When Toyota is hiring or assessing the potential of employees they are primarily searching for one trait:

Toyota believes that the key trait that distinguishes potential leaders from everyone else is self-development — leaders actively seek to improve themselves and their skills.
The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership, Liker and Convis

Toyota is not the only one that believes self-development is important.  In High Flyers, McCall makes a list of “Eleven Dimensions of Early Identification of Global Executives.”  Of those eleven dimensions, almost half involve self-development or improvement:

• Seeks opportunities to learn
• Has the courage to take risks
• Seeks and uses feedback
• Learns from mistakes
• Is open to criticism

(you could make an argument that more of the 11 involve self-development, but I wanted to highlight just the most obvious ones)

The last chapter of Linda Hill’s “Becoming a Manager” is titled “Learning for a Lifetime” and she starts it off by saying:

Through my research, teaching, and consulting over the past ten years, I have come to understand more deeply than ever that the best managers are those who have an appetite for learning and are willing to work on themselves.  Management is very hard; even the most gifted people must commit themselves to lifelong learning and self-development.

What is self-development?

We’re going to straight up steal from Liker and Convis (and by extension Toyota) and define self-development as actively seeking to improve yourself and your skills.

There’s a few key words there that I really want to focus on.  Note that they say “yourself AND your skills.”  When we think of improvement in the workplace we often focus on skills, and if you don’t want to be a manager that’s probably fine.  In Cybersecurity you can have a fantastic career as a penetration tester, researcher or engineer by focusing only on improving your skills.  But dealing with other people requires more than just skills.  It requires that you become a better human being.

Second, the term “actively seeking” is quite evocative.  It is not enough to do the bare minimum.  It isn’t even enough to simply “meet expectations.”  You need to have a desire to improve yourself, and spend time, money and effort on improvement.

This is an area where it’s easy to send the wrong message, so be patient with me as I try and say exactly what I mean.

Some people will see our definition and immediately say “You’ve got to put in reps!  80 hours a week!  7 days a week!  365 days a year!  No pain no gain!  Other dumb platitudes!”  There is a certain faction of people that believe the quantity of work is all that matters.

That is not the case.

Another common misconception is that, when employers look for “self-development” or something similar what they are looking for is commitment to the job or company itself.  Again, this is often about nights and weekends, but the focus is on accomplishing the work of the company at the expense of the self.

This is also not self development.

Self-development is an investment in yourself.  It is you gaining skills and becoming better and more capable in general.  Your employer (if they’re a good one) will benefit from you self-developing, but good self-development, in my experience, often feels like a slight tangent from your every-day job.

Self-development is about doing the right amount of the right thing — and the amount, and the thing, will differ for every single person.

My experience with self-development (so far)

I’ve written before about my first management role.  It was insanely difficult for me, so I’m not going to restate it, but I want to highlight a couple of general trends I noticed about self-development through my experiences:

1. Focus on developing areas you know you need to improve — for me, I have ADHD so productivity has always been difficult.  When I began managing I knew I needed to become productive myself in order to help my team do so, so I began studying productivity (thanks “Getting things done”).
   1. I moved on to study team dynamics, culture, communication, project management and more.  Basically, as we improved one area I looked for the next area we needed to do better and studied it.
2. “Actively seeking” takes time — I felt like I needed to do way better, way faster.  This meant I spent time studying at work, and I spent a significant amount of time studying at home — generally a few hours reading or discussing what I read with my wife.  We now have more children and time is more precious, but I’d say I average an hour or so of reading (and blog-post writing, which helps me solidify things) per day.  Sometimes more (see number 3)
3. Needing to improve helps — I really was in a bind and HAD to learn and grow quickly.  I think being outside your comfort zone can help motivate you to actively seek, though I might not recommend getting as far out as I was.  What’s funny is that it’s now become a weird reflex for me — if I’m feeling uncomfortable about something I’m doing at work, I naturally find myself buying books.  My amazon book expenditure is a pretty good barometer for my stress level.

Self-development is a skill.  You become better at it through practice, but the key is to actively seek.  So figure out the areas you most need to improve, set aside some time every day to work on them, and then figure out how you learn and get to work.

Am I self-developing?

As I mentioned, it’s different for everyone.  But I would ask myself this: am I investing time in improving myself and my skills?  If so, how much?  How much of that time during work, and how much outside of work?  You can improve your capability to self-develop the more you do it, but if you’re not investing time there won’t be anything to improve, so maybe start there.