Career Conversations: How to Get From Good to Great

Career conversations, when implemented correctly and regularly, can benefit both you and your employee. You will be surprised to find there are some high performers who are perfectly happy in their current role and don’t have the desire to climb the corporate ladder. These individuals may have made this decision because of their personal situation or interest. Subject matter experts are a group of employees who often opt out of leadership positions. They like being experts and moving into leadership would take them away from their craft such as science, engineering, marketing, accounting etc.

You can determine if your high performer has the desire to take on a greater role in your company, by having a Career Conversation with them. These conversations need to be structured and consistent across the organization. Inconsistency in talent management and human resource processes can be especially problematic because it creates the perception of inequity amongst employees. I have found this inconsistency quite often with smaller companies because their human resource department is generally understaffed and focused on the tactical rather than the strategic.

“To understand a person’s growth trajectory, it’s important to have career conversations in which you get to know each of your direct reports better, learn what their aspirations are, and plan how to help them achieve those dreams.” – Kim Scott, author Radical Candor

Career conversations are often overlooked by leaders. I recommend these conversations occur at least once a year, while twice a year is ideal as personal situations may have changed to impact your employee’s professional goals. Every employee should receive a career conversation not just the high performers. When career conversations uncover an employee’s long-term goals, managers can help to align their current tasks and responsibilities to their future aspirations and in turn increase employee retention and engagement. In short, career conversations are a tool for employee engagement.

If you haven’t started the process, your initial conversation will be to understand the employee’s desire to take on added scope and responsibilities.  Get curious and learn about your employees’ values, gifts, interests and skills. Your goal is to understand the whole person not just the person’s performance. Create a list of questions to help the employee self-reflect on where they want to be in the future. There may be points at which they won’t have an immediate answer, or they may feel uncomfortable with the questions. After all, many employees have never had a deep career conversation with their manager. If this should occur, don’t try and rescue them! Get comfortable with the silence. If you feel the silence becoming awkward, just say “take your time”. This gives them permission to further self-reflect and not feel rushed.

Here are some sample questions for a Career Conversation I recommend:

• Looking back on your professional life, what event or person had the most impact on your success and why?
• What do you love doing most in your work?
• What challenges you at work?
• What would you like to learn more about?
• If you could design your career exactly how you’d like it, where would you be working, what kind of people would you be working with, and what value would you be providing to the company?
• If you were at the pinnacle of your career and fully engaged, what would you be doing?

After your initial career conversation, you will know whether your employee has a desire for taking on an expanded role and is engaged like a high potential.

More importantly with your newfound information, you can start putting a plan together that supports the career goals of your employee. Your plan may include some of these development methods:

Job Enrichment – Job enrichment is a process of adding dimensions to a job to make the job more motivating.

Stretch assignments – This type of development technique is often used with high potentials. The assignments are unique on-the-job projects structured to provide challenging experiences to an employee. They are selected to develop specific competencies identified as gaps in the development plan.

Mentoring – As a partnership for learning, mentoring is designed to share technical, industry, and professional knowledge, and can provide insight to a profession. It is a unique and personalized process to the development needs of the employee.

Coaching – Leadership and executive coaching address the professional aspirations of the employee and focuses on learning, staying balanced and guiding leaders to their full potential through goal setting, self-awareness and improving certain aspects of performance.

Remember career conversations will help you understand your employee’s goals, first. But more importantly the new knowledge will allow you to partner with your employee to help them attain their professional goals and grow to their full potential.