I’m a big fan of ‘Clarity First’.
After rounds of seeing my best efforts go down the drain because of misunderstood expectations or vision, enough is enough. No one likes looking at the hard work placed into a journey only to find that they have been pursuing the wrong destination. This gets closer to the heart when you are talking not about a project that lasts a year or two, but one that takes at least half your life time - a career you pursue.
As I look back to the various attempts (both myself and others) of leaders to provide clear career roadmaps to their people, here’s what I find that would be key for us leaders to note and practise.
#1 - Ensure it’s a Purposeful Contract
To set a clear career path, one needs to know what one wants in life. This is often a challenge to me as a leader - accessing the voice of my people and helping them access it themselves.
In a world where external noises can sometimes affect our ability to hear ourselves, how can we help people get in touch with what gives them meaning? I’ve been a blessed recipient of good practices from leaders and mentors who have strong convictions about meaningful work. As much as these approaches have helped me find my conviction and built my courage to live it, I hope it would for you and your people too:
- Create space for them to live out their voice. The problem we face in getting in touch with our voice is that we don’t hear it enough - it gets lost in the midst of the noise we encounter in our daily lives. Create an environment where people can express themselves. Encourage them to voice their opinions so that they can experience and learn from it. Through this, they also learn who they are.
- Get your people to practise making their personal vision explicit! Once a year, call for a time-out and get your people to reflect upon and write down their personal vision. There are many templates and guides out there that could facilitate this. More importantly, it’s this regular exercise of thinking about and articulating one’s thoughts that will help them get clarity on the things close to their heart.
#2 - Align with the Professional Contract
Getting sight of what would be a purposeful contract is a great start. Yet, it needs to be realised into operational steps that your people can take in order to move from where they are today to where they want to be. Here’s what I found are useful practices leaders can consider:
- As you look at the overall strategy that you are trying to realise through your team, consider how it can be translated into projects or tasks that align with what they find purposeful. Get them to be part of the discussion to come up with projects and initiatives that can realise or move them closer to both their purpose and the organisation’s goals. Be deliberate to build these into their roadmap so that your people can see a clear practical guide they can pursue.
- In your daily conversations, create a line of sight - speak purpose into their work. With every task (mundane or challenging) that’s given to them, find ways for them to live out their purpose or move them towards it.
#3 - Fire them up with a strong Psychological Contract
One of my favourite neuroscience research pieces points out that the utilisation of one’s talent not only energises you and releases happy hormones into your blood system, but gets your brain ready to learn as well.
Imagine your team turning up for work energised, enthusiastic and excited to learn and innovate. This would be my deepest desire come true and it would turn a career aspiration into reality. However, we often forget that the journey to achieving this can take a while and we need to plan ‘energisers’ into career roadmaps to refuel our people to achieve their goals.
As you build these career roadmaps with your people, get them to reflect if they got to do things they liked at work instead of doing things that they had to do? Are we, as leaders, creating opportunities for our people to help them leverage their talents and get energised? Here’s what I did that worked:
- Observe and watch. Aside from talking to them to get to know them, sometimes it is what’s unspoken that speaks the loudest. When is it that makes their eyes light up and the fire within them visible?
- Make work energising! I like strategy games so I would map out what I found about each team member’s preference, and this became my ‘resource map’. Each time I have a challenging task to assign at work, I revisit this map to see how I can best assign this challenge to generate positive energy and help a member of my team learn something to achieve their goals.
Ultimately, providing clear career road maps is about having an authentic and genuine interest in your employees. Being interested in actually developing them will show in your actions, and employees will thank you for it. Your people will talk about such altruistic development within their communities and circles, building a reputation for your company for being a true developer of talent. This will engage and retain your talent, and eventually help your organisation attract the best talent who want to be developed - making it a win-win solution for both sides.