A high-growth health company had employees who wanted to grow and leaders who valued development, yet development depended on which manager you happened to have, the competencies sat in appraisal paperwork that few people could name, and time was the barrier everyone cited. We recommended treating time as a symptom and building development into the work through stretch assignments paired with mentoring, putting the competencies where promotion and calibration decisions are made, and designing the whole plan so that whoever took ownership of learning could run it without having been part of the discovery. For CHROs, the takeaway is to give whoever owns learning next a plan that already exists rather than a blank page.

A large majority of the employees we surveyed at a fast-growing company said they would take on a challenging assignment if they could learn from it, and fewer than half said they had enough time and space to invest in their own development. That gap framed the whole engagement.

The company had changed a great deal in a short time, and leadership saw itself as early in the work of developing people. Several talent processes were already in place, so our objective was to build on that foundation with a clear path for how people grow at each level, which would help the company keep the talent it had invested in and prepare its leaders for the human side of their roles.

What we found was that development depended on which manager you had, that the competencies lived in appraisal paperwork few people could name, and that time was the barrier everyone cited. We recommended treating time as a symptom, building development into the work through stretch assignments paired with mentoring, putting the competencies where promotion and calibration decisions get made, and designing the plan so that whoever took ownership of learning could run it without having sat through the discovery.

What employees and leaders told us
We drew on an all-employee survey, focus groups with managers at several levels, interviews with leaders and the HR team, and the documents already in place, and three findings stood out.

Development depended heavily on the manager. Participants in every focus group described it, unprompted, as something you have to go ask for: where a manager happened to be generous with time and sponsorship people thrived, and where one was not there was no backstop. They also described mid-level managers who had been strong individual contributors promoted with no formal preparation to lead, and an individual development plan that functioned more like a form to complete than a tool for growth.

The ways of learning employees wanted were the ones they were least getting. Coaching, projects across functions, and mentoring ranked as the most appealing, yet only about one in five employees had been coached in the past year and even fewer had a mentor.

Time was the constraint everyone named, and it fell unevenly across managers and functions. Leaders saw a different root cause, which was that managers did not know how to reprioritize or how to develop people, and that made time the symptom everyone could see.

Putting development inside the work
When time is the constraint, adding formal training makes it worse, so we recommended placing development inside work that already has to get done. The core of the plan is a structured mentoring program with four steps: define the skill and what successful application looks like; pair the employee with a mentor and a meaningful project or stretch responsibility; let the employee own the task while the mentor models, checks in, and gradually steps back; then review the result and choose the next challenge. Managers help select the assignments and follow through, and time for the project and the check-ins is protected.

Courses still have a place. Each short course in the learning paths is paired with an application in real work, which matches what employees said made learning effective: practical use, time with knowledgeable colleagues, and feedback. Passive lectures and training with no follow-up assignment ranked as the least useful.

We also recommended a simple way to record learning that people start on their own, since much of it was invisible to the organization, with a clear line between participation and demonstrated competency so that nobody feels pushed to collect training hours. Managers gain something as well: as they hand appropriate individual contributor responsibilities to the people they are developing, they free up capacity for coaching and planning.

Competencies that lived in a folder
Almost no one in the focus groups could name the company’s competencies, which appeared in appraisal paperwork and never came up when calibration and promotion conversations took place. There was no shared definition of promotion readiness either; decisions relied on informal judgment rather than common criteria. A competency list that never appears in a calibration conversation is documentation, and it was never going to guide development.

We refined the framework to a short set of competencies with behaviors described at each level of the career path, from individual contributor through senior leader, and recommended connecting them to job descriptions, appraisals, calibration, and promotion readiness. We left out areas where the company was already strong (a strong growth mindset, for example, did not need to become a development focus), and we gave the individual contributor path its own standing because employees told us they wanted to grow without managing people. A development toolkit built around the competencies gives each person a way to plan against them.

A plan for someone who was not in the room
The company was building out its learning function, which meant the plan had to work for a person who had not sat through the interviews and focus groups and who would arrive to find a multi-year agenda waiting. In our experience, asking someone new to diagnose, design, and deliver at the same time produces a calendar of events instead of a system, so we put as much of that weight as possible into the plan itself. A new owner can start running it in the first week because of a few design choices:

• Every learning topic states its development objective, the competency it builds, an application in real work, and who to pair it with (a manager or a mentor outside the function, for example), along with a course title and search terms so the owner can find a fit in whatever library the company already uses.
• Learning paths follow the transitions from individual contributor to senior leader, each with a central question, a short list of Core topics to complete first and in order, and Recommended topics to add later, paced at roughly one topic every four to six weeks and starting within thirty days of a hire or promotion.
• A roadmap with quarterly deliverables names owners in three groups: the learning owner, HR leaders, and company management. Several barriers sit outside learning, including performance architecture, decision rights, workload capacity, and leveling, and placing them with HR and management keeps the new owner from being held responsible for problems they cannot fix.
• Quarterly decision gates (tools and pilot ready, mentor training complete, adoption reviewed, a calibrated review cycle) tell the CHRO what to look at and when.
• The first quarter begins with validating what already exists, mapping current courses to the competencies and transitions, and drafting the learning calendar, so the new owner starts by building on the foundation.

For CHROs, the takeaway is to give whoever owns learning next a plan that already exists. If you are about to build or hand off a learning function, the question worth asking is what that person will find on their first morning, a plan or a blank page. Let’s talk through what a plan they could start running in their first quarter would include.

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