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Ultimately, all change is personal. Faced with changing realities and increasing stakeholder demands,
enterprise talent in all areas is undergoing dramatic adjustments. Employees are constantly facing changes in
their roles and responsibilities and need new competencies to keep up. Roles define what we should be doing
and who we are and competencies define how we should be doing our work.
But knowing what to do and even how to do it does not ensure that it will be done well. Personalizing change
and making it real requires learning and development.
6. Articulate a clear goal. Adults who know what they want find it easy to focus their attention. In shaping
your professional development, you can compare yourself to others, to the competencies that the
strategy of the business requires of you, to what your boss and other clients expect of you, and to where
you think the profession is headed. These sources for defining your future enable you to figure out what
should be. A clear and precise vision of the future becomes a magnetic north, guiding efforts at three
levels: What strategy will allow the department to contribute most value to the organization? What
practices will bring the value proposition to life? What competencies do professionals need to make it all
happen? Professional development plans that incorporate these elements will provide solid guidance.
7. Earn and build on respect. Adults learn best from those they respect, and a faculty that lacks credibility
will ultimately lack impact. Professionals can learn as much from peers as from experts if the learning
process is set up to share experience and insight. An effective development program includes forums
for peer sharing as well as faculty members with real-world experience.
8. Create a friendly learning environment. Adult learners commit to action when they draw their own
conclusions from the material presented; they often chafe at the traditional schoolroom where teachers
teach and students study. Professionals need a setting that is informal, two-way, nondictatorial, and
more inquisitive than directive.
These eight principles may be used to assess and guide investments in developing employees or in selecting
professional development experiences. They can be applied to the two major options for improving
performance: training and development. Training focuses on formal education, events where participants learn
specific skills and information. Development includes the array of guided activities that help people learn by
experiencea topic that will be covered later in this course.
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i
To explore adult learning, see Stephen Brookfield, Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning: A
Comprehensive Analysis of Principles and Effective Practices (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991); Malcolm
Knowles, Elwood Holton, and Richard Swanson, The Adult Learner: The Definitive Classic in Adult Education
and Human Resource Development (Houston: Gulf Professional, 1998); and Michael Galbraith (ed.), Adult
Learning Methods: A Guide for Effective Instruction (Melbourne, FL: Krieger, 2004).
ii
This list is drawn from Edward Prewitt, What Managers Should Know About How Adults Learn, Harvard
Business Review, Harvard Management Update, 1997.
iii
Cynthia McCauley, Ellen Van Vestor, and John Alexander (eds.), The Center for Creative Leadership
Handbook for Leadership Development (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003).