Developmental Job Assignments for Project Leaders

Core premise: Experience is the most powerful teacher of leadership — and the most squandered. Organisations routinely allocate their most developmental assignments by accident, politics, or convenience rather than by deliberate match to developmental need. The supplied research reviews the Developmental Challenge Profile, a global financial organisation's 60–70% stretch principle, and the uncomfortable the source finding that men systematically receive more task-based developmental challenge while women receive more obstacle-based challenge. This is a structural contributor to the glass ceiling, and it is fixable — but only if organisations treat assignment allocation as a deliberate leadership development decision rather than a workforce-management afterthought.

1. The "Why" — Experience as the Dominant Developmental Force

Ask any senior project manager at a defence prime where they actually learned to lead, and the answer is almost never "in a classroom." It is usually some version of: "when they threw me into that problem and I didn't know what I was doing." This is not anecdote — it is the consistent finding across decades of research on leadership development.

A classic study in the supplied research The Lessons of Experience identified job assignments as particularly powerful for developing team-building, strategic thinking, and persuasion and influence skills. Prior to its US popularity, researchers in the United Kingdom were already documenting how managers learn, undergo personal change, and acquire leadership capacity as a result of the roles, responsibilities, and tasks encountered in their jobs.

The practical implication is that if a defence prime is serious about developing project managers, the highest-leverage intervention is not another certification course. It is the deliberate allocation of the right assignments to the right people at the right time.

2. The "What" — What Makes an Assignment Developmental

Practice note: Definition A developmental job assignment is one that places a manager in a new situation with unfamiliar responsibilities — typically characterised by high responsibility, high latitude, and genuine stakes — where the experience of navigating the challenge itself produces learning that cannot be acquired in a classroom.

2.1 Where It Fits in the Development Framework

Job assignments are overwhelmingly about challenge. They provide moderate support (the surrounding team, the supervisor) and very little formal assessment. Source proposition 5a addresses the assessment gap directly:

Practice note — source Proposition 5a: "Leadership development is enhanced when assignments are matched with individuals' developmental needs."

The matching is where assessment enters the picture. Without it, even the best stretch assignment is a lottery ticket.

2.2 The 60–70% a global financial organisation Rule

The supplied research documented a specific practice at a global financial organisation that captures the stretch principle:

Practice note: a global financial organisation Principle a global financial organisation deliberately placed high-potential managers in job assignments for which they were no more than 60–70% prepared — making it likely that the kinds of challenges that contribute to ongoing development would be encountered.

The logic is precise. If you are 100% prepared, the job is routine and you learn nothing. If you are 40% prepared, the gap is so large that you fail and the damage is disproportionate. The 60–70% zone is where you are competent enough to succeed with effort and stretched enough that the effort produces development.

2.3 The Intentionality Gap

The supplied research is direct about the central failure mode:

Practice note — supplied research: "Regardless of how potent job assignments can be for development, the most challenging or fascinating assignment in the world may not teach much unless a person has the latitude to try out different leadership approaches as part of the developmental role. Intentionality must surround leadership development, otherwise the focus of a challenging new assignment will likely be on performance with little regard for development."

This is the trap most defence primes fall into. An assignment is allocated because the work needs doing, not because it matches a person's developmental need. The person delivers (or fails to deliver), but the developmental yield is incidental rather than designed.

3. The "How" — The Tools and Principles

3.1 The Developmental Challenge Profile (assignment challenge profile)

The supplied research developed the assignment challenge profile based on data from approximately 700 managers across various organisations. It assesses job characteristics in three categories:

Data across 700 managers supported the basic premise: challenging jobs are associated with greater on-the-job learning. The assignment challenge profile gave organisations a practical tool for diagnosing which jobs offered which kinds of developmental stretch — the beginning of assessment rigour in assignment allocation.

3.2 The Gender Finding — A Structural Problem

The supplied research follow-up study using the assignment challenge profile produced a finding that should concern every defence programme lead:

Practice note — supplied study: Men reported greater task-related developmental challenges. Women reported experiencing more developmental challenges stemming from obstacles faced on the job.

On the surface this looks like a neutral split — both groups are being "challenged." But look closer. Task-related challenge (creating change, managing high stakes, influencing without authority) builds the capabilities that get people promoted. Obstacle-based challenge (dealing with adverse conditions, coping with lack of top management support, navigating difficult team dynamics) builds resilience but not promotion-relevant capabilities.

The compounding effect over a career is severe. Women receive developmental difficulty without developmental opportunity. Men receive both.

Practice note — supplied research: "Subtle patterns of unintentional discrimination in job assignments could impede the development of women managers for top-level positions and contribute to the broader phenomenon of a glass ceiling" (the supplied research, 1996).

For the Australian defence sector — which has made public commitments to closing its gender representation gap in engineering and project leadership roles, and which is competing for scarce cleared female talent — this finding is a direct call to action. Gender-balanced representation is not enough if the developmental assignments are being allocated along gendered lines. Matching assignments to development need (Proposition 5a) is a structural equity intervention, not a soft HR initiative.

3.3 a senior industrial executive and the Intentional Succession Approach

The supplied research uses a diversified industrial organisation under a senior industrial executive as an example of intentional use of assignments for development:

Practice note: a diversified industrial organisation Approach The supplied research "knows intimately" the career paths of more than a thousand a diversified industrial organisation employees. During employee reviews, it was common for the supplied research to display a willingness to put a manager in a certain position because it is the right professional growth experience for that person, regardless of immediate business needs.

This is the radical proposition: that developmental logic should sometimes override immediate business logic in assignment decisions. Most organisations do the opposite — they put the most experienced person in the most important job and then wonder why their high-potential pipeline thins out.

The supplied research qualifies the principle with a caveat: "some jobs may be too important for developmental assignments. The difficult task is deciding what are those all-important jobs." A programme facing a capability demonstration next quarter is not the place to test a high-potential. A programme in its early planning phase, with time and latitude, might be exactly the place.

3.4 Hardships and Negative Experiences

The development research documents a counterintuitive but well-supported finding: negative experiences and hardships tend to promote learning and trigger self-reflection. Failure is a teacher in ways that success rarely is.

The problem, the supplied research notes, is that "too few senior executives take a developmental view of failure. It is far more common to find top organisational levels populated with those who push maximum performance over a concern for development". In a defence prime where schedule slip has contractual consequences and failure is punished harder than inaction, the organisational incentive is to hide hardships rather than extract lessons from them. This is a direct brake on leadership development.

3.5 Job Rotation — The Specific Variant

The supplied research studied job rotations (lateral transfers within an organisation) and asked executives what skills rotation produced:

Illustrative source values: Numerical values in this table are source examples, not universal requirements.

The supplied research notes wryly that the first and second categories could be construed as cognitive and intrapersonal competence, while the third "probably means very different things to respondents" — there was no elaboration on what "leadership skills" meant. This is characteristic of the field: we know assignments develop leadership, but we cannot yet say precisely what about them does so.

3.6 Learning Goal Climate vs Performance Goal Climate

The distinction between learning and performance goal orientations in the supplied research maps directly onto the source's assessment–challenge–support framework. Source proposition 5b:

Practice note — source Proposition 5b: "Emphasising the assessment, challenge, and support aspects of developmental job assignments fosters a learning goal environment."

A learning goal climate values understanding and mastering something new. A performance goal climate values favourable judgements of competence (and avoiding unfavourable ones). The two climates produce different behaviours in response to difficulty: learning-oriented individuals engage more deeply; performance-oriented individuals withdraw or defend.

For a defence programme, the cultural implication is significant. A PMO that punishes visible struggle produces a performance goal climate in which people hide difficulty, which kills learning. A PMO that normalises struggle as part of development produces a learning goal climate in which people engage with challenge more productively.

4. The Pitfalls — Where Job Assignment Development Goes Wrong

1. Assignment by availability, not development need. The person who happens to be free gets the assignment, not the person who would develop most from it.
2. Gendered assignment patterns. Women receive obstacle-based challenge while men receive task-based challenge — a structural contributor to the glass ceiling.
3. Performance focus crowding out development focus. When immediate performance pressure dominates, intentional development is abandoned.
4. No reflection structure. An assignment without structured reflection is experience without learning. The hardship or success passes and no insight is captured.
5. Treating all stretch as equivalent. the supplied research's assignment challenge profile shows that different categories of challenge produce different learning. Rotating through geographies is different from leading a change initiative is different from navigating an obstacle-laden context.
6. Putting high-potentials only in visible, safe jobs. Assignments selected to protect a career rarely produce the kind of challenge that develops it.
7. Ignoring source rule. Sometimes the right development decision conflicts with the right immediate business decision. Most organisations default to immediate business logic and never revisit the choice.
8. Punishing failure. A culture that treats failure as career-terminal produces risk-averse managers who refuse the very assignments that would develop them.

5. Key Takeaways

Practice note: Seven Things to Remember

1. Experience is the dominant developmental force — job assignments typically produce more leadership development than any classroom intervention.
2. The 60–70% a global financial organisation stretch rule — assignments where the person is 60–70% prepared maximise developmental yield.
3. The Developmental Challenge Profile identifies three categories of developmental content: job transitions, task-related challenges, and obstacles.
4. Matching assignments to developmental need (Proposition 5a) is the missing assessment discipline in most organisations.
5. Gendered assignment patterns contribute to the glass ceiling. Closing the gap is a structural, not cultural, intervention.
6. A learning goal climate is a precondition for assignments to produce development.
7. Intentionality is the differentiator. Haphazard exposure to challenging work produces haphazard results; deliberate matching produces development.

6. Knowledge Check

Practice note: Test Your Understanding

1. Explain the a global financial organisation 60–70% stretch principle in your own words. Why is 100% preparation a developmental problem rather than a strength?
2. Using the Developmental Challenge Profile, classify the following assignment into one of the three assignment challenge profile categories and justify your answer: "You are being given the integration lead role on a new sub-system that is two months behind schedule, with a team that lost its previous lead to another programme, and with a technical authority who has publicly doubted the approach."
3. The supplied research found that men received more task-based developmental challenge while women received more obstacle-based challenge. Explain why this is not a neutral split and how it contributes to the glass ceiling.
4. The supplied research notes that a senior industrial executive sometimes placed managers in roles "regardless of immediate business needs" because the role was the right developmental experience. Design a policy rule that would allow a defence prime's PMO to make similar decisions while still protecting business-critical programmes.
5. Why does the supplied research argue that a learning goal climate is a precondition for developmental assignments to actually produce development? What does a performance goal climate do to a stretch assignment?

Applying the Guidance as a Controlled Practice

Use this subject as a decision aid, not as a label applied after the event. Start by defining the delivery problem, the people affected, the authority available and the consequences of a poor decision. Record assumptions before selecting an intervention. That simple discipline makes later review possible and prevents a preferred leadership style from being treated as the answer to every situation.

Six-Step Application Cycle

1. Define the trigger. State the decision, behaviour, team condition or delivery risk that requires attention. Separate observation from interpretation.
2. Map the context. Identify the project phase, task uncertainty, dependencies, stakeholder interests, time pressure, team capability and formal authority.
3. Choose a proportionate response. Select the smallest intervention capable of improving the condition. Explain why it fits the evidence and what alternatives were rejected.
4. Agree ownership and boundaries. Make decision rights, escalation points, review dates and non-negotiable safety or ethical limits visible to the people involved.
5. Act and observe. Monitor both delivery indicators and human signals such as challenge, information sharing, participation, trust and follow-through.
6. Review and adapt. Compare the result with the original intent. Retain, adjust or stop the intervention, and capture the learning for the next phase.

Evidence and Verification

Evidence should be proportionate to the project's risk and governance needs. A short decision note may be sufficient for a routine team adjustment; a high-consequence change may require sponsor approval, formal consultation, controlled records and a scheduled assurance review. Documentation must support judgement rather than replace it.

Review Questions

• What observable condition are we trying to change, and how will we know if it improves?
• Whose perspective is missing from the diagnosis or decision?
• Are authority, accountability and capability aligned, or are we asking someone to own an outcome they cannot control?
• Could the intervention suppress challenge, conceal risk or create dependency on one individual?
• What evidence will trigger escalation, adaptation or closure?

Practice boundary: Frameworks in this article organise thinking; they do not guarantee performance. Project context, contractual obligations, safety duties, workplace requirements and approved governance remain controlling.