How Managers Can Fuel Employee Career Development
6 Ways Managers Can Put Career Development Front and Center
When it comes to professional and career development for employees, companies and leaders have a lot of room for development and growth (pun intended) In a Harris Research poll from 2021, Only one in four employees surveyed, however, felt the employer helped them grow "very well." Furthermore, Around 77% of employees feel "on their own" to develop their careers at the company.
Making matters worse has been the COVID-19 pandemic. Research from Lattice suggests that employee development has taken a backseat even more so during the pandemic, with 43% reporting that career progression within the company stalled or slowed down. This has all sorts of implications for employee productivity, retention, and engagement. Gloat suggests about 48.1% of employees are currently or will be looking for a new job within the next 90 days, and 65.8% employees are doing so because they believe there are better opportunities outside the organization than within it.
This has serious implications for organizations that fail to act. Unfortunately, if you’re an organization that does not take career development seriously through investments in time, resources, programs, fixing this does not happen overnight.
Creating a culture of learning, growth and development across the company is not an easy task, and one that requires significant investment and change. Which leaves everyday leaders and managers in a tough spot. What happens when you’re in the thick of a quarter dealing with lower engagement and productivity from your team, or re-balancing the workload as a result of employees who have chosen to leave?
As a talent development advisor and leadership facilitator, I’ve been hearing this question over and over from people managers of companies large and small. These managers often want to prioritize the development and growth of their employees to ensure they are engaged and productive and excited about their work, but aren’t sure how to make this happen within their own organization. Throughout my work with these managers and pulling from other research, here are five ways managers can take action to foster development and growth for their people.
1) Encourage and Facilitate Conversations About Career Development
One challenge with career development is that it doesn’t get talked about often enough. Too many times, it’s treated as a check the box activity that happens once per year. By intentionally creating time and space to talk about the importance of development goals, ideas, it will give employees the chance to speak up, but also the confidence that you are prioritizing this for your people.
According to research from 15Five, 82% of employees who have conversations more than once a month are highly engaged, compared to the 53%who only talk about their careers once a year or less.
A simple and tactical starting point for this is to put a “career development” section on your 1:1 doc with each of your employees. This section can have your employees updates on their goals, the progress they’ve made, any questions they have, or any asks for advice or help they need. Each meeting, you’ll get the chance to see this which means it will spark more discussion about the topic and how it’s going.
Finally, make sure to also share your own progress on your own goals of growth and development. If you want to see a specific behavior, one way to see it is to start modeling it.
2)Help Them Self-Reflect To Identify Their Strengths and Interests, and Incorporate it into Their Development Plans
In Marcus Buckingham’s most recent book Love+Work, he evaluated research from ADPRI’s most recent 50,000 person surveys about working populations across the world, and according to his research, the most powerful predictors of retention and engagement came back to the following three questions
Was I excited to work every day last week?
Did I have the chance to use my strengths every day?
At work, do I get the chance to do what I’m good at and something that I love?
If you’ve ever asked someone “what are your strengths,” and while many of us probably can name 1-2 of those relatively easy, getting to the nuance of that strength or understanding how it can be used in the workplace or for professional growth takes much more self-reflection and feedback. Helping your employees by consistently asking them questions around what their strengths are, how they are using them, and helping them spot opportunities to further them is a way to encourage them to think more holistically about their own growth and development.
Once you can help them identify those strengths and “red threads” you can then start collaborating with them about how you might be able to incorporate more of them, either into their current projects and responsibilities, or future ones.
#3 Facilitate Community Learning Moments
94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development according to last year’s LinkedIn Learning Report. While many of these learning moments can come from on the job experience, they can also come when you as the manager make time and space for learning and ideation to happen. One way to do this is by intentionally facilitating learning moments across your team. These can be short, but intentional spaces for employees to connect, teach, share, and ask questions from one another. While learning alone is helpful, hearing with and from your peers can be a great way to learn too, and promote collaboration and teamwork.
In a previous job, we created Monthly “Lunch and Learns''.” Each month, someone would be responsible for facilitating and teaching a 45 minute lesson on a project they recently completed to the rest of the team. During this session, they’ll cover what they did, the impact it made, and the learnings they had from it, and answer questions from the rest of the team. Oftentimes, these Brunch and Learns spurred ideas for new projects, the sharing of knowledge, as well as allowed employees to get exposed to other workstreams, projects and initiatives that they could further explore.
#4)Teach Employees How to Cultivate Their Community of Supporters
If you talk to many successful people, inevitably, they will all talk about the importance of having a great network and the help and advice they got from numerous others along the way. Even though individual output and success is important, it really does take a village to grow a career.
While each person is responsible for managing their own career, career development is meant to be a team sport, not an individual one. To do this, teach your employees to start building their own “team” or “community” of supporters, advisors, mentors, confidants, etc.
Whether it’s working with them to identify internally and externally a handful of people who they can consistently engage and connect with about work, the goal is to teach and empower them with a community of people that they can turn to for advice, feedback or general connection. Having a strong community increases your surface area for opportunities to arise, and teaching your employees how to do this can help them build their own team of supporters.
#5)Provide Continuous Feedback Aligned to Their Work and Development
Getting consistent and regular feedback is critical to company culture and general productivity. But it’s also especially helpful to development and growth because it provides context and insight that can often help an employee “connect the dots” between ideas, skills, projects, or experiences that they couldn’t see on their own. Even when we are doing great work, or using our unique strengths in a useful way, sometimes it can be hard to see our own genius.
Consider Clara, a manager at a fast growing startup. Each quarter, Clara uses one of her 1:1’s to provide specific feedback to each employee on a project they are working on, and where specifically she sees them making an impact in a positive manner.
She then collaborates with them around how they might use those positive strengths in other projects they are working on, or within their own development plans, allowing them to see how the feedback not only connects to what they do each day, but also how it can be.
#6) Encourage Employees to Teach What They Know
In the knowledge worker economy, one of the most important assets is the knowledge of the people. But that only benefits when people get a chance to share it with others.
Look for opportunities for your employees who have mastered a topic or skill and find ways that they can teach what they know or share that knowledge to other people either inside or outside of your company. The process of doing this can be helpful to an employee to help them synthesize and summarize what they’ve learned. Furthermore, it also allows them a chance to communicate to the broader organization what they are doing and the impact they are making, which enhances their visibility and personal brand. It also gives them a chance to find additional opportunities for development and growth.
According to research from Gartner, 50% of employees surveyed had left a job because they weren’t clear about how they could develop in the organization.Employees want to know that someone cares about their growth and development and wants to invest in it, along with some actions on how to do it.
While employees do ultimately own their career development, as a manager, by demonstrating your care and commitment to their growth and career, you can help them become a more productive and engaged employee that fuels employee and organizational goals and success.