The Development Struggle

I wasn’t ready to be fired. After all, I had performed magic. Revenue was up and years of deficits had been erased. The audit was free of qualifications. Staff turnover was down. I had succeeded by any measure, I thought. So I wasn’t ready to be fired. But I was.

“What good can we make of this?” That’s what my mother asked whenever she faced a crisis or setback. That question was my guide through the years of struggle to understand and to change.

Thirty years later, it’s easy to accentuate the learning and gloss over the struggle. After all, that’s what most success stories do. We highlight the success when we tell our stories and when we discuss talent development.

There’s it’s all about skills to be mastered and developmental assignments. It’s about growth and change. The struggle is there, but we don’t talk about it. We need to talk about it and we need to make it one way we look at talent development.

That’s why I think that Steven Snyder’s book, Leadership and the Art of Struggle: How Great Leaders Grow Through Challenge and Adversity, should be required reading for anyone involved in talent development. Two words in the subtitle are key.

The first is “challenge.” We need to find more ways to challenge people. After all, there’s no growth without challenge.

The other word is “adversity. We need to help people prepare for, deal with, and grow from adversity. We have the tools and Snyder describes them well. Now we need to use them. We need to integrate them into our programs.

Our people will have setbacks. They will fail. That can be a time for great growth. The talent development challenge is to help people answer my mother’s question: “What good can we make of this?”

Wally Bock

Wally Bock is a coach, a writer and President of Three Star Leadership.