Developing people is properly regarded as one of the most important responsibilities of any manager. Yet few managers regard themselves as developers, either because they see it as an unwelcome distraction to their “proper” work or because they feel unsure how to go about it.

However, if you assume that people learn all the time and that everything that happens has an impact, for better or for worse, on their learning and development (and that learning and development are interchangeable; you can’t have one without the other), then it is clear that managers cannot escape responsibility. Whether they like it or not, managers have a big hand in creating the working environments where learning, accidental or deliberate, takes place.

So, when managers puzzle about how to discharge their responsibilities for developing people, I encourage them to use everyday events as developmental opportunities: simply piggyback development on the shoulders of activities that in any case have to be done. This saves time and money and has the massive advantage of killing two birds with one stone – tasks are accomplished and development is guaranteed.

Piggy-backed development means doing whatever has to be done – running a team meeting, agreeing a budget, reviewing costs, sorting out a mistake, canvassing ideas on how to improve quality, delegating, debriefing after a visit or project – and, at the same time, extracting explicit learning from the activity. One of the easiest ways to do this is to spend 10 minutes sharing lessons learned – those elusive things so rarely given airtime in a busy working day.

Everything a manager does has development implications – it helps if they know this while they do it.