Up Your Business!: 7 Steps to Fix, Build, or Stretch Your Organization, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded

Chapter 3. Develop Your Human Capital: How to Train, Coach, Mentor, and Retain Eagles

Thus far, you’ve journeyed through two key steps for fixing, building, or stretching your organization: You’ve taken a fresh look at the significance of finding and keeping the right people, and you have become more aware of the importance of the environment in which they work. Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and develop the human capital in your charge. Talent rarely arrives fully developed, and one of a leader’s greatest responsibilities is to take the human capital he or she is entrusted with and make it more valuable tomorrow than it is today. Thus, creating and committing to a process of training, coaching, mentoring, and differentiating your people is the next discipline you must incorporate into your leadership repertoire. In this chapter I’ll present strategies for accomplishing these ends as well as outlining how to accelerate the growth of your best people with effective delegation and how to deliver the fast, brutally honest feedback they need to grow.

Developing people starts with the right mind-set from the leadership in an organization. To judge from the number of companies who poorly or inconsistently develop their people, this mind-set needs urgent attention. Many managers don’t invest the time or money necessary to develop their teams because they see training as an expense rather than an investment. Instead, they act as though time and experience alone will improve their ...