How to Identify Your Employees’ Capacity for Growth

Most people think that babies sit, crawl, stand, walk, then run, in that order. I agree that the path has a certain logic. But those who have experience with children have seen babies who crawl before they can sit, and some who skip crawling altogether. In this most basic sense, each baby has their own Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).

ZPD is the gap between what someone can do on their own and what you can help them do with support (i.e., through coaching, training and so forth). Research shows that you can bring about learning in the ZPD — it’s the “sweet spot” in someone’s capacity for growth.

The watchful and thinking baby manager can see the signs and direction of their charges’ progress and help them along. Those who aspire to walk can be given a push toy to practice on. Those who want to stand before they can even sit (my youngest exhibited this at four months, much to our alarm) can be given opportunities to practice that, too.

The key is to give support to people within their ZPD, and not, say, try to teach a sitter how to run.

Professional ZPD

How do you know someone’s ZPD? You have to test it.

ZPD in adults at work can be easier to assess, since being responsible and having professional standards are generally assumed goods in the working world, and most professionals will try to do their reasonable best. And yet experience shows that even professional ZPD varies tremendously.

Recently, my team decided not to renew a term employee who was chronically tardy. I do mean irredeemably, habitually tardy, even to weekly team meetings where nobody is late. Losing your job because you cannot wake up on time is a crying shame. But it was an adaptation that was outside of this person’s ZPD.

By contrast, I once had an intern who was high school age but had an uncanny ability to build financial models. I found out when I asked her to build a Discounted Cash Flow in Excel. I gave her a webpage to read and the assignment. She came back in hours with a wonky model that gave the right answer. The area to test became whether she could build a standardized version of her model, using generally accepted modeling conventions. Her ZPD was huge in this realm.

Try, try again — with some people

Most managers know what their employees are good at already. But do you know the ZPD of your direct reports? Their ability to do things they have not before, how efficiently they can pick up new skills and with how much guidance?

If you know, then you, as the manager and coach, can be smarter about whom you invest in training and developing — with whom you “try, try again.” You already know who you can ask to do certain things, and the quality of the work that will return. With ZPD, you can test your individual team members’ capacity for growth. You can calibrate how much of your time is needed to get their growth going.

How to test ZPD

Here’s one straightforward way to test ZPD: the Think Aloud Protocol.

1. Give your team member a task they’ve never done before.

2. Ask the person to talk through their thinking as they attempt this new task. Welcome their questions along the way.

3. Listen actively to spot where they struggle and where they might benefit from direct coaching.

4. Provide them that coaching in real time, and ask them to keep talking through how to complete the task.

5. When you reach a good stopping point, ask them to return later and repeat the same task. It might be appropriate to ask them to do some additional follow-up on their own.

6. Repeat steps 2-4. This will test their retention, as well as build on the progress made.

7. If the person’s written skills are better than their verbal skills, this process can also be done through a chat platform. The key is that it happens in real time.

I encourage all managers to use the Think Aloud Assessment on a daily basis to continually assess the growth and abilities of their team.

This, in turn, will enable you to strategically invest in each of them. When the team’s goal is doing more in less time at a higher quality (when is it ever not?), your team will reap the gains from your investing more in the big ZPD people. It will also signal to you when to stop investing, as my team learned with the person for whom on-timeness was outside of her ZPD.

It’s an oft-repeated adage that you get what you measure. If you consistently measure your team’s ability to learn, you’ll find that their growth tends to improve.

Most people think that babies sit, crawl, stand, walk, then run, in that order. I agree that the path has a certain logic. But those who have experience with children have seen babies who crawl before they can sit, and some who skip crawling altogether. In this most basic sense, each baby has their own Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).

ZPD is the gap between what someone can do on their own and what you can help them do with support (i.e., through coaching, training and so forth). Research shows that you can bring about learning in the ZPD — it’s the “sweet spot” in someone’s capacity for growth.