The tick box exercise costing you your best people

Hi Nik,

Every week I share one thing I have observed in the field of commercial leadership. This week it is about development, specifically the plan that gets written once and then quietly disappears.

Development conversations tend to follow a familiar shape. Something gets discussed at the start of the year, or squeezed in at the end of one, written down properly, filed somewhere sensible, and then rarely opened again until the next cycle comes round and someone remembers it exists. It is not that leaders do not care about development. It is that it becomes the thing that always waits until there is more time, and there is rarely more time.

A plan written with good intentions in January, genuinely meant, and then not looked at again until roughly the same week the following year.

This week in the field

What I notice most often is that development is treated as an annual event rather than an ongoing conversation, a tick box exercise rather than something that happens with a person regularly. The people who tend to feel this most are usually your strongest performers, the ones actively looking for the next opportunity, the ones you can least afford to have wondering where they stand. In the conversations I have had recently, the leaders whose best people stay longest are not the ones running the most elaborate development process, they are the ones who have made it a genuine, ongoing rhythm rather than a document filed away until the next cycle.

The knock on effect of leaving it until the end of the year is that the people on your team are left to fill the silence themselves. If nobody is talking to them about where they are heading, what the opportunities actually are, or what growth inside the business could look like, they start to wonder, quietly at first. And when a competitor happens to call at exactly the point that wondering has taken hold, the conversation that follows is rarely a difficult decision for them. It is closer to relief that somebody finally asked.

What it means in practice

What tends to shift things is not a bigger development plan, it is a more consistent one. What I have seen work well is a structured conversation on a quarterly basis, proper time set aside, not squeezed into the end of a one-to-one, so there is a clear thread running through the year rather than a single entry made in January and revisited in December. Alongside that, shorter check-ins as and when they are needed, guided by the individual rather than the calendar, so the conversation stays open between the quarterly points rather than going quiet again.

In my experience, offering someone real development can land almost like a promotion in itself, even before anything formally changes. It is the feeling of being believed in, that your leader wants you to improve for your own sake, not only for what it does for the number or the team. Framed that way, development becomes an investment the person carries with them wherever they go next, and in my experience, that is rarely lost on people. They tend to go further for a leader who they know is genuinely invested in them, not just in what they produce.

This is never about having all the answers on someone's future the moment they ask. It is about the person on your team knowing the conversation is genuinely open, and that you are paying attention to where they want to go, not just where they currently sit against the number.

The question to sit with this week

If I asked each person on your team when their last development conversation actually happened, would you be confident in the answer, or a little worried about what I might hear back?

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