The People Growth Equation
How to Align Employees, Managers, and Organizations Around Development
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In today's workplace, career development is critical for attracting, engaging, and retaining talent. Employees expect a job with opportunities for growth and advancement. Managers can shape the employee experience and drive team performance.
Managers' roles in career development are not new since they have an outsized impact on the employee experience. Many employees accept jobs for the same reason they leave them—for career growth, with 41% citing they left a job due to the lack of career development and growth.
How do managers support and enable their team members' growth? What do employees need from their managers to feel motivated and equipped to advance? And how can organizations empower managers to champion employee development?
I've thought a lot about these topics at The Edge of Work , my leadership development consulting firm. These questions and topics come up in my manager development programs and with leaders trying to understand better how to retain employees.
This study will answer these questions and provide actionable insights for individuals, managers, and organizations.
Studying The Role of Managers in Career Development
The study involved qualitative research with three key stakeholder groups: individual contributors, people managers, and talent development professionals from Fortune 500 companies.
Through in-depth interviews with over 50 employees and leaders, the research examined the intersection of employee development and managerial effectiveness and how organizations can empower managers to champion career development.
Our Key Findings
a) What career development support employees seek
b) How managers can help their employees
c) How organizations can support their employees and managers
A. What career development support employees seek
We wanted to cover employee expectations and career development needs. Many people were frustrated with the lack of support, so we wanted to understand better what would be most helpful for employees.
In our conversations, we identified four key areas of support that employees were seeking:
1) Deeper understanding of their background - Employees are responsible for their career development, but many wanted someone who knew their background to act as a support system. Managers who understand their strengths, motivations, and goals can provide ideas, suggestions, and encouragement.
2) Transparent communication - Our interviews highlighted the importance of clarity around opportunities, requirements, and skills. This stems from the diverse directions you can take in your career and unclear expectations and guidance in organizations.
3) Career-focused feedback - Feedback was a common thread regarding career opportunities, not necessarily performance or a current role. "While I have some ideas about my career development, I know my perspective is limited by my own experience. It would be great to get outside counsel in the form of ideas, suggestions around potential possibilities," a customer success manager at a tech company shared with us. Employees also shared that they only need a little career feedback, but more consistent and smaller doses would be helpful. "I feel it's a mistake that we only talk about this once a year," an employee at a financial services institution shared.
4) Active facilitation - Employees seek guidance from managers in getting exposure, experience, and opportunities for development and growth. "While I know some things about what I'd like to explore, my manager has been great at being able to use her resources to connect me to those opportunities," an oil and gas company engineer shared.
B. How Managers Can Help Their Employees
With an idea of what employees want, we sought practices and actions managers can take to support employee career development and growth. We identified helpful, actionable, and practical practices in four key areas.
1) Understand and empower - The most basic action a manager can take is to show their support and encouragement for their employee's career by listening, asking questions, and sharing ideas. Managers who do this well help people develop and create time and space to ask employees about their goals, interests, and aspirations.
2) Provide tailored resources - A manager can also provide specific resources that align with an employee's desired career goals. One employee shared that her manager created a section in her 1:1 check-in document for a list of career development ideas and resources. "Even though it's a small action because it's personalized and relevant, it makes me feel like my manager truly cares about helping me be successful," they said.
3) Give actionable feedback in the workflow - Great managers go beyond checking the box for mandatory career conversations or performance evaluations and provide career feedback regularly. Examples include providing feedback that helps employees connect their work with a career goal, showing them how they are progressing in their role, or suggesting new opportunities they can explore.
4) Advocate and open doors - The best managers facilitate opportunities for employees to develop and grow, such as linking a strength or interest to a potential learning opportunity, creating a new project in their existing role to build a new skill, or connecting their employees to another person who can help them learn and grow.
C. How Organizations Can Support Employees and Managers
For the last part of our research, we wanted to understand better how organizations can support employees' career development. We talked with leaders in talent and HR to hear their perspectives. Here are four key actions organizations can take:
1) Define a career development philosophy - Organizations should develop a definition of career development for their organization and get buy-in and support around it. This will impact everyone, so support from key stakeholders is important.
2) Redefine and codify managers' expectations regarding their responsibilities for employee career development - Organizations can also define the role and responsibilities of people managers regarding their career development roles. You can incorporate this expectation into various elements of the employee lifecycle, such as job descriptions, interviewing new hires, promotions, and performance conversations.
3) Prioritize manager development - The next critical action is ensuring managers know their roles and responsibilities and have the training and tools to do so. Diverse learning interventions can showcase this, but in our experience, the most effective ones are simple and easily repeatable.
4) Reward what good looks like - Having clear expectations and training is great, but having reinforcing mechanisms (like rewards) is critical to getting ongoing commitment and buy-in from your managers.
Bonus: The Value of Career Navigation Skills
Another theme from our conversations was helping employees learn how to develop and manage their careers. A talent development leader told us, "My organization does a good job communicating to our employees that they own their own destiny, but I think what's missing is the specifics around how they can do that. We should really be teaching them how to fish versus just feeding them fish."
Practicing Self-Awareness: Developing self-awareness around your strengths, interests and aspirations and using them to identify opportunities
Demonstrating Self-Advocacy: Understanding, documenting, and sharing your work and expertise so that you can help others and others can help you
Investing in Relationships: Identifying and investing in relationships with others to achieve your goals
Learning Through Experimentation: Experimenting with interests and curiosities to learn and grow
Iterative Growth: Intentionally and iteratively practicing behaviors and to create your own career growth
Conclusion: Aligning Everyone Around Career Development to Drive Business Outcomes
Career development is a mutual and continuous process with shared responsibility amongst employees, managers, and the organization.
Note: If you'd like to read a full copy of the report, please check out this link. If you are working on these types of initiatives, please let us know how they're going or what you are doing. We'd love to hear what you think!
Call To Action
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this newsletter and found it valuable and would like to work together, here are three ways. If you’re looking for some help for your learning and development, leadership development, I’d love to work with you: Here is how I might be able to assist:
Leadership & Learning Programs: Formal training and leadership development in your company, such as new manager or new leader training, or skill-based programs. (See Here for more details)
Keynote Speaking - Do you have a conference, offsite, or event and in need of a speaker? I’d love to hear more and see how I can assist
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Feel free to contact me directly for more details!
Thanks for the shout out, friend!