Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want

Beverly Kaye, Julie Winkle-Giulioni

Listen on Audible

This book explores how managers can play a better role in an employee’s personal development. It provides tips and tools to make it easier for managers to help employees.

Key ideas:

• You (managers) don’t have to do it all, employees own their careers
• Career development should be a priority and is within the control of managers
• Career development is a powerful tool for driving business results, however is frequently forgotten
• Career development is all about conversation - “The action is in the interaction”
• Annual reviews are like new year resolutions, often forgotten and ineffective
• Restructure to have frequent interactions, organically, when and where opportunities arise
• Frequent short targeted conversations have more value than infrequent long ones
• You don’t need to have all the answers, but you must have all the questions
• Curiosity is a powerful leadership competency
• Closure is overrated, incomplete questions encourage further contemplation

Three types of conversations: Hindsight, Foresight, Insight

• Manager’s job is to facilitate questions to guide to greater awareness and action
• HINDSIGHT - self reflection leads to self awareness
• Strengths are hard to self identify, managers must help employees identify strengths
• Strengths are context sensitive, strengths in some situations are not strengths in others
• Concept - Never ending interview, continually revisit with common interview questions
• Apply curiosity of the first interview to the ongoing conversations throughout careers
• Feedback - hindsight from manager’s POV and provides a complete and balanced picture
• A.B.C. framework - Abilities, Blindspots, Conditions
• Be an honest advocate
• Focus on “what” and “so what”
• The career ladder is now the career climbing wall, people now move up, down and all round to obtain roles that suit their needs
• Career advancement is moving to personal definitions of success
• Do you know how your employees define success?
• FORESIGHT - needed for career growth, provides forward view, understanding of trends, context and changes
• Foresight allows focus for satisfying outcomes, provides a target or goal towards which to aim for
• Help employees to foster foresight habits
• Harness the wisdom of the crowd to look out for future, industry and environment
• Use questions to extract foresight information
• Employ a foresight forum to gather information
• INSIGHT is the intersection of hindsight and foresight
• Help employee to grow towards goals whilst “in place” (in the same role), by obtaining experiences, not titles
• Focus on knowledge and learning to do

THE HOW - from Insight to implementation

• The 3 Es
• Expand Education open to learning avenues
• Enable Exposure to others to mentor and coach
• Explore Experience unlock opportunities to learn on the spot
• Make a development D.E.A.L. with your employees
• Documented - make it official
• Employee owned - responsibility
• Align with employee goals
• Linked to organisation needs
• Old vs New - Grow with the Flow
• Real time, in-the-moment authentic interactions
• Iterative, incremental sharing of information
• Curiosity in action

Very useful for time-poor managers not clear on how to help employees with their personal development.

Image Credit: Audible