Like last month’s post, I’ll touch on the competencies that fall under Developing Others, providing the Air Force-given definition and giving my own interpretation why anyone – including those outside of the military – ought to care.
The Developing Others category includes 5 competencies that are meant to “inspire your peers and subordinates.” They are presented in alphabetical order below.
| Developing Others Competency |
| What Is It? |
| Why Should You Care? |
| Develops People |
| What: Invests in others to maximize their contributions to the mission by inspiring and providing an environment of continual feedback and learning opportunities. |
| Why: It’s right there in the category, really.Developing Others is literally about developing people.Individuals coming to your team as a peer or subordinate have the potential to grow, and as their team member or a leader on their team, you benefit by facilitating their development of self. |
| Fosters Inclusion |
| What: Creates a culture where all members of an organization are free to make their fullest contribution. |
| Why: When someone does not belong, they tend to get in the way, slow things down, make things less efficient, lack care for the quality of the products and services being provided…And the same happens when people only feel like they don’t belong.When someone does not feel like every part of them is appreciated, they tend to not bring all of themselves to that space. And when someone does not bring all of themselves into a space, they can’t be 100% in what they do. |
| Leadership |
| What: Inspires, builds, and sustains others’ motivation and morale to accomplish the mission;Organizes people and actions. |
| Why: This expression of “Leadership” speaks to me as “focusing.”A reservoir of water stores a great deal of potential energy, but a directed blast of water puts that potential to use. Leadership in this context is being that directing influence, and you should care because a team only performs well when they work toward the same goal (read: are led in the same direction). |
| Service Mindset |
| What: Desires to help or serve others to meet their needs;Makes and focuses efforts to discover and meet others’ needs. |
| Why: This mindset is necessary to work with others as it enables you to understand the needs, differences, and interests of others. That knowledge is necessary to develop others without depending solely on directive relationships. |
| Teamwork |
| What: Collaborates effectively with others to achieve a common goal or complete a mission task. |
| Why: Today’s problems tend to require the application of multiple disciplines to solve and thereby require a team of individuals. The better a group of individuals is with regard to working together, the smoother and more effective that solution is likely to be. |
I think the big idea behind these competencies is bringing people together with as much of themselves as you can encourage them to bring while focusing on some mutual goal. I also think it’s important that each of us at least has a basic sense of Developing Self before diving into improving the ability to Develop Others – without some growth in Developing Self, it becomes more of a guessing game than an experience-informed exercise.
Keeping in mind a very basic touch on the competencies, do you think this is a sufficient starting point?
What would you add, remove, or change?
How do you think you are doing as a leader with regard to these competencies?
What specifically do you think you could do to easily improve in any competency above?
Reference:
72 Airman's Writings 