How many times have you heard the following from managers looking to hire a new employee? “I need someone with experience who will hit the ground running. I don’t have any time for handholding.” Guess what? Part of a manager’s job is to teach. If you don’t spend any time teaching and developing your team members, you’re neglecting a critical management responsibility. Furthermore, if you’re always hiring people with a wealth of experience, you are probably doing them a disservice. Chances are they won’t have much of an opportunity to learn anything new in their roles, so they won’t have the opportunity to grow. Also, beware of the “bald tire.” Experience does not equal quality. In addition, by not teaching, you do a disservice to those eager “up-and-comers” who, with some guidance, can inject life into your organization.

The bottom line is this: When you don’t teach, you hurt the team members, the would-be team members, and the organization. Teaching is quite often a precursor to effective delegation. Effective delegation is more than simply barking out orders. If team members are to do well, they need to know how to do the work. This is the manager’s job. It is frequently accomplished by informally teaching them.

When do you teach? Managers should teach all the time. Team members will constantly be observing you. There are also formal opportunities to use, such as honest feedback sessions or monthly one-on-one sessions. Pick a topic to discuss at every other meeting; Review a particular skill; Talk about a pertinent magazine article. Take advantage of employee development plans.

A development plan is an action plan that identifies the areas in a person’s current job that might need improvement; it also addresses a person’s future goals and aspirations. Activities and actions are listed that will help achieve the goals, as well as dates by which these goals should be reached.

Work with team members to create development plans. Find out what they want to be doing in the next couple of years and then help them put together a realistic plan to get there. Suggest and volunteer for activities. Assist with execution of the plans. Review plans in one-on-one meetings periodically.

Getting team members enthused about development plans is not easy. Most find the exercise useless because, not much effort is put into creating them. Frequently, no one bothers to execute them. Development plans are nothing more than a checkmark on a manager’s to-do list. They often don’t get reviewed until it’s time to create the next one (usually after an annual employee evaluation is done). Typically, you have to sell one person at a time on the idea. If that person meets with success, share it with the rest of the team. If “Jane” got the promotion ostensibly because of the development plan, that will probably be enough to get others to climb on board. In addition, once people see you are serious about putting in time to teach them and help them succeed, they will warm up to the idea. It can be difficult to overcome years of development plan neglect, but it can be done.

Take the time to teach your team members. Start today. Commit to working with at least one team member to create a development plan and monitor it closely. Revive the neglected art of teaching and marvel at the results that follow.