B For other groups:
– freshly recruited;
– in the middle of their career; or
– supporting their final promotion.
5. How does the organization make its expectations of talents explicit?
B A clear (competence) profile of our talents.
B The career paths we have laid out for them.
B The jobs and assignments that are carefully selected for them.
B Other.
Principle 4: offer mentoring by true role models, or: ‘‘Where are the role models?’’
In my daily working practice I began to notice a huge contrast between the preferred
learning styles and the design of talent programs.
Manon Ruijters (2006), a Dutch professor on learning and development, has found through
her research that talents, especially future leaders, have two preferred modes of learning, of
which observing role models is one (the other, unsurprisingly, is learning by discovering, by
doing). Through observation talents learn what works best and how to build their own best
practices. Talents, her research further finds, are not afraid to make mistakes and are driven
by results and challenges. Learning in a safe, classroom environment holds little appeal and
is even perceived as childish.
Career planning and career development is based on the former preference: offer talents
attractive jobs, positions and projects and this will undoubtedly lead to a superior learning
experience. In fact, a better learning experience may be difficult (if impossible) to find. A
company I visited some time ago embodied this principle perfectly. For each job of
importance (for which career planning was either meaningful, or a necessity) HR offered
‘‘experience navigators’’. These navigators provided an attractively and visually designed
map of mandatory, optional and required work experience, whether those are projects, jobs,
countries or regions.
Besides relevant work experience, it can greatly aid the talent’s development to observe a
more experienced colleague – a role model. And in this regard I notice an omission in what
HRD is able to offer. Whether you are a leader, manager or specialist, the better you get, the
smaller the group of role models from which you can learn. In addition, the higher you get
promoted, the less ‘‘exposure’’ to role models you will have in daily working life. When do
talents meet their role models during and in their work?
Don’t get me wrong: organizations spend quite some time, effort and money in this area.
Mentoring (Jones, 2008), coaching, intervision and supervision are all examples of
interventions that bring peers into contact with each other to exchange their work
experiences. My concern is whether anything worthwhile is learned during these interventions.
Why? Because most often these interventions take place somewhere outside of the daily
environment, in a beautiful location and isolated from the workplace. Brain@work (van
Dinteren and Lazeron, 2010) criticises whether you can learn anything about your work outside
of your work environment. Why is mentoring such an effective intervention to accelerate the
development of talents? The neurological explanation stems from the fact that our brains are
wired with mirror neurons that will literally mimic real life examples of role models. Mirror
neurons work all the time, but the transfer of what role models can teach you is multiplied by
learning in your real-life work environment, if only for the sake that this helps your brain
remember the learning once you are on your own, back at work.
My plea is therefore for mentoring to take place during work time and in the working
environment – not by philosophising together in the boardroom, but by attending a board
meeting together. This will require a careful briefing of prospective mentors by HRD,