New Craze in Training: Actual Company Projects

Companies that want to develop the careers of their more promising executives are placing them in challenging jobs, ones in which expectations and rewards are real and mistakes are anything but academic.

Rather than merely sending these employees to school or putting them in routine on-the-job training slots, some companies are nurturing executives’ talents while keeping them as contributors to the firm.

This process is called project team-based executive development, says Craig Schneier, a Princeton, N.J., management consultant.

A “cottage industry of consultants” has sprung up in the last decade “to teach companies how to leverage naturally occurring experiences into learning,” said industrial psychologist Maxine Dalton of the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C.

“What you’re really trying to get people to see is that whatever their work task, [they need] to have this parallel track in their brain,” Dalton said. “One track is saying, ‘I have to get this project done.’ The other is saying, ‘While I do this, I am trying to learn this new skill,’ whatever that might be. Each assignment teaches different skills.”

In a hypothetical case, an executive might be assigned the task of setting up a cross-functional team of global executives to identify new companies to bring into the fold, to work with a new set of people, and to learn some things about leadership along the way. The executive’s company would provide him with tools to build an effective team and develop a business strategy, give him a coach to help him identify effective and ineffective behaviors, and give him “360-degree feedback,” Schneier said.

Such training allows executives to develop leadership abilities in addition to technical competence, Schneier said.

Career development expert Beverly Kaye, in her book “Up Is Not the Only Way” (Davies-Black), writes that companies expect technical competence plus leadership and management skills, interpersonal development and organizational behavior development.

Kaye said research at the Center for Creative Leadership “has shown that the best development sources are experiences that indeed do come from [actual] assignments.”