Over our many years working with leaders and organisations, it seems there are still not enough great career conversations taking place.
What’s the case for having career conversations?
Well, we know from research that when great career conversations take place, colleagues are around 73% more likely to be more engaged, stay with the organisation, share their ideas and recommend their employer to a friend.
When employee engagement is higher, organisations see customer metrics, productivity and profitability rise, and absenteeism and staff turnover reduce. (Gallup 2016)
When career conversations don’t happen, up to 63% of colleagues say they will look elsewhere.
This builds a compelling case for the impact that career conversations have. Great conversations are critical in retaining, motivating and maximising the potential and talent in your organisation and of course, in driving overall performance.
Career conversations in practice
We’ve been working recently with a CFO in a FTSE 100, who really placed value on the power of career conversations. Here are some the actions he took. He held quarterly talent review meetings with his management team, asking them to discuss their pipeline of talent. However, critically he didn’t keep these meetings secret, he encouraged all his managers to have open conversations with their team members to understand their career aspirations and talk about the future. He had regular career conversations, often mentored younger talented people and encouraged his people leaders to do the same. As a result, performance levels were high, he had the best talent pipeline in the organisation and continually attracted great talent from outside the organisation.
With another client, the MD has shown his commitment to career development by putting talented people in at the deep end and moving them regularly. He has recognised that this is really important for the younger (Millennial) members of his teams. They value change, challenge and development in their roles and he is talking to them about how they can get this and at the same time support the needs of the business. He’s striking a critical balance between the needs of the business and the individual.
However, we’ve also observed an organisation where talent and career conversations are not shared outside of the board room. When asking “what does that person think about the next role you have them lined up for in your succession plan” and hearing, “oh no, we haven’t spoken to them about this”, you know there’s trouble ahead. Senior leaders forbade conversations about career moves and prevented individuals from applying for roles until it suited the organisation and would cause least disruption. They worried that conversations might encourage people to leave. Ironic that this behaviour led to many of the talented individuals leaving, for organisations where they felt their career aspirations could be understood and met.
Case studies like the ones mentioned above have led us to identify the three areas that contribute to the success or failure of career conversations. At the conversational level, managers and colleagues both need to have the skills and confidence to engage in a career conversation. However, that is not enough; the organisation must have the right culture, processes & systems to encourage open and transparent conversations and that is the responsibility of leadership.
Common barriers to career conversations are when;
We have recently shared our experiences with a client organisation and seen that just by raising awareness and naming the barriers, people choose to do things differently. After one lunchtime session, people were saying, “now the myths are blown away, I’m going to take ownership and ask for the conversation”.
We work with organisations, diagnosing and understanding their specific issues in the three areas above. We then help create a bespoke plan and offer solutions to maximise the value that great career conversations can provide.
If you’d like to talk more about how we can help your organisation really shift the needle on the quality of career conversations, we’d love to hear from you.
Contact us:
Call: +44 (0)7881 915657
Email: claire@downtoearth-development.co.uk
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