Developing people should be a committed constant of leadership.  That is not always the case though.  Often the leader is actually still the manager and hasn’t made that important transition to be a master of leverage.  We can work 80 hours a week and blow ourselves up or we can have ten people working their 8 hours every day, achieving the same level of output in a single day.  The manager’s job is to make sure that those ten people are in the right positions, doing the right things and producing the right results.  In addition, the leaders’s job is to set the direction for the team, create the environment where the team can motivate themselves to flourish and assist in the personal growth of the team members.  This last consideration is often abdicated by managers and imagined that this is the responsibility of the HR Department. That would be a huge mistake in Japan.   HR managers are often on a rotation in Japan, where their previous job was heavy machinery export manager and their next job will be head of audit.  In other words, they are not HR professionals.  In big companies in Japan, HR can be the internal police department, making sure all the proper forms are filed out, that the leave records are correct and that the next years job rotations have been sorted out in advance, etc.  Leaders need to guide HR to set the direction for the development of the team.  This can involve external training and budgets are set for this and HR’s job is to go and source the provider.    The leader however has many options apart from this route to help develop their people.  Mentoring people is an obvious one.  Often we are mentoring people not under our direct accountability and it works well, because there is a high level of objectivity on both sides.  As their boss, we can be too close to the situation and an outside mentor may be better placed to be an objective observer and be able to speak more freely with the staff member than we can. This builds the trust and corrective feedback is sometimes more palatable coming from someone perceived as a neutral person, who is not assessing your performance. Is there a mentor system in place in your company and if it is, is it working and how would you measure the outcomes? This last point is the rub.  If we have a mentor scheme and no way of measuring its success, why are we doing it in the first place?   Job rotation within the firm is a given in Japan and over time everyone becomes a generalist within the orgaanisation. Lateral transfers, temporary duty assignments and acting assignments are also valuable alternatives.  The people stay on your budget line, but they are sent off to work with another division to gain experience and to assist in the coordination between departments.  Usually the people connections are the secret to getting things done across departments within the firm and this is a brilliant way to build those connections.   Cross training is a very good idea to reduce concentration risk.  If there is a key person for a task and that person becomes ill or leaves the firm then there is a massive hole, because everyone else has become so specialised in their own roles.  This is particularly pronounced in smaller companies.  Take a quick look at the team.  If so and so suddenly left, what would happen to the business?  If the answer is “it would be a disaster”, then it is time to get started on cross training people within the organisation.  Having key roles cross trained is a good insurance against future disruptions to the business.  Is this something which is part of the weave of your organisation, something built into the fabric of how you operate?  I would guess that these opportunities are not as widespread as they should be.  We only discover the value of cross training when a key person disappears and we have no one around with the required expertise to do the job and to do the job right now.    That happened to me by accident.  My head of administration quit the comp