Great Leaders Grow Great Leaders
Your company has an open position, so you interview a variety of candidates and hire the best one for the job. Hopefully, you provide a competitive salary and all the benefits they need for sustainable health and success. The new employee starts their role and fits well with the team. All is going smoothly. So, your job is done. Right?
Wrong! As a leader, your job goes far beyond the here and now. You need foresight — about the needs of your company as well as your team members. Most workers are concerned with career growth as well as salary and benefits.
According to professional development company Lorman, over half of Americans consider growth opportunities when looking for a new role. Meanwhile, a whopping 70% stated they would consider leaving their current position for a company with more career development opportunities. Another survey cited lack of growth as one of the main drivers of the Great Resignation.
Clearly, personal and professional development are highly valued. This is good news: You want team members who are ambitious and eager to learn, after all. But it takes two to tango, and career development requires participation from team members and their leaders.
The Benefits of Development
When professional development is a cornerstone of your company culture, you’re going to attract the type of talent that every leader dreams of. In my experience, the people who prioritize growth aren’t just looking for money and power. Instead, they’re the always-curious types — the ones driven to make progress, achieve great things, and expand their competencies. It’s about the journey as much (if not more) than the reward.
Employees that care about development are usually:
- Independent, proactive problem-solvers
- Innovative thinkers
- Full of energy and ambition
- Ready to take on more responsibilities
- Dedicated to healthy interpersonal relationships
- Willing to lead others around them
On the other hand, employees who are disinterested in development tend to be stuck in their ways, satisfied with the status quo, and unlikely to take initiative.
Strategies for Supporting Growth
You can’t have it both ways. Passionate, driven people won’t stay at a company that doesn’t prioritize their future. If you want the kind of team members outlined above, you have to do your part in their career development. Here’s how.
Map Their Development
At the beginning of an employee’s tenure, and every year thereafter, host a special 1:1 meeting to map out a growth plan for the year. Discuss their goals, including the hard and soft skills they’d like to learn or improve upon. Soft skills include characteristics like clear communication, empathy, and collaboration, while hard skills are tangible talents directly related to a position, like coding or SEO. Both types of skills are important for career mobility.
Set milestones throughout the year that your employee can strive for, and use your regular 1:1s to follow up with the growth map you created together. Don’t feel too much pressure to iron down a perfect, rigid plan in a single meeting. Some employees, especially new graduates, are eager to grow but don’t know where their strengths and passions lie. You can develop the plan slowly, and leave room for flexibility as they learn.
Get Specific and Personal
Career growth looks different for everyone, so there’s no “one size fits all” development plan. Get to know your team members as individuals so you can cater their development targets to their interests, talents, and ambitions.
Getting to know them also helps you, as a leader, recognize strengths they may not realize they have. I’ve had team members who were natural-born people leaders, but they didn’t see it in themselves until I pointed it out. Recognizing their strengths opened up new possibilities they wouldn’t have otherwise considered. Additionally, you’ll also be able to recognize their weaknesses, which shows you where to focus your coaching (especially if their weaknesses stand in the way of the direction they’d like to go).
Offer Learning Incentives
Even the most driven employees can get overwhelmed with day-to-day responsibilities. With deadlines and deliverables taking the front seat, it’s easy to put your future ambitions on the back burner. As Stephen R. Covey once said,
“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.”
Today’s responsibilities are urgent, but the future is important. Help your employees balance both by incentivizing their growth.
Educational stipends are a great benefit that encourages career growth. Many companies reimburse their employees for training related to their job, including technical courses, conferences, and even master’s degrees. Employees are much more likely to further their education when they aren’t stressed about the expense.
Facilitate Mentors and Cross-Department Training
Formal courses are invaluable, but so is on-the-job, person-to-person training. Your team members can learn a lot by working alongside others within your organization. Encourage growth and skillshare by setting up mentorship programs and cross-department training. You can also create informal spaces for Q&As, like a Slack channel or weekly Zoom.
Not only does cross-department development give your employee more perspective on where they can go in the future, but it also boosts your organization as a whole. When departments work in strict silos, it’s harder to see the full picture. On the other hand, someone in marketing can do their job more effectively by understanding their customer service and dev colleagues (for example).
Coach Potential
Supporting development is the difference between management and leadership. That is, coaching their personal potential instead of focusing on specific tasks. Teach your team members to be independent and proactive by showing them how to work things out for themselves.
Ask the deeper questions and guide them in the right direction, by all means. But they won’t learn anything if you continually micromanage and dictate their actions. Sometimes, this means letting them fail. But failure is a valuable learning experience and can have a huge positive impact on their future competencies. Just be sure to reflect with them in failure instead of leaving them out to dry.
The Future is Bright
Supporting professional development means a brighter future — for your team and your company as a whole. The more invested you are in your employees, the more invested they’ll be in your organization. As they grow and develop their skills, they’re far more likely to level up in your organization, where they know their growth is supported and championed.
As a leader, your ultimate goal is to create more leaders. Do so by supporting your employees’ personal development and coaching them along the way.