How we grow and develop together
Every organisation of any size has a way to answer the development question. A training budget, a learning platform, a line in the appraisal about objectives for the year.
That answers a smaller question than the one worth asking, which is not what the organisation offers, but what the work does to the people doing it.
A job does something to a person over time. It builds them - stretches their capability, hands them things they could not have done a year ago, sends them home most days with a little more than they came in with. Or it wears them down - the same tasks, the same ceiling, a slow draining of energy and confidence that nobody decided on and nobody is tracking.
Development reads which of those is happening. Not the size of the training budget, which an organisation can report without knowing anything about the effect it has. The effect itself.
And it reads it at more than one scale, because growth is not only personal. When one person learns something hard-won, does the organisation get wiser, or does the lesson leave with them? When people are ready to lead, are they trusted to, or does leadership stay pooled at the top? A place can grow individuals and waste them. The dimension asks whether growth happens, whether it compounds, and whether it is put to use.
Development is where an organisation's relationship with time shows up.
Most of what an organisation measures is about now: this quarter's output, this month's satisfaction, today's incident. Development is the dimension that asks whether the organisation is getting more capable or less - whether it is building the thing it will need in three years, or spending down a stock of capability it is not replacing. A place can look healthy on every present-tense measure and be quietly eating its own future, and this is the dimension where that shows.
It works at two scales that a single measure runs together. There is whether individuals are growing - real, and the part organisations usually mean by development. And there is whether the organisation is growing as an organisation: whether what one person learns becomes something everyone has, whether capability survives the departure of the person who held it, whether the people who are ready to lead are allowed to. An organisation can be excellent at the first and hopeless at the second - full of people getting better at their jobs, in a system that loses the benefit every time one of them walks out of the door.
This is where the other seven earn their place. A low Development score raises a question it cannot answer alone: are people not growing, or growing and not supported, or supported and too exhausted to take any of it in? Read against Flow, you learn whether there is any capacity left for growth after the work is done - because development is the first thing a punishing pace crowds out. Read against Culture, you learn whether it is safe to take on something you might fail at, which is the only way anyone grows. Read against Purpose, you learn whether people can see anything worth growing towards. Development is downstream of a great deal, which is why the score is a starting question rather than an answer.
The Development score is the mean of five statements. Two read the individual, two read the organisation, and one reads the formal offer.
Whether people grow and develop through the work itself.
The most direct of the five: is the role stretching this person, or has it gone static? Growth here is mostly not a training-room event - it is the work itself handing someone something they have not done before and trusting them to find their feet. Where this is reported as less true, people are doing what they have always done, at the level they have always done it. The job has stopped teaching them anything, and a job that has stopped teaching is a job someone is starting to think about leaving.
Whether what one person learns is shared so the whole organisation improves.
This is the statement that decides whether learning compounds or leaks. When someone works out how to do something better, does it become part of how things are done - or does it stay in the one head that happened to acquire it, to be relearned from scratch by the next person and lost entirely when that person leaves? Where this is reported as less true, an organisation keeps paying to learn the same lessons, and grows more fragile with every departure, because so much of what it knows is walking around inside individuals rather than built into how it works.
Whether people at every level are trusted to lead when the moment calls for it.
Development that goes nowhere is development wasted. This dynamic reads whether leadership is something people are allowed to do when the situation calls for it, or something reserved for the people with the title. Where it is reported as true, the person closest to a problem is trusted to make the call on it. Where it is less true, capability is built and then not used - people are grown, and then asked to wait for permission, which is a reliable way to lose the ones worth keeping.
Whether the training and support on offer make a real difference to how people work.
The one statement about provision - the courses, the training, the structured support the organisation actually puts on. It reads not whether the provision exists but whether it lands: whether it connects to the work people do and changes how they do it, or whether it is attendance without effect. Where this is reported as less true, there is activity - sessions booked, boxes ticked, a completion rate somebody reports - and no visible difference in the work afterwards.
Whether working here builds people up more than it wears them down.
The statement the whole dimension is really about. Over time, does working here leave a person with more than it took - more capability, more confidence, more of themselves - or a little less each day? This is not a question about training. It is a question about the net effect of the place on the people in it, and it is the one that a full training calendar cannot answer and cannot fix. An organisation can offer every course going and still, on balance, wear people down faster than it builds them up. Where this is reported as less true, that is what is happening: the work is taking more than it returns, and the deficit is being paid out of people.
The assessment asks how often each statement is true. Below is what each end of that scale describes. Neither column is a judgement - both are descriptions of what people report.
Alongside the five scored statements, everyone is asked one open question about development:
What would help you grow and develop here?
It is a question people tend to have a ready answer to, because most have thought about it long before anyone asked - the stretch they want, the thing standing in the way, the move that never quite gets discussed. The responses are not scored, summarised or averaged. They appear in the dashboard as written.
They are also, frequently, the most practical answers in the whole assessment: specific, near-term, and often cheaper to act on than the organisation expects. Not send me on a course so much as let me sit in on that, give me the thing I keep asking for, stop moving me off the work just as I get good at it.
Where Development sits against the other seven dimensions, and how much of the overall shape it accounts for.
Whether the growth is happening but leaking, happening but unused, or not happening at all. The distinction between growing individuals and a growing organisation lives in the spread between these five, not in the mean.
Development is a dimension where tenure and role level often pull in different directions - early-career people and long-servers frequently have very different relationships with whether the work is still teaching them anything. The dashboard shows those splits rather than resolving them into one number.
In their own words, unsummarised - and on this question, usually specific and usually actionable.
Five statements, each answered on the same five-point frequency scale: almost always, often, sometimes, occasionally, rarely. The prompt is how true is this in your experience?
That prompt is a deliberate choice. Agreement scales measure opinion - whether someone endorses a proposition about the organisation. Frequency scales measure observation - how often a person reports seeing something happen. Opinion tells you what people think about the organisation. Frequency tells you what they encounter in it.
The dimension score is the mean of the five. It is reported on the 1-5 scale rather than converted to a percentage, and it carries the language of the scale with it - a Development score of 3.6 reads often true, and means the average respondent reported these five conditions as often true, not that the organisation scored 72%.
Alongside the mean, the dashboard shows the spread, which on Development is where the real reading is. The five statements measure different things that a single score blends into mush. A high score built on strong provision and strong individual growth, with a low reading on whether learning is shared, describes an organisation developing people well and losing the benefit. The mean looks healthy. The pattern underneath it is a leak.
A note on what this dimension does not do. Development does not measure the quality of an organisation's training and development offer. One of the five statements touches on it; the other four are about whether people are actually growing, whether that growth compounds, whether it is put to use, and whether the work builds people up or wears them down. An organisation can have an admired L&D function and score poorly here, because a training budget is a thing you provide and development is a thing that either happens or does not. This dimension measures the second.
Development is one of eight dimensions States of Vitality reads across a whole workforce. We can talk through what an assessment would look like - scope, timing and price.