Inspiring a culture of continuous professional development

Why is continuous professional development important?

The three things that make people enjoy their work are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Not everyone will resonate with the company’s purpose, or find it through their work, but you can provide opportunities for mastery, and some amount of autonomy.

As a manager, if you can create a culture where your team members are motivated to seek out opportunities for growth and development, you may find that people approach their work with a new sense of passion.

How do I create an environment of continuous professional development?

Your organization may have policies in place to encourage professional development like a professional development fund, or even 15% time like 3M instituted around World War II. If you do, this will make your efforts a lot easier. Lean into the frameworks that already exist, and try to nudge your team to make use of these benefits wherever you can.

In weekly 1:1 meetings, I always ask people what they’re working on for professional development. At this point, everyone knows I’m asking this question every week, so people come prepared with an answer, but it wasn’t always this way.

In the early days of being a team lead, I started by trying to lead by example. I created a Slack channel, where I would post excerpts from books I was reading, to prompt some discussion. Not every post was a winner obviously. Often I would get a series of lightbulb emoji reactions under the posts, but every now and then someone would comment in the thread with some thoughts, and there would be a small burst of discussion. By making my professional development visible, it made it easier for me to start that conversation with my team.

I’d start off with asking if they’ve thought about professional development lately. If they had, they’d have a few ideas of skills they’d like to develop. If not, we could go back to their Career Conversations and pick some skills from there. Once we had identified the skill they wanted to develop, we started to look for free resources to start with, just to get their feet wet.

Why do I start with free resources?

Every professional development expense that gets submitted has some administrative cost to get it approved. If someone on your team is saying, “I might be interested in this, but I don’t know a lot about the topic yet.” It’s hard to measure exactly what the return on investment will be. It can be hard to get these sort of “exploratory” professional development costs approved. Starting with a free resource allows people on your team to build a greater understanding of what’s involved in a certain skill before you invest significant resources. If you’re familiar with Miller’s Pyramid of Clinical Competence, you want people to get up to the “knows how” level before you invest in paid resources to get them to “shows how” and “does”.

What sort of free resources do I start with?

When someone on my team wants to explore a new topic, try to find some free ebooks, courses, webinars, YouTube videos, or even games that could teach them the skill they’re interested in.

Yes even games. There’s a little game called SQL Island that’s pretty good for teaching people introductory Structured Query Language (SQL), but you have to find the button to translate it to English.

How much time does my team spend on professional development?

I tell everyone on my team that they can spend 2 hours of work time on professional development. We work 35 hours/week so it equates to about 5-6% of our time. The people on my team are very passionate about what they do, and love to learn, so some people will continue working on professional development outside of work to continue moving forward faster.

What sort of skills do we work on?

I’ve said to my team that I’ll approve almost anything, I don’t care. Here’s a few examples of things people have learned

• SQL: This has really stepped up our team’s ability to kickoff large data projects without waiting on software development for support
• New software/tools: There’s so many software tools out there, learning some of their key features can bring efficiencies to the team
• Advanced spreadsheet functions: My team has really leaned into this one. There’s some functions we rely on almost daily that we didn’t even know about a few years ago. The benefits to the team have been huge.
• Generative AI: There’s so many free courses out there, and even just playing around with the tools can lead to a lot of new ideas for ways to work more efficiently.
• Project management: Good project management can speed up delivery by huge margins
• Product management: Although this isn’t directly related to anyone’s job title on my team, lots of people have worked with our product managers to learn more about product discovery, interviewing users, and product strategy. This is more of a long term investment, but if you find yourself without a dedicated product manager on your team, you can keep moving forward with minimal loss of momentum.

These are just some examples of what my team has worked on. Your mileage may vary, but I would say that allowing people to learn skills outside their official function can give your team perspective and insights into new and better ways of doing things. The benefit is hard to quantify, but over time it’s very obvious to see.

Over time, you’ll start to see different archetypes in your team members. Superstars and Rockstars from Radical Candor, specialists, and generalists, etc. Depending on the archetype, some people may invest more or less time overall into development. Some people may dive deeper into specialized skills while others will do a little bit of everything. No matter the case, remember that you haven’t officially moved the goalposts for your team yet. As the scope and scale of work that your team can accomplish increases, you may need to take the opportunity to push more senior leadership to recognize the improvement in the leverage of your team.

How much should I push for professional development?

The other thing to keep in mind, you can’t always push people for professional development. People aren’t machines and they can’t always perform at 100% while also developing new skills and pushing the boundaries. Sometimes people need to take a break from rapid growth and just do steady work for a while. We don’t always know what’s going on in their lives. If that’s the case with someone on your team, ease off on the professional development conversation for a few weeks, but be sure to check in occasionally. Keep the door open so that they can get back to growth when they’re in the right place again.

Wrapping up

By building a culture of continuing professional development, a small but regular investment of time will lead to major returns in the long run. And unlike the kind of teams that just assign more and more work, your team will actually be motivated to get more done and see how they can improve their leverage.