Why people development matters in organizations

Every organization needs to understand that people development means taking care of its main asset. After all, every operation is carried out by people.

Successful businesses depend on the individual and collective success of their employees, and that success is a concrete return on the investment made in a hire.

It is well known that the workplace demands constant development from companies and their people. Today’s market is highly dynamic, which increases the need for change.

Naturally, that change involves the ability to manage individuals’ development, which makes the people management cycle even more important for business growth and success.

In this article, we explain more about what people development is in organizations and how it can be strategic for your business.

Siteware has also prepared a complete, free Individual Development Plan (IDP) template. Download it here (in Portuguese)opens in a new tab!

What is people development?

People development inside organizations is the goal of every HR area. The logic behind the concept is that employees keep improving their skills, reach high performance and, as a consequence, help the company achieve its results.

That makes people development a fundamental strategy for any organization, from bringing new employees in through onboardingopens in a new tab to retaining talent. People management matters for driving change in competitive environments and global markets. To support that development, you can choose from a range of actions, such as:

• Succession plan;
• Performance reviewopens in a new tab;
• Career plan;
• Individual Development Plan (IDP).

In addition, people development efforts improve employees’ qualifications, engagement and well-being. They also help companies attract and retain talent, reduce turnover rates and foster a healthier organizational climate.

So investing in an effective people development program inside companies includes identifying training needs, creating training plans and evaluating results. An important question is the type of training, such as skills development, technical training, motivation and other soft skills and hard skills.

What is the difference between people development and people training?

Training is a short-term action focused on teaching specific skills or knowledge so that a person performs a given task or role more effectively.

It usually happens when there is an immediate need in the company, such as learning to use new software, following a new procedure or developing a technical skill essential to the job.

Development, on the other hand, takes a broader, long-term approach. It seeks to prepare the person for continuous career growth, focusing on their future potential.

Development involves a series of activities that improve the employee’s knowledge, skills and personal and professional abilities over time. This can include coaching, mentoring, opportunities to take on new challenges and leadership programs.

People development and innovation

The people development process is, like any other organizational process, subject to change over time. It is always situated in a given economic and social moment that matches the market’s characteristics.

So, today, when knowledge is a central tool in any business, people development has become more strategic. It joins forces with other fields of knowledge such as Information Technology and Marketing.

Being strategic, then, means joining human resources with business strategy, turning information into market intelligence and optimizing time, investment and procedures.

Technological progress has become one of the engines of strategic management.

From this marriage between HR and IT comes a modernization of procedures and of the whole department, along with a decentralization of management, which no longer belongs to the human resources area alone.

As a result, managers in every department become responsible for managing their own teams, and HR’s role is to support those leaders and manage the leadership process itself.

Different types of people development

Career development can be broken into several fronts, each focused on improving a different aspect of a person’s professional path.

Below, I separated the different people development models:

1- Technical skills development

This type of development focuses on improving the technical skills and specific knowledge a person needs to do their tasks with excellence. It is common in professions that demand constant updating, such as technology, engineering or healthcare.

2- Behavioral skills development (soft skills)

Here the focus is on developing behavioral skills that help with interpersonal relationships and the work environment. These include communication, conflict resolution, teamwork and emotional intelligence.

3- Leadership development

Leadership development prepares professionals to take on leadership roles in the future. This type of development involves learning skills such as people management, decision-making and strategic vision.

4- Planned career development

This type of development helps employees map out a career plan within the company. The idea is to define which steps they need to take to reach their professional goals over the years, such as taking on a new role or qualifying for a promotion.

5- Continuing education

Continuing education encourages professionals to keep studying throughout their careers, even after graduation. This can range from short courses to postgraduate programs, MBAs or specific certifications.

6- Change management

This development prepares employees to deal with organizational change and learn how to adapt their skills and behaviors to new realities. This matters, for example, when the company implements new technologies or goes through a restructuring.

Why people development matters

Investing in employees’ continuous development not only raises their skills and abilities but also drives innovation, efficiency and productivity in the company.

When organizations commit to improving their teams’ skills, they not only enrich the pool of internal capabilities but also cultivate a culture of learning and continuous improvementopens in a new tab.

In addition, people development is intrinsically linked to talent retention.

Employees who see growth and development opportunities at work are more likely to stay with the organization, reducing turnover rates and the costs of hiring and training new employees.

This also shows up in talent attraction, since companies known for investing in their people tend to attract qualified, motivated professionals.

Furthermore, people development also strengthens leadership within the organization. Well-developed leaders can guide their teams more effectively, promoting a positive, encouraging work environment, which in turn boosts employee satisfaction and engagement.

Another crucial aspect is improved performance and productivity. Employees who receive proper training and development are better equipped to do their jobs, adapt to change and contribute to organizational objectives.

They also become more skilled at problem-solving and innovation, and contribute significantly to improving the company’s processes and operations.

The leader’s role in people development

Whatever the company’s mission, values and identity, the leaderopens in a new tab will always be the main mediator between organization and team.

In the words of James Hunter, author of the best-seller “O monge e o executivoopens in a new tab” (in Portuguese), “if the leader yells and loses control, you can be sure the team will also lose control and tend to act irresponsibly.”

That is, the leader is a reference point for the team, and is actively responsible for its overall performance.

In a culture geared toward people development, it is also the leader’s job to pass on and strengthen those values. Learn about the 5 expected traits of a business leader.

The leader as a coach

A term used for coaches and trainers in sports, the concept of coach has extended to every dimension of life, including, and perhaps especially, the organizational context.

The essence of this role is turning ordinary people into champions: exploring skills, improving attitudes and drawing out potential that may be latent or often underdeveloped.

A business coach is a person who commits to supporting someone to achieve better results and promote their professional and personal development.

So a leader who supports the people development process plays a trainer’s role. They should refine their team members and closely follow their progress.

See how a leader can become a true coach to their team:

• Using discipline as a motivational tool;
• Using feedback to improve performance and turn mistakes into learning;
• Practicing listening and valuing team members’ actions;
• Encouraging teamwork.

Stratws is a tool that encourages a feedback culture in companies through strategic management. Talk to an expert about Stratws.

Through these four attitudes, the relationship between leaders and team becomes a learning network that promotes, above all, the improvement of both sides.

It is important to stress that a complete leader learns from their team. That is, in people development there is room for mutual growth, as leadership improves through exchange with others.

How to work on people development?

Now that we have looked at the whole context of people development, the importance of management and the leader’s role in this process, let’s get practical.

Knowledge, skill and attitude: the development triad

Based on this triad, you can carry out people development with the confidence that the work is complete.

After all, knowledge, skill and attitude are the set of elements that need to be developed in an organization so that its employees achieve well-rounded growth.

To make this clearer, we will cover each element separately. Follow along!

1. Knowledge

In people development, knowledge is the factor with the greatest differentiating impact among competitors in the market. So the question here is: how can I raise my employees’ level of knowledge?

Authors who write about Knowledge Management point out that knowledge is truly valuable when it becomes explicit.

So all the effort around this element goes toward making it accessible and concrete, since it is precisely what represents the organization’s famous know-how.

Knowledge management involves: creating, capturing, systematizing and disseminating content.

Therefore, the company should foster the sharing of valuable information by creating communication channels.

It should also standardize procedures, formalizing them so they are internalized, and finally promote learning through techniques and tools from the world of corporate education.

2. Skill

People development represents the level that most covers employees’ personal aspects, such as inclinations, aptitudes, experiences and ease of learning in certain areas.

Here it is worth noting that developing skills requires close observation of individuals. It involves tracking results and also the whole path that led to them.

This tracking matters because you can only develop people if they are recognized.

A leader who does not recognize their team’s talents, for example, will have a less engaged group than they could, if there were room for that recognition and work to refine the talents that already exist.

3. Attitude

Attendance, interpersonal relationships, initiative, ethical behavior at work and punctuality are examples of attitude indicators.

Working on these factors is as important as developing potential and providing knowledge.

Recurring habits and certain behavioral flaws can get in the way of people’s personal and professional paths.

In contrast, an intervention and the resulting change in these aspects can turn a stagnant career into a rising one.

To do that, the company can highlight important attitudes that add value to the work, constantly encouraging its employees through rewards, incentive programs, benefits and so on.

Here, feedback is a valuable instrument, both positive feedback, which reinforces good attitudes, and negative feedback, which corrects what adds no value or harms the employee, their team and the company.

Watch the video on how to give negative feedback (in Portuguese):

Ways to apply people development

There are countless ways to develop people. Among them, we can highlight:

1- Job rotation

It consists of moving people around the organization, both vertically and horizontally, in order to expand knowledge and develop and strengthen skills and attitudes.

It is a temporary strategy that gives the employee more experience by exposing them to other operations in the company.

2- Hands-on learning

It is the full dedication of an employee to a given project, which can happen in a group or individually.

It can also be aimed at solving problems in certain departments. It is usually used together with other techniques.

3- Courses and seminars

This way of promoting people development is one of the most widely used. However, how it is carried out can vary, either inside or outside the company.

You can also use technology as support, through apps, programs and learning platforms.

4- Simulation techniques

Simulating a challenging work situation can be an interesting action in people development.

Besides taking the employee out of their comfort zone, it can revisit situations constantly lived in the company’s routine.

This way, such situations can be seen from the outside, shared, discussed and more easily resolved.

5- Performance review

Employee performance reviews can be run in cycles. The most important thing is that they happen constantly.

Besides being an important quality control tool, they can also support employee development.

The 360-degree review, a well-known and widely used model today, is an example of a review that promotes complete improvement within an organization.

It happens at all hierarchical levels, involving professionals from different specialties and roles.

That is why it has proven to be such an efficient tool for making companies aware of their performance.

As we saw, knowledge only becomes valuable if it is explicit. Methods that offer more transparency about what happens in the organization can bring the expected development more easily.

Next steps

Organizations exist to achieve results that a single person could not achieve alone. So overcoming limits is part of their mission.

People development, in turn, is the ultimate expression of that mission in the organizational context.

Companies that believe in their employees’ potential are those that can convey to their customers a commitment to becoming better and better. And they offer services and products that draw on the full extent of their effort and potential.

To get outstanding results, you need to invest beyond the standard. That means investing in the main ingredient of your business: people. An organization’s success must go hand in hand with its team’s success.

Do you want to encourage communication, collaboration and the spread of best practices among your team members to make sure your planning is executed correctly?

Then the ideal is to have a robust people management system that is easy for every level of the company to use.

Good Human Resources software offers, for example, more autonomy to HR, since it allows process automation and encourages a feedback culture through smart talent management.

The perfect ally for this modernization is Stratws.opens in a new tab With it, you plan, organize and improve the work routine of the whole team, keeping employees focused on a results culture.

Transform your company’s management with Stratws.