Career Development (Part 1/2)
Easier said than done
Career development is the very definition of 'easier said than done'. It has so many things stacked against it from the very beginning that it's no wonder it's universally poorly done.
Obviously, it's hard to get career development when your company outright doesn't do it. Either they don't see the value in investing the resources needed or they hold the bigoted view that they 'shouldn't be training you for your next job.'Â
Though, even at companies that support it, it's still rough sailing.
Most companies contain a multitude of professional disciplines under their roof, so career development steps for a person in finance are different from those for someone in software engineering.
It is for that reason that career development becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The company says they support it, but what that often means is that they won't punish leaders for taking the time to do it. However, those leaders often have no more support than an enthusiastic thumbs up from their superiors and need to figure it out by themselves. This means the upper limit of how good your career development is going to be is how much time and experience your direct superior can muster. To make matters worse, even if someone is an expert in their field, that does not necessarily mean they can teach. Teaching is actually something very few people are naturally good at.
Imagine if we ran hospitals that way. The hospital management has given your doctor permission to treat you but no support, so success is based purely on whether your illness fits within the resources and the experience your doctor already has available to them. If they need more help, facilities, or tools, you probably won't have a good experience.
It's actually a random chance that your career development needs fit within the experience and time your manager already has. You can't say your organization offers career development if it's actually a roll of the dice. I can't say my food truck offers food every day if it's a random chance every morning that I don't get my ingredients.
I've worked in organizations that understood this problem, but every time the solution was always some HR-led, 'one size fits all' career development kit that was uploaded onto the intranet or into an e-learning module. Again, this is not sufficient for the complex modern workplace.
With so many cards stacked against it, what is the solution to offering effective career development?
The path forward is a two-parter.
The rest of this article will cover the mindset you should have as a manager, your beliefs, and the approach you should be incorporating into your management style to set yourself up to provide good career development for your team.
The second article will cover what you can do day-to-day to put these learnings into practice and get the ball rolling.
The Ethos
The first thing you need to get your head around if you don't already is that every employee is entitled to grow within their role, even if it's an entry-level role in a fast food chain. Part of their compensation is to be able to leave the role with more experience than when they started it.
It is part of your responsibility as a leader to provide your staff members with opportunities to grow and learn new things. You are not 'helping them leave your company', or 'paying for the next company to benefit from it; those are deeply problematic ways to view employment.
A manager of mine described his view of career development like a university. Your staff will graduate some day; no one stays at a job forever, and they are here to grow along the way, and it's your job to help that growth. I like this approach; it re-contextualizes it as some managers get caught up in the loop of "you are paid to work", "this is the company's resources', and "I'm too busy doing the job to be investing time in you."
It should come as no surprise that I strongly believe that career development is the responsibility of a manager. It is your job to facilitate and support; even if you don't personally have the skills to train and mentor someone in the specific direction they want to go, it's still on you to support them and provide time and resources to enable that journey.
If you don't agree with that, I'm sorry. I don't think you should be a manager. You aren't here to control, restrict, or gatekeep your staff's careers, and if you find yourself doing that, you are potentially in the job for the wrong reasons.
Not to mention that as you invest in your staff, it benefits you and your team's goals.
One of my favorite anecdotes about career development came from a manager I worked with who had a struggling and checked-out staff member. After a few months of awkward conversations about performance and trying different things, the manager asked him, "What do you want to do for a job? After some pressing, the staff member admitted they wanted to be in an entirely different field all together; they were currently in IT, and they actually would rather be in a kitchen cooking.
So that manager offered to pay for some cooking training. IT courses can be pretty expensive, and having a checked-out staff member you really want to move on from can also be costly. It was the right thing to do from all angles. Six months later, that staff member moved on to a job in a kitchen, and that manager was able to hire someone who wanted to be in that role.
I like this anecdote as it's a great example of how even investing in career development for the opposite reasons everyone expects can still be good. Sure, they used the company's training budget for something that didn't appear to benefit the company, but in the long run, it did and was probably more cost-efficient.
The second thing you need to get your head around is that career development isn't something that's done once or twice a year. It's something you do every single day, and spoiler alert: it's less work overall and gets more results.
Long story short, your goal is to foster a growth mentality between you and your staff member.
If you invest in a culture of growth, then you never need to have the definitive answer, you never need to have a strict plan, and you never need to have done it yourself. This takes a massive amount of pressure off your shoulders and helps share the responsibility between the two of you.
I commonly see career development conversations and efforts fall flat out of the gate.
Managers adopting a "I can't do this for you, so just tell me what you want to do" approach, or conversely, the team member getting stuck in a "I don't know what I want to do" loop, and then both of you get too busy with work.
A small majority of staff know exactly what they want to do and will happily tell you what they need from you in the way of exposure, training, and on-the-job experience, and while that's an easy path forward for you, their manager, don't treat everyone that way.
Instead, for those who don't know, take the pressure out of needing an exact plan or direction and just go with the flow. Don't aim for the sky; aim for next week. Go on the journey with them, and as small opportunities present themselves, push them in that direction, and then after the fact, talk about how it went. A growth mentality is fostered through curiosity, contestant experimentation, and a decent amount of failure.
Getting your staff member comfortable with giving new things a go, not having a master plan, and failing regularly will do more for their career than anything else. Then, when they figure out exactly what they want to do next, you can implement that plan easily with a quicker success rate because you've not been dormant; you've been exploring and growing.
I had a staff member who was very good at their job and in quite a junior position in their career. When prompted about what they wanted to do next, they were unsure. There were ample roles within their field for them to step into and specialize in, but they were unsure.
So we adopted a taster-course approach and reached out to different teams within the organization, and they did ride-alongs to learn what they did and even did some work for them. Within the team, we experimented with deliberately changing their role slightly to take on more specific responsibilities and gauged how they felt.
They took the lead on some more leadership qualities such as managing workload and leading stand-ups, then we went closer to the subject matter and made them the team's sole code reviewer for a few weeks, and then for another few weeks we tasked them with looking at ways to speed up the team with a focus on automation and process improvement.
By the end of the journey, we had gone on a journey together, and I never needed to have the final solution. Because they were in the mindset of giving things a try, they didn't feel the pressure of getting it perfectly right. Of course, in the end, they figured out what they liked the most, and we were able to then move forward with specific goals.
The best position you can put yourself in is as someone who helps facilitate career growth. By going on the journey with them, it helps build trust, removes the illusion that you know exactly what to do, and opens them up to doing smaller, more impactful things rather than a once-a-year, expensive course they may not get anything from.
I've worked at a lot of companies where career development was something you talked about twice a year. Once to set the goals, and the second time to mark you as passing or failing. I worked for a company where bonuses were tied to career development completion, and it did not have the intended effects. Staff would set the goals early in the year and then sprint to finish them late in the year, which would then have an impact on other end-of-year deliverables and burn people out.
View it as homework from school. You could do it all on Sunday, all stressed out and needing the entire day, or you could do a little bit of it every night and have a noticeably reduced impact on your life. Bake career development via a growth mentality with your team and always be doing something small, and you and your team will be far better off in the long run.
Now that we've covered the general approach to doing career development, join me in part two, where we cover ideas, exercises, and approaches you can do day-to-day in your role to get the ball rolling.
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.