Competence grows through experience, and experience is handed out. Who leads the workgroup, who presents to the assistant commissioner, who drafts the legislative report: these assignments build the record that later counts in hiring and promotion decisions. When they are given by habit, the same people get them again and again, and others never have a chance to show what they can do.
Minnesota's state administrative procedure on employee learning and development sets an expectation that supervisors and employees jointly discuss, prepare, review and annually update an individual development plan. It describes development as part of performance management and names coaching, mentoring and continuous learning as methods. Used well, an individual development plan is a shared agreement about growth. It should not become a hidden record of weaknesses or a checkbox that proves someone was offered development. Keep it forward-looking and make sure the employee has a copy and a voice in what it says.
Three practices make development fairer. First, hold a career conversation with every person on your team, not only those who ask. Ask what they want to learn, what kind of work energizes them and what they need to know about the next step. Second, rotate visible assignments deliberately. Keep a simple list of high-visibility work over the past year and look at who has had it. Third, understand the difference between mentoring and sponsorship. A mentor gives advice about how rooms work. A sponsor uses their own standing to put someone in those rooms: recommending them for a project, naming their work to leadership or inviting them to a meeting where decisions are made. Both matter. Sponsorship is often what moves careers, and it is less often extended to people outside the sponsor's own networks.
Watch two risks. Reverse mentoring, where a junior staff member teaches a senior leader, can be valuable, but it should not become unpaid equity work expected of staff from underrepresented communities. If someone is regularly asked to educate others about their community, recognize that as real work in their assignments and performance record. And development plans should not be used as a substitute for classification review when someone is already doing higher-level work.
