A self-driven career culture
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How do you create a culture where people actively drive their own careers?
In the 21st century it should surely be desirable that people are driving their own development and careers. Yet there is a common problem – that people are relying too much on their manager, and their managers would really rather hand over this issue to the experts – HR. It sometimes seems like in the ideal world (for most people), they would have regular career mentoring from experts, a clearly laid out career path, and be in a group whose progress is managed with special attention…
“I’m a high contributor, manage my career!”
How can we change this?
The problem with providing career help is the speed of change in the 21st century. Organisations are much more confusing than they were 25 years ago. New jobs are bubbling up all the time, and it’s a rare department that goes for a year without some element of restructuring. Global competition and the Internet mean that organisations have to respond nimbly to widespread competitor activity, political change – and financial crisis. It’s confusing for individuals, but it’s also essentially uncontrollable. It would be a fulltime job for an entire department just tracking the jobs that are emerging, and the changes to existing ones – and that’s before you started having 1-to-1s with every individual.
Dominic Cadbury said ‘There’s no such thing as a career path; it’s crazy paving, and you lay it one piece at a time.’ And our research into actual successful careers supports this. Only 10% of over 1600 successful people interviewed as part of our research, had ever had a career plan looking 2 moves ahead.
So how can you help people to surf the wave of change, and drive their own career?
Things to stop doing:
- Don’t expect managers to become career experts. They are IT managers, engineers, finance managers, operations managers. They do a very small number of career conversations a year, so any skills training is likely to get very rusty very fast. Expecting the average manager to learn subtle and skilled ways of approaching a myriad of career issues is unrealistic – they will forget these because they don’t use them on a regular basis.
- Stop holding career conversations at appraisal. Performance appraisal is the time when the manager is in the highest position of authority, giving feedback and direction. When a team member is in this headspace, they will also expect direction on their career.
- Stop career discussions ending with a list of actions for the manager. The most that the manager should do is perform introductions. Every small action like this must reinforce the point that the individual is in control.
- Don’t focus on how to get selected. The real career skill of successful people is how to find out about and actually attract career opportunities you’d love. Career advice on getting selected (CV, interview) can also be used to find jobs outside your organisation!
- Equip individuals with career facts. People don’t know how successful careers are managed. In our workshops we have started doing career quizzes to prove this. When asked to identify the main way that successful people find key jobs in their career, 96% fail to identify the biggest source of key jobs. This is a source that, in our research, accounts for 3 times more key jobs in successful careers than any other source. (Most people answering the quiz think the biggest source is via networking. But that only accounts for 11%.) Without correct information on what works and what doesn’t, people will never be able to drive their own careers.
- Help individuals to make it easy to find them. If someone can articulate their strengths and interests, it’s easier for people to help them. This is a basic career skill – and few people are naturally good at it.
- Make individuals accountable. This is particularly important for anyone on a talent programme or in a talent pool – who may expect the organisation to look after their progression, like an escalator. Accountability also applies to any career conversations. For example, we provide an instruction card that is given to an individual at the end of a career conversation, which clearly states the following: “Who owns and drives the career plan? The person who wants to progress their career – YOU! This means you are responsible for: making decisions on what action to take; taking action; and the career consequences of not taking action.” (They are also expected to write their own action plan, and set up meetings to report progress).
- Give managers tools that individuals can play with, while the manager watches and discusses.The best kinds of tools are practical – card sorts, question banks – and raise any difficult questions that will kick-start an honest conversation. This takes the role of authority away from the manager. Instead they become a resource, sitting with the individual as the individual explores, offering insights, an objective view, and feedback. The individual makes the choices, and records the results. Training managers to use tools will stick, where training to raise expertise will fail due to the long gap between career conversations.
- Provide regular prompts to get individuals thinking. Good quality data, experiments and observations fed to individuals on a regular basis are helpful. Beware of sending ‘obvious’ information. Comments from senior people in your organisation, or data from research or unusual insights are vital.
- Provide access to helpful people. Consider having career champions who are successful, widely networked, and really skilled in career facts and advice. Provide short bookable times for them to give suggestions and perform introductions.
- Emphasise self-nomination, and ‘earn the right’. For example, you could send a message to all company mobile phones with “Have you got more to contribute?” You could then allow anyone who responds, and also has good performance, to prove their commitment to career management by doing self-driven work to qualify for the career workshop or programme. Contrast this with manager nomination, and a 1-day assessment to pick out the fast track ‘hares’. The latter reinforces the idea “The organisation has spotted that I’m clever and success will come to me.” The former says “I drive my own success by putting up my hand to contribute more, and working hard on my own initiative to qualify.” (Read our article The Hare and the Tortoise for more on this topic.)
The job map in your organisation is constantly changing, and most people have no idea of the career facts that will help them find the right internal opportunities. If you want a self-driven career culture, start from these two facts. Driving your career in the 21st century without having career facts and skills is like having a racing engine without a steering wheel. Consider providing career workshops that are open access to all high performers, or as a reward for delivering great work. And consider training managers to work with tools that will help people create and drive their own career action. We hope that this article will have raised some questions and ideas that are helpful for you. Talk to us if you’d like to find out the latest approaches to helping individuals drive successful internal careers, or check out this link – Helping people drive their careers.