Career Development (Part 2/2)
If you haven't read part one of this segment, I recommend you go read that before you jump into this piece. I promise it won't take long and will be very worth your while.
It's a commonly held viewpoint that the majority of career development is done on the job and only a small percentage, 10--20%, is done via formal or paid-for training.
I agree with this view, which is why a lot of my focus in Part 1 was on how to bake career development into the day-to-day part of the job. People learn more effectively when they can practice and experiment. Very few fields have learning barriers that can only be bypassed with formal, in-classroom training.
For this reason, much of what I cover below is focused on what you can do on the job; however, we will briefly divert into what your role is around paid training.
The first step is to understand what training budget you have available. Roughly how much has been allocated per staff member, and what are the hoops you need to jump through to get it?
While I don't expect managers to give up on getting some training paid for because it's 'too hard, i.e., it has to go through 900 approval steps, I encourage you to understand up front what that fight looks like. Then you can better talk about that process and be able to advocate for it with your staff member.
There may be a time that finance, or whomever the approving body is, denies certain training for your staff member, and that can be pretty devastating or disheartening for them, so we want to try and minimize that being a surprise for both of you.
One thing to test the waters on is what that training budget can be used for. Most people envision that as just some hands-on training at an away day somewhere with mediocre catering that costs an arm and a leg. But in my experience, I've used the training budget to buy books, conference tickets, Udemy courses, online webinars and events, and software licenses, all of which were nearly all cheaper than a normal one-day course somewhere and often of more use.
One last thing before we move away from training courses Try your best to validate the usefulness of a course. I've been on a fair few courses that my management wanted me to go to that ranged from utterly useless to only useless if I immediately went back into the office and kept practicing that specific skill rather than waiting for it to show up naturally in my day-to-day work. It can be a real gamble and not always something you can predict up front, but have a chat with others who have been on the course before, if you can, and see what they say. Unfortunately, the sheer complexity and context-specific nature of most of our jobs mean that outside training can sometimes never be worth it.
Right back to on-the-job career development
My number one recommendation, as it was in my guide on how to do 1:1s, is to have a central document for you and your staff member to refer to as you work together. Put it somewhere both of you can get to and add to; things like Google Cloud and Office 365 are amazing for this.
Using this document and getting something written down is really important. It gets you in the habit of agreeing to something, getting it documented, and then holding both of you accountable for its completion. Start small. The goal here is to get that growth mentality going. Doing one course a year or achieving one goal a year is not career development. Regularly growing, experimenting, and failing in small steps is career development.
Once you have something down (and I'll provide some structured avenues below), it's important to not only ensure that it gets done but to do a mini-retrospective on how it went. This is where the real learning takes place.
I had a staff member who wanted to be better with stakeholders and get their smart ideas across to people, but they quickly grew frustrated and often ended up pushing stakeholders away in meetings, and in the end everyone was unhappy.
I could have sat them down and plainly said, "You suck at talking to stakeholders" and outlined how I would have done things, but it's never that simple. When someone is in the midst of a conversation, the brain sort of defaults to autopilot, and it can be hard to break through that.
So, when they raised this frustration with their lack of success in convincing stakeholders in our 1:1 meeting, we put in a plan. We would talk about a plan ahead of a meeting, they would go to the meeting, sometimes alone or with me there, and then we would talk about it after the fact. Sometimes virtually through Teams, and I would always ask, "How do you think that went? Did you get what you wanted from that meeting?"
This self-reflection allowed them to internalize their own missteps, and it allowed us to talk through strategies, some that worked and some that didn't. When they made a mistake, we just rolled with it and vowed to do better next time. Eventually, we started to see success, and they got better and better at convincing stakeholders that their ideas had merit. All of this was a cooperative experience; I did not mentor, lecture, or give them the exact plan. All I did was offer support, provide a level of accountability, and focus our efforts on reflection and planning for next time.
When we say the majority of career development should be learned on the job, this is the sort of thing that is being referred to. Moving the focus away from 'what single training course can I do this year' and towards 'how can I be a little bit better this week or month? is a much more beneficial approach for all involved. It's the growth mentality in action.
As I've already mentioned, some staff are going to be driven and know exactly what they want to do, and they tend to self-direct themselves. Don't entirely abandon them; I still think your role is to provide a level of accountability and reflection, and through that, you may find yourself needing to provide a little bit of mentoring, but for the most part, they should be good.
Some staff are whiners or just categorically unhappy (I'm one of those people), and it can be quite easy to redirect that negative energy towards small career development opportunities and eventually a way to turn their mindset around. Are they whining about people being inconsistent with documentation? A great opportunity to get them to set some standards. Are they moaning about the speed of deployment to production? A great opportunity to get them to improve some automation. Take any complaint that's relevant and just turn around and ask them, "Is that something you're willing to help improve or resolve?"
I once had a staff member moan about how stand-ups weren't that fun and felt a bit soulless, and people were checked out. I knew that was partly my fault; I was still a bit green at the time, and I partly viewed stand-ups as this necessary evil to get over and done with. The team was small, so conversation outside of stand-ups flowed naturally, so I wasn't overly concerned. However, I knew this staff member had some leadership potential and was very empathetic, so I asked them if they wanted to lead them instead of me. The best decision I ever made It gave them the experience they needed in leadership, and the team was much happier and more engaged as stand-ups also became a place where we did quizzes and solved puzzles as well as talk about the weekend, etc.
One concept I read about in Radical Candor (a great book by Kim Malone Scott) is the premise that some staff are superstars and others are rockstars. Not everyone is experiencing or chasing the same level of career growth. A superstar might grow quickly, be promoted often, and be seen as successful' by today's standards, but that doesn't make them better than your other staff, and they will slow down eventually. Rockstars are going at a different pace. Maybe they are starting a family, and that's taking up their excess energy, and they just want to come to work and not have to think about their career for a bit. That's fine; you want a healthy balance of both. Superstars will leave you quickly, destabilizing the team and its goals. Rockstars give you that stability. Listen to each staff member, make a gauge of where they sit on the spectrum, and cater your efforts accordingly.
Getting it started isn't always that easy, I know. Some staff are disinterested, closed off, or you simply haven't built that relationship yet, so below I'm going to run through some more structured approaches to getting the conversation going. Use them however you feel comfortable; in some roles, I've had these scheduled in a spreadsheet, but in other roles, I've had them more in the back of my head.
Listen to what they are saying:
In the 1:1 article, we covered asking your staff both how they felt about work on a scale of red, amber, or green and where their emotional bank accounts were at the end of the week. Digging deeper into those conversations can unearth all sorts of opportunities to explore career growth. Like my staff member who said my stand-ups were boring, this is the perfect opportunity to pivot that into a growth path for them. It doesn't have to be in response to negative comments either; positive comments can be an opportunity to push them to go further; maybe they really enjoyed or excelled at something they didn't think they would. Ask them, Is that something you'd like to do more of?' If the answer is yes, then bingo! Forge ahead.
Ideal Reputation:Â
Career development conversations can often fall into the trap of being laser-focused on what job you want next or what skills can enhance the current execution of your job. It tends to entirely miss how someone wants to be seen in a team or who they want to be culturally. Someone might say that their career development goal is to become a lead engineer, but if you ask them how they want to be seen within the team, they might say something like, "I want to be seen as the person everyone brings their problems to. See how they are different? Career development rarely nurtures those goals, and I find them to be just as important. So ask your staff member who they want to be, what they want their ideal reputation in the team or company to be, and touch base with them every few sessions. Explore avenues to grow that reputation, and if you see something that could help or something they missed, bring it up.
Future Backwards:Â
In the same way ideal reputation covers things that don't tend to get covered in traditional career development processes, so does what I call the future-backward conversation. What I do is ask my staff, Fast forward five years; what will you be sad that you haven't achieved'? This can be a great device to understand where someone really wants to go. In a sense, career and professional development are so focused on the next step that they can lose sight of the bigger picture. For example, someone wanting to eventually be a manager might pick career development tasks that don't grow enough of their leadership skills; they are simply hoping that they do enough career development courses and gain enough experience to be considered for the eventual leadership position they will apply for. But it's very likely they won't ever build enough experience that way. Knowing what your staff members goals are, especially the ones they really don't want to lose sight of, is a good thing to know and allows you to scan ahead for them and supplement their career development with opportunities that you see pop up.
Make a written plan.
Whether you are incorporating the above or not, having the plan written down helps a lot. There are a myriad of formats and templates online for you to use or adopt, but fundamentally, what you want to do is not just write down the goal and call it a day, but plan it out. You need to have enough written down so that both of you know what needs to be done in order to say they have 'done' it. During the plan, establish whether it is a short-term or long-term goal, outline the steps and resources needed, and even include the support needed from you, their manager. Get this written down, set a deadline, and create a rough timeline, and you'll be halfway to success in no time.
Of course, I hope that both parts of my Career Development Guide help you and your staff practice effective career development; however, none of this will work if you don't make time. Everyone gets wrapped up in their job, their deadlines, their deliverables, and their stakeholders, and career development quickly becomes 'I'll do that next week', next month', and when it quietens down'.
I understand that not everyone has the luxury to carve out time for things like career development, especially those in operational or delivery-type roles, but as a manager, it's important that you proactively help your staff make that time. Help manage stakeholder expectations, ease up the flow of work, and prioritize. We know that people are not on the grind every minute of every day. I often recommend that my team do career development on Fridays. It's a day most people are taking easy; 'emergencies' tend to not happen Friday afternoon, and IT teams tend to avoid releasing things before the weekend. Conversely, Monday morning can also be a great time. Help your staff make the time, and your role is to protect that time and keep them chipping away at it. This is why I stressed so much in Part 1 of this guide that baking career development into your day-to-day is a far superior way to operate.
Feel free to reach out if you have a question, all my links are in my Linktree and if you want to show some extra gratitude you can buy me a coffee through my Linktree.