A huge part of development is providing stretch opportunities. These are activities that are new to the employee and designed to get them to have to "stretch" to learn new skills. The difficulty is that you want these opportunities to be difficult, but not too difficult where it frustrates or discourages the employee.
A key factor that I try to keep in mind is that failure and struggle isn't bad, and this needs to be communicated to the employee. You will be asking them to do something they've never done before. You don't expect them to be perfect or succeed without any issues. This creates the proper framework.
The other thing is to constantly be checking in and then do an after-action review. This lets you have an open discussion on what went well, what could be done better, and what will be done differently next time.
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