Self-development
The development of the self, by the self, through a deliberate process of learning from experience.
All development is ultimately self-development. The plain fact is that everyone has to take responsibility for their own development. In the same way that you can lead a horse to water but you can't force it to drink, you can provide your people with developmental opportunities but they decide whether to take them or not. Of course, it behoves you to make the opportunities enticing and to give active encouragement and support, but that is as much as you can do; the rest is up to them.
Self-development is the development of the self, by the self, through a deliberate process of learning from experience. Through self-development people can:
- increase their knowledge
- acquire new techniques and skills
- overhaul their attitudes, beliefs and values
- become better at managing negative unproductive emotions.
There are only two real constraints on self-development. The first is the individual and how far he/she wishes to go. Some people, for example, are happy to develop their knowledge and skills but hesitate to go deeper into attitudes and emotions.
The second constraint is the climate in the organization which may be fearful of releasing the self-development genie from the bottle. People are only able to take responsibility for their own development if they are allowed to (able, willing and allowed).
Some organisations worry that people might become enthusiastic about developing personal attributes which make no obvious contribution to their performance at work. This concern, whilst understandable, fails to recognise the worthwhileness of people acquiring and sustaining the learning habit. The answer, from the organisation's point of view, is to help self-developers set learning objectives which benefit both the individual and the organisation.
You can encourage your people to become self-developers by doing some or all of the following:
- Building learning into the system
- Keeping learning logs
- Learning contracts
- Offering encouragement
- Reviewing learning
- Rewarding the 'right' behaviours
Best of all, however, is that you become a blatant self-developer yourself. Everyone will know you have taken responsibility for your own learning when you:
- strive to improve your current performance
- deliberately seek out learning opportunities
- extract learning from chance events
- assess your own needs
- set your own development objectives
- assess your own progress
- experiment/try new or different things
- explicitly complete all the stages in the learning cycle (do, review, conclude, plan)
- tolerate short term discomfort in the interests of longer term learning and development.
Just nine explicit indications to your people that you are a self-developer.