Are You Having The Right Development Conversations With Your Staff?

by Liz Seyi Digital marketing manager

The task of conducting regular and ongoing discussions with your employees on their career development can be an understandably intimidating one. However, the importance of this process cannot be understated.

After all, if your idea of employee leadership only covers your staff members’ day-to-day duties in their roles, there’s a strong chance that many of your best people will leave the company sooner than they would have otherwise done.

That’s why it’s crucial to have the frequent and meaningful dialogue with your employees about their development – focused on actionable plans and measurable goals – that will enable them to feel they are genuinely growing in their present roles.

This, in turn, will help to reduce those agitated feelings among your staff about not having been promoted for a while, and which could even have them gazing longingly towards the exit door.

There are so many ways to get career conversations wrong

It’s human nature to wish to grow and develop, so if you fail to have the right development conversations with your employees, it’s almost inevitable that the best of them will look to grow and make their next big career step without you.

So, the very first thing is to make sure you’re actually having such development conversations that will help your employees to look to their future dreams, rather than trying to incorporate them into performance reviews, which are inherently backward-looking. 

But it’s also important not to limit development conversations to the near future – such as whatever the given employee might require to gain a promotion or to make their next career step. Nor should you treat it as a mere box-ticking exercise, or just do it in an intermittent, half-hearted, stop-start way that doesn’t provide any real framework for career planning.

How can The Career Coach help you to sharpen up how you talk to your employees?

Even if you are perfectly aware of all of the above factors that explain the importance of development conversations with your employees, you may presently feel that you lack the skills and confidence to conduct effective ones. This is what our Development Planning For Managers workshop is designed to address.

This workshop is suitable for leaders at all levels, and will enable you to better help your employees to think about what they desire from their career, as well as their motivations, strengths and interests.

We’ll train you in the simple models that you can use to identify how your staff can best further their development, in addition to how to write meaningful development plans and empower your team to take ownership of and follow through on their plans.

There will also be opportunities throughout the workshop to get accustomed to using such coaching skills on each other, culminating in you even writing your own development plan for the year. This way, you can be sure of being confident enough to coach your team to create their own plans.

It doesn’t take much effort to get in touch

Are you interested in learning more about the steps you could take to boost not only your own professional development, but also that of your employees? If so, don’t hesitate to contact The Career Coach to talk through your requirements with us in more detail.  

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Created on Aug 2nd 2019 01:20. Viewed 257 times.

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