Which Employees Should You Invest in Developing First?

By definition, as a manager, you always have to weigh choices, which means your budget for professional development can’t cover everyone. That leaves you with a choice: Who should you send first?

The easy choice would be to send the employee who asked or the person who is visibly struggling the most. But the easy choice isn’t always the right choice. Sometimes the right choice is the person who isn’t struggling at all.

In fact, they may be one of your better employees because they know their job, people trust them, and they can take on more responsibilities. But their ability to communicate hasn’t caught up to everything else they can do.

Which Employees Should You Develop First?

The employees worth developing first are the ones whose ability to communicate affects more than just them. Consider the difference between someone who spends their whole day working independently and someone who spends their whole day explaining ideas, influencing decisions, and giving directions.

Both employees are important, but the one directing other people can have much more of a direct impact on those around them just by communicating better. Again, this is where the obvious choice may not be the best choice. You aren’t looking for the worst communicator. You are looking for the person whose communication could have the greatest impact.

Look for the Gap Between What They Know and What They Can Explain

Look for the person others go to for help, whether it’s with a technical question or because everyone thinks they have the right answer. This is the person you give a problem to, and they solve it. Everyone trusts them because they trust their judgment.

But put that person in front of a group of senior managers, and something changes. They talk, but they provide too much detail. Their ability to speak clearly somehow gets buried, or their message becomes unclear.

That’s the development opportunity you are looking for. This is someone the company has already invested years in helping. Their expertise is there. Their knowledge is there. What’s missing is their ability to take what they know and make it useful to the people around them, including upper management.

Pay Attention to the People Everyone Already Listens To

There is another group of people companies don’t think needs training but, in actuality, may provide more bang for the buck. Those are the people who already have influence in the company, whether they have a title or not.

Look for the leaders, those people, other employees go to and ask what they think. A good way to determine who you are looking for is to pay attention to the next time something changes. Explain it to the group, then watch to see which employee the others go to for help understanding what is happening. That’s the person you want because that’s the person with influence.

The truth is that most managers can identify this person because they are the one you are thinking about eventually promoting. This is the person you think may one day be in charge of a team or whom you may ask to represent a department.

When you consider this, it makes more sense to develop this person’s ability to communicate six months before you promote them rather than waiting until they are six months into the job and struggling.

Who Is About to Take on More Responsibility?

Another way to look at this is to look forward instead of backward. Who are you thinking about promoting in the next year? Is there an employee who is starting to sit in on higher-level meetings? Is there someone who is being asked to present recommendations rather than just do the work?

There are always employees whose jobs are changing, even if their titles haven’t changed yet. These are the people beginning to manage projects that involve people from other departments. Their responsibilities are increasing, and they have to accomplish more through other people.

That’s the employee you are looking for, the person who can benefit the most from this training. They are going to need buy-in on an idea, or they will need to explain why a specific decision was made. These are the kinds of problems you want them prepared to take on before you promote them, not when they are in the thick of it later and the stakes are higher.

Don’t Wait Until Communication Becomes a Performance Problem

Sometimes companies get professional development backward because they wait for something to go wrong before fixing it, when it is more effective to train someone before the problem ever occurs.

Imagine waiting for someone to give a bad presentation or embarrass the company in front of a client because it was assumed they could get people to buy into an idea or present effectively when they had never been trained to do so. Now, training feels corrective instead of beneficial.

Now, let’s flip the script. Instead of leaving the employee to wonder what they did wrong, look at it differently. Make development something good employees receive because you want more from them, not because you were disappointed in what they were doing.

At Effective Presentations, we’ve worked with more than 100,000 professionals over more than 20 years. One thing we’ve seen repeatedly is that communication problems aren’t limited to people who lack confidence or ability. Some of the people with the most to contribute simply haven’t learned how to communicate at the same level as their expertise.

For employees moving toward greater responsibility, intentionally developing stronger communicators as leaders before the next promotion can make a lot more sense than waiting until the new responsibilities expose the gap.

How Can You Identify the Right Employees?

Look for the intersection of communication and responsibility. This doesn’t have to be complicated. Start with the people you are considering promoting in the next year and ask:

Does this person know more than they’re able to communicate?

They may know their job and be excellent at it, but do they struggle to explain complicated issues to people outside their group?

Are other people already influenced by them?

Do other employees already look to them for their opinion? People with this level of influence are the people you are looking for.

Are they going to be asked to lead more?

Start by looking past their current titles. Is there someone who will be managing people, projects, or important decisions a year from now whom you can start developing today?

Would improving this person’s communication affect other people’s performance?

This is perhaps the biggest question to answer. If helping one person communicate better improves their team, their meetings, and the people they manage, then you aren’t really developing just one employee. By training that person, you are affecting many people, not just one.

Your Best Candidate May Not Be Your Biggest Problem

If you are only using training to fix problems, then you are missing its potential impact. Your best candidate for training is probably already doing well. You’re already planning to promote them.

Or you may have a technical person who needs a bigger voice because everyone is already listening to them. Similarly, you may be looking at a manager who is going to take on a bigger team. You already know they have some of the skills they need, but adding to those skills will give them the ability to take on even more responsibility while affecting a greater number of people.

So, the question isn’t, “Who needs training?” The better question might be, “Whose ability to communicate is going to matter more a year from now than it does today?”

That’s the person I would start with.