The importance of people developing is paramount for your team and your organisation. When building a great team it’s really important as a team leader that our team has opportunities to develop themselves and have an objective career pathway. One of the frameworks that I really like is the SFIA and that’s a specific IT framework that has different levels and different capability descriptions that people can use to progress through the organisation.

I don’t believe as a leader we should be pushing people or babying people when it comes to career development, but is important that we set up a framework and that we support those who do with what they’re trying to do. Be clear how you as a leader and as an organisation will help and support them in their development. The first capability framework that I ever set up was super basic just with a spreadsheet and I worked with a couple of the technical people and we developed the different role titles and the different descriptions and rolled it out within the business.

It worked well because it was transparent. People just want to know the what, the why, and the how. Be clear about role titles with a really clear description when it comes to salaries, salary reviews, and when it comes to promotions, and how you get promotions and when you get promotions. It is really important that you have a clearly defined process and that people know how it works and they know what they need to do to achieve those things and tick those boxes. Align development efforts with clear expectations about the roles, responsibilities, and required skillsets of your team members.

From a salary perspective transparent processes are important when it comes to the development process. When a team member gets their promotion or acquires new skills it is important that they understand how you’re reviewing it, how it’s measured, what data you review, what market rates do you look at. A lot of the time people just want to understand, how you calculated their salary, if it’s because of market rates in CPI and what other different factors it’s based on, as long as you can explain how you’ve thought about it, what the process was and why this is the reason, they’re going to be a lot more forgiving and a lot more patient with you. Having perks for high achievers don’t always have to be money-based, time off for family events, rewards of recognition are some incentives and a lot of the time people just want to develop for their own sake and be current in new tech.

Learning, growing, and developing in my experience is great. People really want to know and be able to do this within their organisation. So enabling people to keep progressing with whatever type of learning and developing and training that they want is really important. Whether it be formal personal development plans, whether it be quarterly catch-ups with people where you set a couple of goals for the quarter learning and the importance of developing your team will only benefit the organisation. Professional development isn’t just about building relevant job skills—it’s about being driven to be better today than you were yesterday and finding new ways to contribute intellect, energy, and creative ideas to the organisation’s collective talent pool.