Help Your Employees Grow Through Career Experiments
Unlocking Productivity and Engagement of Your Employees Through Career Growth
Hello, and welcome to this week’s newsletter. Thank you to our new subscribers. If you’re new, drop me a line and tell me what you are working on these days
This Week’s Newsletter:
Advocating for Better Workplaces and Leaders
How to Help Your Employees Run Career Experiments
1. Advocating For Better Workplaces and Better Leaders
If you are reading this newsletter, you’re most likely working in a knowledge worker job of some kind, and you probably are also someone who cares about creating better workplaces, better teams and better leaders. It doesn’t take much to see how much opportunity there is to do this work given the state of our knowledge worker workplace, but I read a few articles this week that reminded me of the fact that while the knowledge worker environment has a long way to go, so does work at large.
If you have a few minutes, I encourage you to read a few of these articles detailing the current challenges that first-line employees at companies like UPS and Starbucks are currently facing in their efforts to fight for a better world of work.
After reading these articles, I started to pay more attention to the service-oriented establishments I’ve entered over the past week, ranging from airports to coffee shops, restaurants and gas stations. As I observed the workers in each of these environments it was a reminder to me of how collectively we have such a ways to go in creating better workplaces for more people.
I don’t have an answer or a nice way to tie this thought together but I know it was important enough for me to spill some ink on in this newsletter. If you get a chance to read the articles I would encourage you to think about what we can do, as employees to help create better workplaces, as well as what we can demand from our leaders to do the same.
2.How to Improve Productivity and Employee Engagement Through Career Experiments
I’ve been on the road for the past few weeks focusing on training new manager and leaders on how to be effective new managers and leaders.
Throughout the trainings, common questions and themes bubble up, ranging from how to assign work, how to deliver difficult feedback, how to manage low performers and how to manage up, down and across.
Many of these are what you’d expect from people managers, especially those who are new to a role. (And if you’re wondering the answers to these questions, make sure to check out my podcast episode with Radical Candor CEO, Jason Rosoff)
But more and more, I am getting a type of question that comes up related to how do I help my employees grow their careers?
I’m grateful to see this question because it means that these managers understand that part of their role is to in fact help unlock the growth and potential of each of their employees.
Introducing Career Experiments: How to Help Your Employees Create Their Own Career Growth
An experiment (like the ones we learned in science class in middle school) is a procedure designed to test a hypothesis as part of the scientific method. In this case, the scientific method is our career, and the hypothesis is just merely an educated guess about something in our career that we are interested in or curious about.
Career Experiment: A hypothesis driven approach to evaluating a curiosity or interest about your career growth
Career experiments give us permission to explore and learn about something that is interesting or meaningful to us. They also provide us space to fail, learn, and try again. Intuitively, we all know that these are things that are important, but we often fail to create conditions to do this.
Just like a science experiment, a career experiment has merit, but when it succeeds and when it’s proven false. Instead of approaching our career development as having a clear sense of the 10 steps you need to take on a clear path, you can think more about intentionally trying something out, learning, and then taking a step.
And for some, the experiment scope might mean actually figuring out if a particular path is as interesting and exciting to you as it seems, but it can also be something much smaller.
You might be wondering, that sounds great, so how do I do this? I want to give a couple examples of how I’ve seen people take advantage of experimentation to lead to opportunities, learnings and paths in their career, that you can try on for yourself.
Why People Managers Play an Important Role in Career Experiments
In my opinion, a manager has three main responsibilities
Get your team to deliver on business outcomes
Create conditions that enable success
Helping your employees with designing their own career experiments helps on all three responsibilities but especially #1 and #3.
The purpose of career experimentation is to align a curiosity and interest with an opportunity that drives new ideas, tasks, projects, and collaborations. As knowledge workers, our goal is to drive outcomes through our insights and knowledge in a way that drives an outcome. Some of this will come from things we already know, such as the tasks, workstreams, and projects that we work on. But carving out space to explore and experiment can lead to all sorts of new opportunities, for the individual employee, as well as for the company. This is often where new innovations, collaborations, and ideas can come from, so providing your employees the time and space to do this has clear benefits for you and your team.
But it also has many benefits to the employee. We all know the feeling of getting to work on something that uniquely aligns to our own interest, expertise or curiosity. Furthermore, while many of us care about our careers and want to grow and advance, not all of us know exactly what we want to do.
Teaching your employees how to run career experiments is also a way to help them generate opportunities for career growth, and to get “unstuck.” Instead of waiting and wishing for the lighting bolt to discover what they want to do in their career, it inspires them to follow their curiosity and take action.
Examples of Career Experiments
So how do you run a career This may seem a little amorphous, so to help you out, here are a few examples of individuals I know who have conducted career experiments that have led to growth opportunities.
Curiosity Conversations to Explore Other aspects of a role - As a product marketer, I knew that PMM was a diverse and multifacated role. One area of product marketing I didn’t have experience with was demand generation. My hypothesis was that, if I wanted to advance in the profession, I needed to get a good understanding of this discipline, but I didn’t know much about it. So I went and talked to the Demand Gen team within my company to learn about the role and why it matters to product marketers.
Carving Out a new Project to Explore a Curious itch - After 2 years as a product marketer I was getting tired of working on the same work. However, there was one area of product marketing that I was curious about, and that was competitive intelligence. While I could in fact look for roles on the CI team, instead, I talked to my manager about scoping a small workstream around Competitive Intelligence. I enjoyed this work, and it helped improve my attitude about the role that I was in because it gave me something new and challenged me in a new way. The work I did ended up becoming so valuable, that eventually we created our own team around competitive intelligence in our organization, which I got to be a part of.
Take on a side hustle to find more time to do things I enjoy - I enjoyed writing but wasn’t getting to do a ton of it my in day job, so I started focusing more on it outside of my day job. Instead of giving up on MBASchooled, I continued to write while working as a management consultant, and even picked up more writing projects writing for The Muse. This eventually led to writing a book, starting a podcast, this newsletter, and many other writing opportunities For Fast Company, Insider, and many other places.
Connecting with other people who share your values - Sarah was in a learning and development role, but was interested in exploring a role that was more strategic and creative. Unfortunately, she was not finding many roles or opportunities in her existing department for this work. Sarah decided to join an ERG which had a mentoring program for women who wanted to connect with other women. Through this program, Sarah met another female leader in the company who after looking at her background, asked her to consider a role as solutions engineer, which she could use her background in instructional design, but in a different part of the business. Sarah then used this knowledge to start talking to other people who had this role in solutions engineering within the ERG, and over time, Sarah was able to make the transition into this new role.
These are just some examples of career experiments that you can share with your employees to help them think of their own.
Principles For Running Career Experiments
If you’re a manager or leader, here are some guidelines for helping your employees run their own career experiments (or to run your own)
Make Time and Space - Intentionally carve out time to run an experiment. I don’t want to put quantities, but I’d say one a quarter is a great start.
Ask For Guidance - Encourage your employees to find a partner, or a mentor who has run a similar experiment, not to copy, but to share your progress with, and provide perspective. If they trust you, it can be you (the manager)
Reflect on what you’ve learned - Doing the experiment is important, but creating time to reflect and take the learning forward is also important. Action is the result of doing, but reflection is what drives the learning and the next actions. Once they’ve finished, make sure to think about what you’ve learned, and how it can move you forward
Enjoy the journey - The throughline for each example I gave is the individuals genuinely enjoyed the thing they were doing for their specific experiment. I think if we all found a little more joy in our work or in our days, it would make us a little bit happier. Career experiments can do that.
These are just some examples of how you can coach your employees to start generating their own career experiments in a way that helps them create their own opportunities for engagement, productivity and career growth.
If you’re looking for some help for your learning and development, leadership development or professional development for this year, I’d love to work with you: Here is how I might be able to assist:
Team Trainings & Professional Development: Happy to facilitate training or professional development opportunity for your team & organization - common topics include: career development, influence without authority, effective relationship building, and stakeholder management
Support Your Offsites & Meetings: Speak or facilitate at your team’s offsite. Need a guide to facilitate or speak at an upcoming offsite, QBR or all hands? Happy to engage here.
Leadership & Learning Programs: Formal training and leadership development in your company, such as new manager or new leader training, or skill-based programs.
Feel free to contact me directly for more details!
Have a great week!
Al