4 Ways Managers can Fuel Employee Career Development
How to meet your employees where they are in their journey with career growth
A few weeks ago I got a phone call from a former colleague who had some challenges around career conversations they were having with employees. My former colleague is a first-time manager, and genuinely loves the idea of managing people, coaching, giving feedback, and helping a team achieve goals together.
He is invested in developing his people and having regular career conversations with his employees about how they want to develop and grow. But after a year he hasn’t made much progress.
Each quarter, when he’s sat down to talk to his employees about their career aspirations he’s often met with blank stares, and a limited amount of action, and wanted to know what was going on, and what he could do about it. This is not an uncommon. While many employees believe it’s important to be in a job or career path where they can learn and grow, actions do not always mirror words.
Additionally, having been on the other side of these career conversations, sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what to say. Finally, many employees are never taught the career management skills needed to navigate the workplace.
In my colleague’s case, the lack of understanding of career skills seemed to be part of the issue. Many of the employees reporting to him had less than 2 years of work experience, and they still lacked exposure and experience. When you’re early in your career, you don’t always have the answers to these questions, or reps to know how to maximize these situations.
In today’s workplace, there are many ways that someone can choose to grow their career. Furthermore, as an individualized society and with more diverse forms of work, we all have the agency to choose our own relationship with work and our career. In the case of my friend’s team, there were a number of individuals who wanted to grow and advance, others who were quite content with where they are, and a few who and were just trying to focus on getting by each day.
The beauty of today’s diverse workplace and the current state of careers is that there isn’t one specific path for growth. Which means, as a manager and leader, you need to really be intentional about how to meet your employees where they are while finding ways to hit your goals.
What to Do?
At the organizational and HR/Talent Strategy level, there are a few options - For example, Netflix’s concept of talent density means that those who aren’t striving for high performance are met with a “generous severance.” Corporate leaders of the aughts like Former GE CEO Jack Welch popularized the “yank and rank” philosophy of firing a consistent amount of the “bottom” employees each year. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is resorting to the Frank Slootman (Snowflake CEO) strategy of “amping it up” and higher the bar for expectations and in hopes that people leave. But if you’re reading this article, chances are you don’t have control over either of those things.
So what can you do, as a manager, if you have a desire to develop your people but also do your job effectively, knowing that each person is at their own place in their journey with their aspirations for their career, and their own self-motivations for their job?
As a manager, or leader, your job is to guide your team to achieving business outcomes with the resources, tools and skills you collectively have at your disposal, and here are a few recommendations for how you can do that:
1)Create Trust and Space
A reason why some employees are hesitant to talk about improvement or career growth is fear of retribution or lack of support. This is especially true if your employee has interests or aspirations that they perceive don’t align with your interests as a manager, such as interests outside of their immediate role on your team. The first thing you can do as a manager to solve this is by making it safe and open to have these conversations in the first place, regardless of what they surface.
A former manager of mine, made it clear when she took over the team, that she was invested in seeing all of us succeed, on this team, or anywhere else. And that if at any point, if we saw another role or opportunity elsewhere, she would support us, full stop, no questions asked. She would articulate this out loud to us each quarter when it was time to have career conversations to reinforce the message.
To her, setting her employees up for success had benefits both for her as a leader, and for the individual employee. Hearing our aspirations could help her scope, align projects to those interests, or allow her to proactively plan if it meant that someone was going to leave. Instead of being caught off guard when someone left (and then having to make up for lost productivity and attrition pains) she had a much clear definition which could both allow her to help, coach and support us individually, as well as help her scope and plan for resources and headcount.
This gave many of us a sense of trust, that we could talk to her about our own career aspirations whatever they were. I witnessed this first hand, when a role opened up on another team within the company
2)Teach Career Mindset and Habits
Too often, career development, coaching, and feedback exercises are treated as check the box activities. Instead of focusing on just the exercise or that specific career conversation, teach and model to your employees about the compounding value of building a mindset and set of practices around actively and intentionally managing your career. While that career conversation or that individual development plan might be a one-time thing, their career goes with them forever, long after they finish working for you. Helping them understand what it takes to intentionally and personally manage your career can pay long-term dividends, and I’ve seen this done well in a number of ways.
A previous manager of mine wanted to help us understand what actively managing your career could look like, and would go out of her way to share with us what he was thinking about his own career aspirations. At the time, he was going through the process of being evaluated for Partner at the firm, and openly and transparently shared with us the decision to go through the process, the steps that it took, and the highs and lows of going through that process. His message to us was not to necessarily follow in his footsteps or copy him persay, but to see how he was aligning specific habits and actions he was taking that aligned with his desired ambition for making partner, to encourage us to think about and model that four ourselves, regardless of what our ambitions were.
Another manager of mine wanted us to learn how to practice self-advocacy, and started encouraging us at the end of each quarter, to write down 3 big wins, 3 big learnings, and 3 big goals for the next quarter and to submit them to her. For anyone that did, she would then share those with the broader leadership team and advocate for us on our behalf. This encouraged all of us to be better about advocating and speaking up for ourselves, but also, for practicing continuous self-reflection, and using that as a way to better understand our strengths and interests, which she could then use to assign projects or to talk about during career conversations.
3)Connect the Dots in the Day to Day
Coming up with your own career goals or aspirations can feel amorphous or high level, either because it seems far off in the distance, or because you lack the context or experience to understand it.
As a manager, you have more context and experience than your direct reports, and your job is to use these strengths to help your employees make their ambitions and desires more real, and the way to do that is by connecting the dots for them in the day to day.
Finding moments in the day to give feedback or share insights that connect what your employees said in development conversations with what they are doing in their work helps make amorphous career aspirations feel more concrete and real. It gives context, that when your employees explore further, can often connect the dots and take an ambitious but high-level goal and get connected with a set of actions that an employee can take to achieve that goal.
During my last role as a people manager, one of my direct reports started putting their career goals for the year at the top of our 1:1 document that we reviewed during our weekly 1:1’s. That way, we could never forget to cover this in each of our 1:1’s.
4)Help them Build Their Career Team
We know that most people who are successful in their career goals don’t do it alone. Hard work and grit are important, but gone are the days of rugged individualism - the people who are successful today, have their own team behind them cheering them on and supporting their efforts.
And while you as a manager play a critical role in helping your employees develop and grow, you are not the only person who can help. Encouraging and supporting your employees to help them develop their own “career team” or a team of colleagues, peers, mentors or advisors who they can trust and feel safe talking to, or going to for advice or feedback is a great way to encourage further development.
A colleague of mine who is a people leader at a CPG company did an exercise with her team where she asked them to look at their emails and text messages and to figure out who they went to talk about their careers or to get advice. From there, she encouraged them to set up regular check-ins with these people, or to find 1-2 other new people they could turn to talk about their career goals.
Another former manager of mine actively budgeted for professional development dollars each quarter for anyone who wanted to go connect with other product marketers, and offered to connect us with any other product marketers within the company that we wanted to meet. These are not huge investments of time, but can often pay significant dividends.
Helping and coaching your employees so they can develop and grow in their career is a worthwhile but never-ending endeavor. This is especially true when you have employees who all have their own unique desires and ambitions for growth. The challenge then becomes, how do you help each individual employee in a way that works for them while achieving the collective goals as a team?
For the managers who are committed to this it's important to remember that each individual employee must have their own intrinsic motivations for their career growth. However, managers like my former colleague still have tools and resources they can use to support their employees, regardless of what their desires and interests are.
PS - Julia, one of our readers, has a newsletter that you should check out.
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What: Kindness at Work Honor Roll aims to recognize employees who exemplify empathy for their colleagues. I started it because I feel we don't recognize this trait enough externally.
Where: The Switchboard, a newsletter to help readers become better (internal) communicators with career insights, inspiring stories and best practices. It’s one of my side-project passions.
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