Development centres are a learning and development initiative that will help your team members evaluate and understand their current strengths and development needs against LSE’s effective behaviours framework, LSE’s ethics code, and research-backed principles of inclusive leadership. Taking part in a development centre will shape and support your team member’s leadership and development plans, provide them with insight to take their career forward, and give you the information you need as their manager to support their personal and professional growth.
You can find out more about the programme, including eligibility criteria, on the main development centres page and you can get an overview of the programme in the video below.
Development centres for LSE staff
Find out more about what development centres are and how they work in the video. Captions are enabled.
What’s my role as an LSE people manager?
Firstly, the diagram below gives you an overview of what you can expect from the process when putting forward a member of your team for a development centre. This is explained in more detail below.
When putting someone forward for a development centre it is important to think about the time you will need to support them before, during and after the development centre itself.
You will need to:
- Endorse their application with a supporting statement.
- If the application is unsuccessful, support them in creating a development plan in conjunction with a discussion with Organisational Learning. This guidance document will support you through this process.
If the application is successful, you will:
- Attend a managers’ briefing session so that you will know how to support your team member through the process. Please see the dates for the manager's briefing sessions, you can attend any one of them: Thursday: 11th July, 11am-12pm Monday: 15th July, 2pm-3pm
- Check in with your team member before they attend the centre itself, make sure they know what to expect, that they are feeling positive about the upcoming experience and that they have completed the pre-work required.
- Build the outcomes of their development centre report and action plan into your ongoing 1-2-1s, CDR discussions and wider development support to ensure that the opportunity of attending the development centre is maximised for the individual.
- Think about how the individual’s report and development needs fit into the wider team development plan for all of your direct reports (more about this below).
- Ensure that you use the CDR process to support your log-term career development discussions.
Don’t forget that Organisational Learning are here to support you through this process. Attending the managers’ briefing session we run is very important, but you can also talk to us at any time about the development of your team. You can also make use of:
Our Teams and Leadership tool. The tool is for managers, leaders and teams to conduct anonymous 360 degree feedback, get a personalised, downloadable report and support with learning materials around areas highlighted for development. This can help you target the development needs of your entire team.
Teams and leadership development tool (lse.ac.uk)
Our webpage dedicated to ideas for supporting ongoing development: Supporting ongoing development (lse.ac.uk)
If you have any questions about the development centres process or anything around supporting the development of your team, please do get in touch at hr.learning@lse.ac.uk