One episode in particular in the second season of the scripted show about a fictional Chicago-area restaurant, The Bear, has stuck with me ever since watching it a few weeks ago. It’s episode 7, and I’d recommend it even if you don’t care to watch the entire series.
A core theme of the second season is professional development. The restaurant owner identifies a need in most employees for them to be their best selves at the restaurant, and he sends them on little missions to continue their education. One goes to Copenhagen to study next to a renowned chef; another goes to culinary school.
Then there’s Richie, who is great with people but has struggled to find his purpose. Carmen sends him to the best restaurant in Chicago to work for a week. I won’t spoil what happens: Just go over to Hulu to watch it.
All this really got me thinking about professional development, particularly from a leadership perspective. My coworkers have free reign to pursue education and growth, but The Bear showed me that there’s also value in a leader identifying what their team members may need and offering opportunities to address those needs.
I wish I had instant inspirations for each of my team members, but I think this will take time to figure out (and chats with coworkers, as they know themselves the best). I’m glad to be aware of it, though, and I thought I’d share that awareness with you.
Also, I brought up this topic on last week’s Facebook livecast, and there were some interesting answers and stories from viewers. Here are a few examples:
- “My sister had an interesting continuing education experience working at a marketing firm a years ago. They sent her to an improv class early on because some improv principles and an ability to think on your feet actually applied to their work. It was a fun and unique experience for her that also benefitted her work.”
- “I think providing opportunities for those to further their education is amazing, but I also think that it is important to create opportunities for that new skill or knowledge to be put to use.”
- “Our employees are required to set professional development goals. It’s like setting a roadmap for your professional growth. We also have regular monthly meetings with career managers just to discuss progress against those goals. It’s a dedicated time to reflect, adjust, and get guidance. Even though there’s an emphasis on setting these goals and checking in, there’s no strict requirement to hit every goal. It’s more about giving employees tangible things to pursue and ensuring both the employee and their managers are in the loop on areas of focus or things to improve on. There is also a very generous budget to pay for peoples time, materials, courses, travel, certifications, etc. I think the critical thing is having these benefits available to employees who want to take advantage while also pushing them, however slightly, to pursue growth.”
Have you pursued professional development in any formal capacity or supported someone else in pursuing it? I’d love to hear your experiences and insights in the comments.
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Also read: Have You Experienced Unreasonable Hospitality?
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7 Comments on “The Bear and Professional Development”
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[…] The Bear and Professional Development […]
As a supervisor and leader both in the Air Force and at the Department of Justice, I’ve been allotted generous funding to furnish different types of training for my teams over the years. But, sometimes, it’s not about the formalized training, and instead it’s simply nudging people out of their comfort zones to perform roles outside of their day-to-day activities.
For more than two decades, I’ve worked with linguists and while they are superior in the ability to translate (render textual information from one language to another), not everyone has the ability to interpret (verbally translate information either consecutively or simultaneously) I’ve sent linguists out in pairs…one who showed great proficiency as an interpreter and the other who had reticence to do so. Within a short period of time, the ones who displayed reticence returned with a renewed confidence ad enhance ability, making them even more valuable to the agency.
At my last job (before switching to work on board games full-time) the company was big on professional development and gave generously to employees in both money (to cover course/seminar/certification fees) and time (to pursue learnings during work hours). I had the privilege of both exploring my own professional development and, as a manager, supporting others on their professional development.
As a manager on a team of 6, only half of my team would take advantage of professional development opportunities on a given year but those that did were super appreciative of the company’s commitment to their personal growth. We had very few restrictions on what they could pursue, other than the annual budget had a set $$ amount an employee could use each year. If the employee didn’t use it one year I would allow them to carry forward the funds to the following year. I had a few recommendations if the employee wanted to pursue something but wasn’t sure what, but most of my team had a good idea what they wanted to pursue. Throughout their professional development window (whether studying for an exam or participating in learning forums), I would ask my team members in a regular one-on-one meetings to share some of their biggest learnings.
As an individual contributor myself at the COO level, my boss (the owner) was super supportive and paid for over $3k in costs and provided 13 full days of paid work time (about 1 day a month) during a single calendar year towards two learning opportunities I was super interested in (Worth noting that during 3 other years working there I did not pursue professional learning opportunities.) That blew me away to have my boss provide such a substantial commitment to my ongoing professional development. I learned many invaluable lessons and grew in my leadership from those learning opportunities. The two opportunities I pursued were:
1) Thoughtfully Fit – a bi-weekly virtual cohort with others in leadership positions focused on taking a better self-inventory of how you respond to interpersonal situations and developing strategies for developing healthier relationships. Highly recommended course.
2) Local Civic Leadership – monthly cohort focused on exploring pressing challenges in our local community and exploring ways we can be more active contributors to bring about needed changes. The cohort provided opportunities to meet key leaders in the community (politics, non-profits, and business leaders) that are leading the charge in various areas, visit many tremendous organizations in the community, and a team project to start getting involved somehow.
Happy to chat further about my experiences if it helps!
Thank you for sharing this, Kirk! I agree that the level of support your boss provided was incredible, and I like the opportunities you sought.
I recently escaped from seven years at Thermo Fisher Scientific as a chemist, and these comments are bringing back not-great memories of “professional development.”
There was no room to advance and remain a chemist – if you become a manager, you are no longer a chemist, you’re a manager – it doesn’t matter that you’re managing chemists. I didn’t spend way too many years in college earning multiple degrees in chemistry to approve time cards and budget out payroll. Doing professional development reviews every six months was just painful. “Sorry, you’re maxed out of your pay tier – if you want to earn more, you have to get out of the scientist track.”
In college I was a volunteer EMT. To maintain my certification I had to do X “Contininuing Education Units (CEUs)” every few years.
Because it was structurally part of the profession, the industry convention-equivalent had a heavy focus on offering CEU classes in addition to vendor sales and networking.
In most industries, that type of continual growth mindset isn’t baked into the professional culture in quite the same way (from what I hear, teaching is quite similar though.)
One option could be to identify skills/courses that could benefit many people in the company on a regular basis (say, a one day class 4x/year) and invite anyone interested to take it as a group.
As an educator I’m required to attend professional development courses and events yearly. For example, I just finished a structured literacy course which was 15 hours of training to meet our state guidelines.