BUS603: Managing People

At present, professional development is an area of growing interest, mainly due to its implicit consequences, such as self-esteem, self-efficacy, motivation, job satisfaction, and employability the performance of various job duties and responsibilities and the increase it provides in job satisfaction. Thus, such development is relevant to both the workers themselves and the labor and development organizations of the country. As a result, investments in actions aimed at professional development have grown in the international scenario.

As discussed throughout this chapter, professional development should be understood as a construct that goes beyond the mere sum of a set of courses carried out throughout the career because it is a process of maturing the reflexive capacity. So, the most important is not whether professional development comes from formal or informal learning processes. What matters is that such development is characterized as a growing process of awareness and mastery of know-how at work. This is evidenced in different researches that point to reflective practice as an important element for professional development processes. Therefore, in addition to promoting training and development events for specific activities, leaders should encourage a critical and reflective vision in their respective work teams with a deliberately planned direction.

It is also necessary for leaders to understand that the workplace is a complex social system made up of peers who consistently coregulate each other's learning. Thus, if leaders invest in social interactions, they can foster informal learning at work, transforming everyday work practice into a space for the continuous production of collective knowledge.

So, we can conclude that professional development of subordinates is directly connected with leadership style because this development is understood as the growth and maturation of knowledge, skills, and attitudes acquired throughout workers' lives, as a result of learning-at-work actions. And learning-at-work actions depend on leadership decisions.

But while it is important for leaders to act to provide support and development opportunities for their subordinates, care must be taken that leadership does not create unhealthy dependency. Dependence on subordinates constrains their growth and autonomy. Therefore, emerging leadership approaches value the leader's role of coaching roles, with concepts of self-leadership, super leadership, and leadership reinforcement. The challenge posed to the leaders of the twenty-first century, therefore, is to promote and encourage the professional development of their subordinates in a consistent and individual way but without stifling their initiatives and the ability of each one to self-engineer his or her own career.