*Note: This is not a direct transcript. Content was edited for length and clarity. Watch the video for the full webinar or continue reading for the recap. Download the accompanying session materials to help you follow along.
Welcome to Unlocking Employee Career Growth for Managers! In our work, we spend a lot of time growing leaders and doing assessments that allow them to understand how others experience them. Over and over, the lowest scores are typically in growing teams and talent. So, we wanted to have a conversation with managers in the field about how you can bring growth and development to everyday work experiences. It’s not about adding growth and development to your busy schedules, but about turning the stuff you’re already doing into a growth experience because of the way you engage in it.
A Little About WinningWise
We focus on growth for leaders, people and organizations through solutions such as leadership development, career and talent strategy, culture transformation, and organizational change. We’re passionate about anything that involves people thinking or performing differently in their roles. Usually, we focus on talent practitioners, but today is about the managers themselves. Think about if this content will help your managers grow in order to develop others.
Why Mobility Matters
Growth Across the Talent Lifecycle
We often hear: The job of the manager is to influence employees across the talent lifecycle. So, where do managers actually fit in that lifecycle?
1. Attract Talent: Managers have to have a role in attracting talent, i.e., hiring the right talent.
2. Engage Talent: Managers have to engage their people and show them what they need to do to be successful.
3. Grow Talent: Managers need to grow their people as their role and the organization grows. Individuals need to evolve as things change.
4. Keep Talent: Managers need to be thinking about how to retain them and keep them engaged in what they’re doing in the organization, so you’re not losing out on that investment.
Managers can amplify the employee experience if they embrace the development mindset as they think about the talent lifecycle. To attract talent from a development perspective, think about looking for talent externally and also within the organization. Create a reputation for yourself as a developer of people, so others across the organization want to come work for you. Help your people understand how to grow not just for today’s role, but for the work of the future. That helps people want to stay longer. When you’re a developer of people and think about mobility, you amplify your impact as a leader.
Why Invest in Development?
Growing people is an underdeveloped skill. In coaching, we often hear people say: “I really want to grow people, I’m just so busy doing X that it feels like an extra thing I need to do.” Here are some of the challenges they’re facing.
Current Talent Challenges:
- Succession planning is at a crisis point. Only 42% of critical roles can be filled quickly by internal candidates. We know organizations are feeling pressure of not having the right people ready for future roles.
- Traditional career pathways have eroded. 71% of millennial workers say the pandemic made them “rethink the place that work should have in their lives.” They’re no longer feeling the same level of commitment to organizations as they did in the past. This also says they need more guidance about how they fit in their teams and organizations long term.
- Managers are at the frontline. 68% of managers are burned out and feel unsupported. They’re caught between the organization’s needs and their people’s needs.
The Way Forward:
- Focus on mobility. Companies that excelled at development had a 15% higher internal mobility rate and a 12% increase in production. This benefits employees by giving alternate pathways, and it benefits organizations by being able to move folks around.
- Support employee growth. 93% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers. Referring back to the talent lifecycle, if we’re investing in growth, we’re able to keep, engage and grow people for longer and not lose out on that investment.
- Empower managers to embrace their connector role between employees and organizations. 60% of employees see managers as their frontline organization connection.
The Manager’s Role: A Balancing Act
The manager’s job is to facilitate a strong relationship between the individual and the organization by balancing the needs and the offers of both parties to create more opportunity today and in the future. As a manager, you have to know your people, what matters to them, what they bring to the party, and how that fits with the needs of the organization. That’s how you create the runway for potential.
What makes it challenging is that managers also have a job of their own – most are in a leader/producer role and a lot of energy goes into that. Then, they have this other “side job” to grow people and figure out how to get them to fit into the organization. It’s easy to forget to make the conversations broader and to have a deeper connection with people. But when you do it, there are some cool benefits.
What’s in it for me? Benefits for Developing Talent
1. Individual Benefits: Employees want to know and be engaged in the organization. They want to feel their performance is up to par. They want to know they have a future and feel included.
2. Organization Benefits: It’s about performance, agility and flowing with the market demands. Everyone is working on building a bench of talent and increasing internal promotions.
3. Manager Benefits: You can meet your own goals and grow talent across the enterprise. This can increase your own potential and opportunity for growth and mobility in the organization too. When managers embrace growing people to support the organization, they support the company and the people. That’s a huge personal win, and you can earn a reputation for the soft skills that enable you to project your own career forward.
Strategic development is a shared responsibility. Individuals have to own their own careers, managers can support the process AND the organization needs to facilitate that. There’s a huge role talent practitioners play in building a sandbox to make these opportunities possible.
Embracing a Mobility Mindset
What Does Everyday Growth-Mindedness Look Like?
This is not about adding more to managers’ plates but shifting the lens through which you look at things you’re already doing. Let’s rethink these conversations.
Traditional View:
- 1:1 Meetings: Discuss to-do lists, align on weekly priorities, often canceled when something more urgent comes up
- Performance Reviews: Employee and manager do it in advance, then have a conversation to align on/share ratings and talk about if they met their goals
- Exposure to Senior Leaders: Certain roles give you more exposure; managers take the lead and do most of the talking; team members who participate sit in the back
Growth-Minded View:
- 1:1 Meetings: Talk about priorities, but always dedicate time to feedback on performance and development goals (short term and long term); help employee think about how what they’re doing today gets them to where they want to go; meetings don’t get canceled because there’s always more to talk about
- Performance Reviews: The traditional topics plus talking about what could be possible for the future; what it would take to get there, how to make things better for next year and how to work toward that together
- Exposure to Senior Leaders: Managers let go of their ego and think if their team shines, they shine; prepare their team in advance to lead; focus the spotlight on the work of the team; participate when asked rather than taking the lead
What Great Managers Do Differently to Grow Talent: Assess Yourself!
There are 6 things we see effective managers do differently in their interactions.
1. Grows Strategically: Know the needs of your people, what their potential is, what their strengths and capabilities are, and how to match that against the needs of the organization. Think about what the organization needs in the future, where the opportunities are, and how to connect your team to the right opportunities to create growth.
2. Maximizes Potential: Get out of the way and let other people step up. Create opportunities for your people to learn, grow and be at their best without getting in the way.
3. Motivates with Feedback: Don’t hold back positive or constructive feedback because you have to share in order for others to grow.
4. Energizes Around Excellence: Don’t lower the bar just because people aren’t ready yet. Tell them they need to rise to the occasion and that you believe in them and are pushing them to do great things.
5. Cultivates Resilience: Focus on the future, look forward and learn from mistakes. Don’t be afraid of mistakes. Look for progress over perfection. Understand that in growth there is inherent messiness.
6. Champions Others: Focus the spotlight on your team and their work. Become an advocate for the work of others rather than taking the lead for yourself.
Instructions: Take a moment to assess and rate yourself on these 6 areas to make sure you’re creating a strategic plan around talent. See the session materials for a copy of the assessment. (The X’s are just to show an example.)
Best Practices for Development-Minded Managers
- Know Where You Stand: Assess your current strengths and growth areas. Be clear about your own growth. It’s hard to grow others without turning the lens on yourself.
- Start Small: Identify 1 to 2 places to start to focus your time and energy and make your work with your team more growth and development minded.
- Start with Feedback: Unless you already do it well, if you don’t know where to start, do this first. Especially focus on constructive feedback, although it can be argued positive feedback is more important and often overlooked. It’s hard to go wrong with being able to do this well.
- Adjust Your Lens: Look at your day-to-day interactions with employees and consider what might shift with a development lens. Is there more you can do with the conversations you’re having to make them developmental?
- Improve Over Time: Layer in new skills as you build confidence and capacity. Get started and then move on and let it grow. Little by little can make a huge difference.
Download the accompanying session materials for ideas on HOW to go about doing these 6 things.
Growing Employees Through Everyday Experiences: Where to Look
Stretch projects: Are your people working on things outside of their comfort zone that make them feel like it’s a risk? The more they do that, the more they grow. When people work on BIG goals, they grow in their capability. Not huge, insane goals, but higher than basic expectations.
Lateral moves: This can be really exciting for growth because it can grow your network, capability, and change the focus on your skill set. This can prepare you for upward mobility.
Mentorship and coaching: Any ongoing feedback situation is helpful.
Job shadowing: Having people spend time checking out what other folks are doing can be really helpful.
Team meetings: Turning team meetings into growth experiences can be so easy by switching to questions, pushing bigger projects, and delegating with more authority and responsibility.
Individual development planning: This is an underdeveloped skill for most leaders. Sometimes, leaders create development plans focused on something someone is doing wrong or on competency growth, which makes sense, but that’s not how people grow and change. Rather, that’s the what or the destination of what you want someone to grow into, i.e., being more strategic. That’s a great outcome, but how do you get there? You might have to speak up or have a plan or learn more about the market, for example. These are things you’d have to change to have that outcome. And that is what a development plan should be about.
Performance review conversations: These are a great way to create development and exposure to senior leaders. People have the opportunity to listen, learn and test ideas. All of those are growth opportunities. Sometimes it’s important as a leader to make sure other people know that these kinds of things are growth opportunities. You might be providing growth opportunities that people don’t even realize. So, it’s important to make sure the organization can provide these opportunities and that people know they’re being provided.
Essentials of Growth Conversations
Driving Success – Setting up Meaningful Growth
Career success is a partnership, not a solo act. The idea is that if we can create alignment between the individual and the organization, we can create Shared Success.
When we think about this, we create more growth and opportunity by strengthening the Individual Offer. What is an individual able to do? If they’re able to do more, they have more growth and opportunity.
You can increase results by better meeting Organizational Needs. If the organization has needs that individuals are better enabled to fulfill, you’ll have better results.
You can increase employee happiness by meeting Individual Needs. If employees feel their needs are being met, they’re happier.
And you can promote greater satisfaction by understanding and leveraging the Organizational Offer. So, what is the organization able to offer its employees and how can you help people see how that offer meets their needs and helps them grow?
What’s interesting about this model is that the intersections are great opportunities for conversations and for growth. For example: Individual Offer and Organizational Needs. That intersection is great for having conversations about performance. What can this individual offer that meets the organization’s needs today? Also, if we apply a future lens, how does that individual’s offer help meet the future needs of the organization and/or how is that individual going to need to grow and develop to meet the organization’s future needs.
Another intersection is Individual Needs and Organizational Offer. Does the organization’s offer meet the individual’s needs? And if this individual wants to grow, is the organization able to support their growth and development so they can increase their offer over time? There are so many opportunities to have really meaningful conversations.
Conversation Topics to Grow People
There are 3 critical conversations that help grow people: Performance, Development and Career.
- Performance Conversations: How do you strengthen job performance today? Is there alignment between the expectations of the job, goals, objectives, priorities and current performance? How do you fix the performance issues now? Are you providing direction, resources? These conversations are really the day-to-day interactions about what the individual can do and what the needs of the role are today.
- Development Conversations: This is thinking about future In a performance review, you might be thinking: What will they need for next year, what will they need to grow, what are their strengths and weaknesses in relation to that and how can they grow over time to rise to the occasion?
- Career Conversations: These are long term conversations around career pathways, different options and what their potential is. How are you supporting your employees to achieve their long-term career ambitions and aspirations? How are you helping folks define a pathway, understand where they want to be in the future, where they are today and what are the steps in between? How can you pair them with opportunities that enable them to move forward along that path?
Growth Conversations: Ignite Inspiration
Feedback is really important, but specifically feedback with a developmental view. You might be discussing how one can grow or do things better, and that could fall into either the Development or Career Conversations category. Also, as a note, those conversations might get joined. Here’s what a developmental feedback conversation can look like.
See the Reality: Point out whatever behaviors connect the cause and the feedback. It’s the good ol’ fashioned feedback model of what actually happened, what were the behaviors and what’s the impact of those. This way people know what you’re basing your developmental or career feedback on.
Orient to the Future: Say what you would love to see. Share what the potential could be for them. This helps to bring the person back up again.
Act Together: Once you agree on the orientation for the future/what the possibilities might be, then together you can brainstorm actions around that. How can it grow? Ask how you can support them and what roadblocks they worry about.
Rise Up: Say something inspiring and affirming such as: “I can see you’re going to really be able to master this. You get it and you’re going to excel.” Something affirming will help the person really be able to grow.
The SOAR feedback conversation is a bigger conversation. It’s not simple and quick. It’s not about fixing something. It’s about growing and developing the capability and career of the other person. And this kind of model helps people go from where they are today to where you’d like to see them go. It’s also pretty easy to remember.
Refer to the accompanying session materials to see how you can apply SOAR in a performance conversation. The handout provides good questions or points you might make and how it sounds/flows.
Conversations Build Futures
There are two types of feedback involved in these conversations: positive and developmental. Positive has a very important place. You don’t want to only give critical feedback. In fact, you need 6x as many positive as developmental. This is for 2 reasons: 1) You want to build up a bank of goodwill, so people know you value them, respect them, and think they’re making a positive contribution. 2) You don’t want to give people so much critical feedback that they don’t know what they’re doing well and then they stop doing those things. Make sure people are aware of what they do well so they can continue to do that. Then, make sure you’re allowing them to have that future by giving the critical feedback when it’s needed.
A Little About GrowWise
Need extra support with the growth and development of your people? GrowWise, our online, scalable, development tool, is a great opportunity for leaders and people to be able to work together through self-discovery to scale development planning, identify their development focus, create their development plan and get growing in that area. It’s one thing to build career paths, but it’s another help people walk through them. To be able to make those jumps is huge, and the only way that happens is through development. Conversations are important but people need tools in order to help take more personal responsibility to drive their own careers forward.
This program is filled with assessments, learning and exercises to get people thinking about their development. It’s a design-your-own adventure so that you, as an employee, can also go into conversations with your manager with a much better basis in order to drive the outcomes that you really want for yourself and the organization. It’s a big win on both sides.
Visit our website to watch the 3-min intro video. Reach out to schedule a demo and chat more about how we can help bring managers and employees together to join in the development journey.