Many employees automatically equate development with advancement. They pick a goal and then hyper focus on the gap between their current job and the next one. But upward mobility isn’t always the best choice for development. Sometimes it’s helpful to think about the gap between how you perform in a given role and how top performers do it. For example, I might be the star of my local basketball team, but put me in an NBA game and my flaws would become instantly apparent.

Often employees have no idea what next level performance is so HR and operational leaders should design a development process that provides that insight. This can come from job shadowing high performers in the organization, partnering with non-competitive companies for job/employee sharing, bringing in external experts/speakers, or sending employees to working conferences or development programs.

If you have a strong HR team you can also commission a role profile exercise that highlights the difference between what is required for success in the role and the extra skills, competencies, and outputs make for high performance. Then you can train for those qualities specifically.

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