Title: Risk & Reward: How to Provide Development Opportunities For Your Team - Thoughtful Leader
Headings: Risk & Reward: How to Provide Development Opportunities For Your Team
Risk & Reward: How to Provide Development Opportunities For Your Team
What Is a Development Opportunity?
Development Opportunities Come With Risk
Risk Comes With Reward
How to Provide Development Opportunities, Safely
Selecting Development Opportunities
1. Believe
2. Ensure That the Development Opportunity Aligns to Your Team Member’s Career Direction
3. Make Sure There is Enough Support Available
4. Handle Their Business as Usual Work
5. Communicate With Relevant People About the Development Opportunity
About the Author: Ben Brearley BSc. BCM MBA DipProfCoaching

Content: The first key aspect of a development opportunity is that your team member needs to be learning new skills and having new experiences outside of their normal role. Next, the new work needs to be aligned with the career direction or interests of your team member. When development opportunities are aligned with the aspirations of your team member, they are more likely to be interested in taking it on. Otherwise, they are just working on something different (which is nice for variety), but they don’t really care about improving their skills. Having to learning new skills and have new experiences means you will “stretch” your team member. This will put them outside their comfort zone. Development Opportunities Come With Risk
When you provide development opportunities to your team, there is almost always risk. First, you risk your team member feeling stressed and overwhelmed because they’ve never done the work before. You run a real risk of failure to deliver, because you are putting an inexperienced person into a situation where a more experienced person would normally be. This comes with a reputation risk for you, because you’re putting your team member forward to take on the opportunity.