How do people grow?

In my previous article, I mentioned that facing subordinates’ adaptive challenges requires timing and energy of both the supervisor (the one who nurtures) and the subordinate (the one who is being nurtured). We also mentioned that even if we become aware of a subordinate’s adaptive challenges, we should not immediately try to solve them, but rather, we need to choose the appropriate time and occasion while carefully considering both the subordinate and ourselves over a long period of time.

In the previous articles, we have talked about the attitude of a supervisor toward the development of his/her subordinates. In the coming articles, I will discuss how to face the growth challenges, including adaptive challenges, of subordinates.

One way to grow is to acquire new knowledge by being taught or by doing research on one’s own. Another way to grow is to acquire skills to do what one could not do before (e.g., give an easy-to-understand presentation).

Challenges that can be solved by acquiring such knowledge and skills are called technical challenges. On the other hand, there are growth challenges that cannot be solved by acquiring knowledge and skills but involve a change in one’s sense of values, and these are called adaptive challenges. As we have already mentioned, in order to support the growth of subordinates, it is necessary to deal not only with technical challenges but also with adaptive challenges.

Technical challenges: challenges that cannot be solved with the technology and knowledge currently possessed, but the technology and knowledge needed to solve them exists and can be solved by using them.

Adaptive challenges: challenges that are difficult to solve with existing models of thinking and require changing or letting go of some of the traditional values and beliefs.

Viewed in this way, the ways of dealing with technical challenges and adaptive challenges appear to be quite different. In fact, in the case of technical challenges, they can be solved by acquiring knowledge and skills, as mentioned earlier. On the other hand, adaptive challenges require a bird’s-eye view of one’s values, followed by a trial-and-error process of transforming one’s sense of values.

Although the concrete responses to technical challenges and adaptive challenges differ from one another, from a larger perspective, there is a common concept that is important regardless of whether we are dealing with technical or adaptive challenges.

That is the ability to learn from experience. This is the ability to learn from one’s experience and apply it to the next experience. We will refer to it here as the ability for personal growth or the ability for personal transformation.

It is clear to us that experience has a great impact on a person’s growth when we look back at our own growth process. However, it is not enough to only have experiences. Some people can grow a lot while others cannot grow much, even if they have similar experiences. It is important not only to have experiences, but also to learn from them, and how much one can learn from one experience is different for each person.

When a supervisor is involved in the development of subordinates, it is of course important to give advice and feedback that directly affects their growth, but the most important thing is to cultivate in them the ability to learn from their experiences on their own.

A model of people development

In response to the question, “How do people grow?” our company (Alue Co., Ltd.) has devised a model of people development based on the ability for personal growth.

In this model, we believe that a person’s growth is continuously realized through the following mechanisms

(1) Increased ability of personal growth: The ability to learn from experience through a variety of experiences (work, etc.) will be enhanced.
(2) Competence growth: Increased ability of personal growth leads to competence growth through experiential learning and self-improvement.
(3) Mental maturity: Increased ability of personal growth facilitates mental maturity.
(4) (Through mental maturity) Enhancement of ability of personal growth: The ability of personal growth is further enhanced by the quality of challenge and the quality of reflection that is deepened through mental maturity.

In this model, the ability of personal growth plays a central role. It is a recurrent or self-reinforcing model in which increased ability of personal growth promotes not only competence growth but also mental maturity, and increased mental maturity further enhances the ability of personal growth.

It is clear that increased ability of personal growth promotes competence growth. What is perhaps a little more difficult to imagine is that increased personal growth promotes mental maturity.

Mental maturity in this context can be understood as an increase in mental flexibility when addressing adaptive challenges.

Through a concrete example, I would like to explain the process by which mental maturity, as well as competence growth, is promoted through an increase in the ability of personal growth.

Let’s say that a subordinate in a sales position is facing challenges in presenting proposals to customers. He/she is trying his/her best to make the presentation, but is not getting the response from the customer that he/she expects.

When he/she experiences this, he/she needs to think about the cause as to why the response from the customer is not good and address it.

If the cause is that what he/she wants to convey is not organized and therefore difficult to understand, one solution may be to learn the skill of summarizing the proposal in an easy-to-understand manner. This is a way to address a technical challenge.

Another cause may be that “ he/she is telling what he/she wants to tell and is not trying to capture what the customer wants to know. The situation is that he/she is in his/her own point of view and is not able to have the customer’s point of view. In the background, there may be a fear of not knowing what the customer wants to know, and this may lead to a one-sided approach in which he/she tells only what he/she wants to tell the customer. This is an adaptive challenge because it involves transforming one’s sense of values.

By identifying and dealing with such adaptive challenges, he/she gradually learns to have the other person’s point of view instead of his/her own, which leads to mental maturity.

Enhanced mental maturity increases the ability of personal growth

The other key point of this model is the part about “(4) Enhancement of the ability of personal growth through mental maturity”.

I will explain this also using the example of the sales subordinate I mentioned earlier. Suppose that he/she was unable to listen deeply to the customer’s needs due to a fear of not knowing what the customer wants to know, and was repeatedly making self-centered proposals.

What kind of insights can he/she gain by gradually overcoming this fear and becoming more attuned to the customer’s needs? By looking at things from the customer’s point of view and not just his/her own, he/she will be able to better understand the strengths and challenges of his/her company and of him/herself. And it will be easier to be motivated to further develop those strengths and overcome those challenges.

The essence of the mechanism by which enhanced mental maturity increases the ability of personal growth lies in the “acquisition of diverse perspectives. In this example, the ability to learn from experience is enhanced by taking on new challenges and reflecting on the experience from the customer’s perspective as well as one’s own.

The difference in the ability of personal growth depending on mental maturity will be discussed in a future article, so it is sufficient to understand that looking back from various perspectives facilitates growth.

In this article, I discussed the mechanism of people’s development, focusing on the “ability of personal growth” (the ability to learn from experience). When involved in the development of subordinates, I hope that you will keep in mind that it is important not only to give advice and feedback that will help them grow, but also to develop the ability of personal growth of the subordinates.

Here are the quests of the day. (If you’d like, please share your thoughts in the comments.)

・What experiences, if any, make you feel you have grown significantly through that experience?

・Please apply this article’s model of people development to the process by which you have grown through that experience. What kind of competence growth and mental maturity did you experience through that experience? How has your ability of personal growth (ability to learn from experience) increased through that mental maturity?

Bunshiro Ochiai