If you have employees who ultimately want a seat at the table, and especially if they’re top performers, you will want to start setting the table. Most employers want ambitious employees who aspire to help grow the company. What today’s managers may face, as mentioned in my previous HRTools.com Insight, are some individuals who expect to be promoted to vice president after a year on the job. How can an organization manage the career development aspirations of today’s diverse workforce?
Here’s a story of what can typically happen in this present business environment. I know of a company with about a hundred employees. This company’s middle managers realized they had a number of Millennials in the workforce (also known as Gen Y, those individuals born between 1981 and 1983). Many of these employees were very eager and aggressive about trying out new ideas and experimenting, etc.
So I suggested that they get together with these employees to discuss their ideas and take a deliberate approach with them. If these employees wanted to pursue or experiment with some ideas, they needed to figure out why they thought those ideas would work, and also learn from those experiences, and so on.
For those employees who wanted to be quickly promoted to vice president, for instance, I encouraged them to engage these employees in detailed conversations. They started out their conversations by saying, “It’s OK if you’re not there (at the VP level) yet.” They also needed to ask them thought-provoking questions such as:
- If you want to work toward the role of a vice president, why is that?
- What is exciting about that role? Why does it appeal to you?
- What are you hoping to accomplish?
- Does this role represent increased status and increased pay, or is it for some other reason?
- Are you bored with your current role, or is it just that you see your friends achieving that status at another company, so you believe you should be striving for that, too?
Also, as another point: It’s important that employers provide a safe and secure environment for its up and coming leaders to express themselves; one in which their feedback and comments will not be held against them. You want your employees to always feel that it’s safe to say back to you, “No, thank you.”
Or have you thought about how you would handle this scenario? You have employees who are being considered for an opportunity or a promotion; and an employee is selected and he or she accepts the promotion. You will want to do the responsible thing and let the other candidates know, as well, who received that promotion. They should be further told why they didn’t get the promotion, or what the deciding factors were, and what they may want to consider doing to get to that next career step in the future.
Ultimately, your objective for career management is to develop and maintain an environment in which people want to stick around and keep doing their specific tasks. For one reason, employee turnover is very costly. For another: Organizations are wise to recognize that a diverse and experienced workforce often provides the best pool from which to prepare its up and coming leaders.
Given our diverse workforce, organizations are wise to be versatile and tailor their career management development relationships by keeping an open, understanding and flexible mindset.