Development & Coaching Notes

Plan development where it actually happens, in real work that gets reviewed afterwards, and use your one-to-ones to coach instead of solve, so the person leaves each conversation with a step they chose. An optional section adds an Individual at Work Canvas for understanding one person's fit, motivation and circumstances.

Learning from challenging experience comes from interview research with executives (McCall, Lombardo & Morrison, 1988). The 70-20-10 ratio built on it is weak or contested (Clardy, 2018). Structured debriefs are strong research (Tannenbaum & Cerasoli, 2013; Keiser & Arthur, 2021). Workplace coaching has meta-analytic support (Jones, Woods & Guillaume, 2016), but GROW as a model is practice, not research (Whitmore, 1992). Durations and rhythms on this page are rules of thumb.

Use it when:

• A report wants to grow, or you need them ready for a bigger role, and the plan so far is a course list.
• You hand someone a stretch assignment and want it to teach them something, not just get done.
• Your one-to-ones drift into you solving their problems.
• Use the optional Individual at Work Canvas section when you need a fuller picture of one person's role fit, motivation and support needs first.

Skip it when:

• You need to rate performance or set goals for the period: use 4.8 Expectations & Performance Canvas.
• You are planning your own development: use 1.16 Leadership Development Plan or 1.05 Skill Gap Map & Priority List.

Managers say they learned most from hard assignments, a pattern documented in interviews behind the lessons-of-experience work (McCall, Lombardo & Morrison, 1988). The tidy split between experience, other people and courses that grew out of it is another matter: its figures come from a practitioner planner (Lombardo & Eichinger, 1996), not from a study, so this page plans all three channels and sets no percentages.

Experience alone is not the lever. What turns a stretch assignment into learning is looking back at it in a structured way, which is why every assignment here ends in a debrief. On coaching, the research on workplace coaching as a whole is encouraging (Jones, Woods & Guillaume, 2016), while GROW, popularized by Whitmore (1992), is a useful sequence that has not been tested on its own. Its value here is that it closes on a commitment. The limit: no plan helps if it is written once a year and never opened again.

Write this together. Name strengths and development areas with an example each, then where the person wants to go.

Strong answer: "Strength: explains complex dosing rules clearly to nurses (the ward survey comments). Development area: gets overruled in meetings with senior physicians. Direction: wants to lead the medication-safety work within two years."

Direction in one to three years, in their words:

Illustrative example: the roles, the hospital and all details are made up.

The head of a hospital pharmacy in Finland coaches a clinical pharmacist who wants to lead medication-safety work.

Section 1: strength: clear explanations to nurses, seen in ward feedback. Development area: gets overruled by senior physicians. Direction: lead the safety work within two years.

Section 2: goal one is holding ground with physicians (experience: present at the ward meeting; people: the chief physician as sparring partner; formal: a negotiation course). Goal two is planning a team's work (experience: own the rota for the review team).

Section 3: three months leading the review pilot on one ward. At the debrief she said the reviews went well, but her first presentation stalled because the physicians saw the findings for the first time in the room.

Section 4: in the next one-to-one, the head asked only questions. The pharmacist chose to send the findings in writing two days ahead.

Section 5: a month later one recommendation was adopted without the head present. The course was swapped for sessions with the quality lead, because the time was not there.