What I want you to start thinking about as I start talking to you, is that when I say people development - that includes myself. So it’s me, my team, whether it’s one person or two people or more. So even if I have just one person working with me, this is still a team. Together we are a team. The key competency or key capability of any business is to continue developing because if we stop developing, we will die. The world is moving so fast and the changes are coming right left and centered. If we don’t continue keeping up with those changes and the newest learning & innovative trends, then we are going to be out of business very soon.

So, continuous development or talent development is a key capability for you and your business to keep on growing and succeeding. Therefore, how to actually do it? Developing one’s self and developing others: obviously you need to develop yourself before developing others because we can’t practice something, preach something that we are not personally practicing. So if I go and tell my team member – “you need to go and attend this training, read this book because you don’t understand much about this and you now do this”. If I, myself, do nothing about it, then I, haven’t been really working on ‘myself’. This doesn’t set a good example and it’s not really the kind of collaboration that we are talking about.

Now I am going to talk about the how? This is what we need to do. I need to provide you with more information and some more knowledge about how you can actually go about it.

In the older or conventional way of actually developing people, many organizations, unfortunately till date, still fall in to this trap. “Send them to training, just go and attend this course and this public program”, but you know that this is only 10% of how can you actually develop people. Because of this, I want to introduce to you this model. It’s called the 70, 20, 10 rule and it is a rule that has been developed by creative center for leadership. It basically teaches people and organizations how to best develop their people. Let’s start with the 10% which actually talks to the training program, is actually the percentage you can spend on developing people. Only 10 % goes to training. Not just that but then you also have 20% which goes to actual coaching and feedback. The last part which is the bigger chunk of the rule is the 70%. 70% of the time is spend on different developmental activities like on job training so actually taking on a challenging project and learning how to complete it. Even gaining experience by following a person who is completing a similar project, would fall in this section.

Checking out the internet, Google, YouTube, learning how different things are done, it is all on the job as you are going. You are not sitting in a training room, you are actually learning about different things while working. When you attend a business developing meeting, bringing your team member in to attend with you, so they understand how things actually happen behind or outside the office. So these are the kinds of things that you can do in addition to the 10% which goes to the actual classroom training.

So, to summarize about talent development, it’s about developing yourself and developing others and it is about performing it through the 70,20,10 rule. It is not just spending huge budgets for training and sending people to courses, but it is also about ongoing interactions with your team member or members and on doing a lot of projects that actually help to build the skills base in your business.