See One, Do One, Teach One

The way most managers develop their team is haphazard and neither efficient nor effective. How can we not develop our teams when doctors learn thousands and thousands of procedures, diagnoses, and surgeries in such little time? See One, Do One, Teach One. It's faster, and it works well if you're willing to delegate and give lots of negative feedback.

Lots of managers blame their lack of ability to get their directs promoted on the slow and bureaucratic promotions process in their company. None of those problems aren't real: they are. But the only way you can really make that complaint legitimate is to make sure - without any doubt - that your direct, or directs, truly are ready. And most managers don't do that well enough. Sometimes we blame the system, but most of the time we haven't developed our directs fast enough, or fully enough.

Yet medical schools get young professionals - younger than many of our directs - ready to diagnose, and prescribe, and even do surgery, very quickly in medical schools. Up until the modern use of simulations, See One, Do One Teach One was the most well known and effective technique - for over one hundred years - for speeding up the process of turning a smart young student into a competent medical professional. And it is still in use today.

We managers, before there are simulations we can use, ought to be learning from every source we can of ways to quickly develop our directs. See One, Do One, Teach One can be immediately useful to virtually all managers today.