Natalie Archibald brings a rare blend of disciplines to the HR role. As Vice President of People (Employee Success) at Clio, she is also a Registered Clinical Counsellor and Leadership Coach. That combination shapes how she thinks about workplace culture. Her conversation on Reimagining Company Culture explored the idea of being deliberately developmental, an organizing principle that asks companies to design their entire operating model around the assumption that humans grow best when growth is built into the daily fabric of work, not tacked on through programs.
The phrase comes from research by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, but Natalie's framing was less academic and more operational. She wanted to translate the idea into specific HR practices that companies can actually adopt without rebuilding everything from scratch.
What Deliberately Developmental Actually Means
Most companies treat development as a separate track from work. Performance reviews, training programs, and career development conversations live alongside the actual job, often in tension with it. The deliberately developmental thesis flips that. HBR's introduction to deliberately developmental organizations argues that the most effective organizations weave development into daily routines, conversations, and operating practices. MIT Sloan research on continuous learners reinforces the point. Development happens in the work, not around it.
Natalie's translation was practical. Companies do not have to adopt the entire deliberately developmental model to get most of the benefit. Even partial adoption (better feedback practices, more honest conversations, real growth conversations during regular work) produces compounding benefits in retention, engagement, and capability.
What Development in the Flow of Work Looks Like
How do you make daily work developmental?
Natalie described a few specific practices. Managers running one-on-ones that explicitly include development questions, not just status updates. Project assignments deliberately matched to growth needs, not just to capacity. Feedback loops that happen weekly rather than annually. Each is a small change. The aggregate is a different employee experience.
How do you coach managers to do this?
Through training, modeling, and accountability. Managers need to learn how to ask developmental questions, give honest feedback, and use real situations as growth opportunities. Companies that invest in this kind of manager capability development see the practice spread. Companies that do not see development stay confined to the L&D function.
What Actually Works in Deliberately Developmental Practice
Principle 1: Treat training and development as a system, not a calendar
Annual training calendars produce surface compliance. Embedded development practices produce real change. Companies that move from calendar-based to practice-based development see different outcomes. The practices include regular feedback, ongoing coaching, and explicit growth goals integrated with performance discussions.
Principle 2: Build mentoring and reverse mentoring into the operating model
Mentoring is not a separate program. It is a way of organizing knowledge transfer across levels and tenure cohorts. Reverse mentoring is particularly valuable for senior leaders who lose touch with how the work actually feels at lower levels. Both work better when they are built into the operating cadence rather than offered as opt-in programs.
Principle 3: Use feedback infrastructure that supports honest growth conversations
Honest feedback requires infrastructure. AllVoices' performance improvement tooling and GPT for HR capability help managers structure development and performance conversations more consistently, which is essential when companies are scaling and quality of feedback varies wildly across managers.
Where People Operations Fits
Deliberately developmental practice sits inside broader work on human resources and people team efficiency. The teams that operationalize it well integrate it across performance, engagement, and ER work rather than treating development as a separate track. Executive development work has to model the same practices the rest of the organization is being asked to adopt.
How HR measures developmental culture
The mature pattern is to track a small set of indicators. Manager-rated development quality. Internal mobility rates by tenure. Engagement scores on growth opportunity. Feedback frequency self-reported by employees. These do not perfectly capture developmental culture, but they trend in the right direction when the practice is real and stagnate when it is not.
Frequently Asked Questions About Being Deliberately Developmental
Do you need to adopt the full deliberately developmental model to get benefits?
No. Most companies cannot fully adopt it without years of culture change. Partial adoption (better feedback, more honest manager conversations, growth as part of performance reviews) produces meaningful benefits even without rebuilding the operating model.
What is the biggest barrier?
Manager capability. Most managers were not promoted for their ability to develop people, and many were never trained to do it. Without investing in that capability, the operating model cannot deliver the developmental experience employees are being promised.
How does development affect retention?
Strongly. Employees who see clear growth opportunity stay longer, perform better, and engage more deeply. The companies that invest in development see compounding benefits. The companies that do not see retention erode in ways that compensation cannot fully fix.
What about employees who do not want growth?
Most employees do want growth, even if they would not phrase it that way. What they often resist is forced development that feels disconnected from their actual interests. Real developmental practice meets people where they are and helps them grow into where they want to go, not into where the company assumes they should.
How does developmental culture interact with high performance?
They reinforce each other when done well. Honest feedback, clear expectations, and ongoing growth conversations produce both better performance and better development. Companies that try to separate the two end up with weaker versions of each.
How do you balance development with delivery pressure?
By recognizing that they reinforce each other when designed well. Teams that grow together tend to deliver better, especially over multi-year horizons. The companies that frame development and delivery as opposites end up sacrificing both. The companies that integrate them, building development into how work actually gets done, end up with stronger performance and stronger talent depth at the same time.
What is the role of psychological safety in deliberately developmental practice?
Foundational. Honest feedback and growth-oriented conversation require employees to feel safe enough to be wrong, to ask for help, and to admit when they are stretching. Without psychological safety, the practice collapses into performance theater. With it, the practice produces real growth. Investing in safety is not separate from investing in development. They are the same investment.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Natalie's argument is that being deliberately developmental is not a label or a program. It is an operating choice that affects how managers run their teams, how feedback gets delivered, and how employees experience growth. Companies that adopt the practice (even partially) see meaningful improvements in retention, engagement, and capability. Companies that treat development as a separate track will keep watching their best people leave for places that integrate growth into the actual job.
The deeper point is that humans are wired to grow. Companies that build with that wiring in mind end up with workforces that perform better, stay longer, and produce more. Companies that fight it with calendar-based programs and disconnected training will keep producing the modest results those models tend to deliver.
The compounding effect of developmental practice also shows up in unexpected places. Teams led by managers who develop their people tend to produce more candidates for senior roles, more cross-functional collaboration, and more institutional knowledge transfer. The investment in development pays back in the quality of the leadership pipeline the company has access to over the next decade, which is harder to measure but ultimately more valuable than any single program outcome.
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