory space in my brain -- that may be why I have such bad memory for more important things! I guess I get curious when I run across things I've never heard about. So I go on the web and research on it. My recent favorite lunchtime hobby is reading random articles on Wikipedia. I love this site! It's by no means the authority on information, but it's a quick read fact-finder! You can also contribute by editing the pages and adding more information that you know about and willing to share with others.