Is your business built for top performance and success? Knowing how to help your employees grow as professionals is the key to a powerful organization. This article will provide you with information about employee development programs and how they can help your business. Whether you're an executive, a manager or a team leader, the following information will be beneficial to you.

We are well into the new school year, a good time to focus attention on and give gratitude to the educators of tomorrow's leaders. Teachers deserve admiration for regularly facing classrooms of pupils with vast differences and needs, and still managing to fill young minds with the knowledge that turns them into productive citizens and creative thinkers.

Some of today's pupils will eventually land at the doorsteps of industry and business, eager to perform. In the ideal scenario, some of the best employees will become high-performing CEOs and CFOs, executive directors, or hold other highly responsible positions of leadership. But for this ideal to occur, learning must be a lifetime pursuit and teaching, or development, must meet individual needs.

In too many organizations, this does not happen. Employee development programs are often like ordering from a menu that offers a single entry, no substitutions permitted, and everyone has to like it. In development classes, this means that managers with different needs will join others both like and unlike them, to study the same things - customer service, perhaps, or team building, or leadership in general - whether they need these sessions or not. Organizers of such programs should glance into the room at mid-point and see how many pupils are engaged in the subject. If you see vacant stares, doodling and finger drumming, take it as a sign that your development needs an infusion of relevance and reality.

The First Step

One of the most effective things a leader can do when developing employees is find out what they need. Asking, "In what area(s) do you need to grow?" is simple enough. But just because the question is easy does not mean the answer is at our fingertips. Everyone has blind spots, and all ambitious employees want to present themselves in the best possible light. For example, don't expect someone to tell you that she is good at everything except for establishing relationships. Many people just do not want to admit that a skill or two might be weak. Even those who know where they need to improve might not be willing or able to articulate it clearly.

This is where an objective assessment can be a useful method of determining exactly what your employees need to develop into a great leader or manager. Let's define an "objective assessment" as a measure of on-the-job behaviors or skills required to perform the job. A list of these skills could be quite long and include such things as displaying commitment, an ability to develop teams, skill in motivating team members, and the constant fly in the organizational ointment, effective delegation of duties to others.