Employee Development – You Set the Stage
Your team members are looking to you, as an individual leader or the business owner, to set the stage for whether or not employee development is part of your company culture. Employees want to continue their development, and they are looking for indicators to how much the organization will invest in them, or if they need to find learning elsewhere. Most people will find learning on their own, but it will be based on their strategies for growth and will most likely not consider your business goals in that strategy.
How to Set the Stage for Development:
Start with your business goals. Determine what skills are critical for your employees and leaders to master to drive this forward.
Ask your team members. Find out what their collective and individual career goals are and where they feel they are masters and novices. Depending on the size of your company, this could be accomplished through conversations or a simple survey.
Assess your findings and prioritize. With the insights from your business goal review and team member feedback in hand, identify which 2-3 initiatives would make the most impact and are most foundational – start here.
Ask for help. If you try to accomplish these prioritized goals alone, you will struggle to achieve success. If you are a business owner, solicit an owner and a small sub-team of your executive team to own, advise, measure, and lead this work. If you are an individual leader, set measurements and a timeline, then ask a few high-potential employees to join with you to make it happen and suggest mitigation strategies when needed.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. If this is a new approach for your company or team, people need to hear you talking about it consistently to believe that it is really going to happen. Build a simple communication strategy that you can revisit again and again. Then, find people who are embracing this and ask them to tell their story once a quarter either live or in a newsletter. This adds practicality to the goal and helps you keep communicating.
You are in the spotlight as a leader, and your team members, at least most of them, are ready to join in the moment you begin pursuing a culture of continuous development. Start small, but consistently make this a priority. Then, you will not be alone on stage anymore – new talent will begin to join you.