Great career conversations for all?

Posted by Anne Hamill

It’s a time-honoured convention that at appraisal, everyone has a career conversation with their manager. Yet often these end up being put off, or they are cursory and never followed up, or worse, the manager listens to a team member enthusiastically talking about a promotion that the manager knows the person doesn’t have a hope of getting – but say nothing to address the mistaken belief or help them develop a realistic plan.

If you’re serious about ensuring everyone in your organisation has a great career conversation, how do you go about it?

The need to provide good career conversations was a challenge that was posed to us a few years ago. The initial enquiry was based on skilling up the HR team to feel confident in holding career conversations. In talking to them we uncovered feelings of a lack of expertise, a feeling that they had to do something for an individual – which led to the HR person leaving the room after a career conversation with a list of jobs to do, to drive someone else’s career!

In talking to managers about holding career conversations, another problem arose. Managers are engineers, customer service managers, finance or IT specialists. They don’t have expertise in career topics. But most importantly, they only have to do 5 or 6 a year – and then it’s a year before the next round.

This means that you can’t hope to train line managers in sophisticated skills in tackling tough conversations and facilitating wide-ranging career conversations – because a busy year later, they will have lost the knowledge and skill they gained. Skills training only works if you do a task regularly enough to keep building and refining your skill.

The solution, it turns out, is a simple toolkit that requires only a half-day of familiarisation training. A toolkit can be picked up and put down, whenever need arises. Getting the toolkit right needed a lot of thought, however. We took Apple for our inspirations – building tools that had to be simple for the user, but work perfectly every time .

What was needed to give a great career conversation to everyone, through their managers?

1. A simple pre-meeting questionnaire. This ensures that the team member prepares for the meeting, and the manager can reflect on the kind of help they need.
   
   
2. A simple diagnostic. Managers often get lost because they don’t spot early on what kind of conversation a person needs – so they give their team member the kind of conversation the manager would like to have! Some team members need a conversation about how to develop their skills and build the track record that will qualify them for the role they have their eye on. Some don’t want to progress, but are interested in developing in role and getting a great reputation. Some don’t have a clue where they are going and need to explore their strengths and the kinds of role that they might target. So the first component was to define 6 career conversations that people often want to have, and help managers discuss with their team member which 1 or 2 of the 6 career conversations will be most useful to them.
   
   
3. A set of questions for each conversation. Here we put the team member in charge, reading out the questions and using the manager as a resourve, for feedback, ideas and insights. Difficult questions are raised easily in this way, and the manager can give honest views, as a collaborator not a judge.
   
   
4. A set of 72 career tactics cards – 12 for each conversation. These are bite-size suggestions about what the team member can do, to progress their career. Base on our research into how over 2000 successful people drive their careers, these are daily and weekly that have a proven track record of success.
   
   
5. A self-directed career plan. This requires the team member to take action and write a plan. It’s made completely clear that it is their career plan, and they’re responsible for writing the plan, taking action, and the career consequences of NOT taking action. The manager is a resource, but not a nanny.

The results of our work on Career Conversations have been spectacular. In the words of one manager –“ I had to come and thank you! I went on the familiarisation training 6 months ago, and after that I hadn’t done a career conversation until last week, so I was a bit nervous. I opened the box, read the first page, and though I remember this, it’s not difficult. It was a really simple process, and I had a great conversation. I don’t have any worry about holding career conversations now, whenever people want them!”

The Takeaway
You can’t expect people to become skilled at tasks they do rarely – whether that is holding a career conversation or making a potential rating. You need systems and processes that are brilliantly simple and intuitive – so that it is easy for line managers to use the best talent management thinking.