Development & Succession

Organisations want to remove old, clunky manual performance and development processes and replace them with agile, continuous employee development.

The obstacle is rarely intent. Most organisations already believe development should be continuous. What stops them is that their process was designed around an annual event.

This session covers how to make the shift quickly and efficiently, without a twelve-month transformation programme.

Presented by Mark Seemann, CEO & FounderWatch time 5 min 29 sec
See in Action

Why annual cycles produce annual development

If the only structured conversation about someone’s growth happens once a year, then development can only ever be an annual activity. Everything downstream inherits that cadence — objectives are set once, skills are assessed once, and the plan is reviewed roughly never.

The instinct is to fix this by adding more meetings. That rarely survives contact with a busy quarter. The more durable fix is to change where development lives, not how often it is discussed.

What “continuous” actually requires

Three things have to be true before development can run continuously without adding workload:

  • Development has to sit inside conversations that already happen. One-to-ones and check-ins occur anyway. If capability and progress are captured there, the plan updates itself as a by-product.
  • The target has to be defined. “Get better” cannot be tracked. A capability defined at a proficiency level, against a role, can be — which is what a competency framework provides.
  • The admin has to disappear. If each update costs a manager fifteen minutes of form-filling, it will not happen twelve times a year. It will happen once, badly.

Doing it quickly

The common mistake is treating this as a transformation programme: define every competency for every role across the whole organisation, then launch. That takes a year, and by the time it lands the appetite has gone.

The faster route is narrow and deep — pick the roles where capability risk actually matters, define those properly, run the continuous loop there, and expand once it is demonstrably working. A framework that covers a third of your roles and is genuinely used beats one that covers everything and is ignored.

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