Professional Development More Than Skills and Techniques

Whether we are the CEO of a big company, a supervisor on the floor of a manufacturing company, a doctor, teacher or lawyer, a human resource manager, a sales assistant or a receptionist, we all need to be able to effectively communicate with employees, customers and clients to produce positive and desired outcomes while maintaining engagement, in what are often challenging circumstances. We need highly developed people skills, those interpersonal or “soft” skills that enable us to inspire the best from our people.

“I think I need to do a counselling course”, one of these people said to me recently. Yet when we look at counselling courses, however, they are mostly designed for people who want to make a career out of counselling. They are often specialised in their scope –marriage and relationships, drugs and alcohol, family, gambling, adolescents and so on. They are heavily laden with theory that is not particularly relevant to the type of interaction that the people above have with their employees, clients and customers on a daily basis. While people in organisations and companies would be experiencing all these things, it is often inappropriate for them to be dealt with “in-house”. There is potential for role conflict as managers try to be both manager and “counsellor”. The situations also often demand a level of expertise that “in-house” professionals do not have. They need to be referred out. The sensitive process that leads to the identification of a problem, and to getting the employee to seek help in addressing it, however, does belong “in-house”. Many people do not have the skills required to do this in a way that produces the desired outcomes because this level of skill development was not part of their original professional training.

What is needed is a much broader process of professional development and training that develops the capabilities of managers and employees to address the people dynamics within their companies and organisations today.

• How do I communicate with a stressed employee, on the verge of going off on stress leave, who sees me as a cause of his stress?
• How do I, as a teacher, maintain my integrity and professionalism, when faced with aggressive and bullying parents?
• Or what do I do about the complexity of concerns my young adult students bring to me, because they don’t trust counsellors, which I am not qualified, or have time, to deal with?
• What about the receptionist – seen by some to be at the bottom of the organisational ladder – yet, being the first point of contact for people with the organisation, who carries its reputation in the way she/he handles distressed, demanding or angry clients and customers?
• As a middle manager, how do I get my employees behind an unpopular new company process, about which I have doubts myself?
• And then there is the CEO about to launch considerable change within the company. How does she/he communicate this to his/her employees to gain their support and engagement – and what sort of communication process needs to be continued to maintain it?

In an article in HR Monthly in December 2005/January 2006 issue, Glenn Martin calls for a new model of professional development that prepares professionals for the ever increasing complexity of issues they face in their work. What he calls the “straight line” learning – that technical information we have to know to do our job well – is relatively easy to communicate. It is what he calls the “curves” – those less well-defined processes that engage problem posing and problem setting – that pose the most challenging areas for professional development today. My PhD was about the same issue. I made a distinction between “training” which I saw to be about the “straight lines” and “professional development” which I saw as being about the “curves”.

If we are going to be able to develop the abilities of people to handle the “curves”, and we must, then not only do we have to give attention to determining what the “curves” are in our particular professional area, but also to what we need to do about navigating them. Most importantly, is the “how” of it all, because we can’t develop people’s capabilities in this area by bringing in experts to tell them how it is done, by lecturing them from a podium or by developing an on-line distance education program. What is needed is hands-on professional development that requires a much more dynamic and interactive process. It also requires learning spaces that are different to the traditional ones used for professional development.