Career conversations —simplified
I’m writing this article with an intention to help new people managers with a hopefully simple approach on how to handle career conversations. Career conversations are crucial conversations that managers should have with their employees and it can be often difficult when you are new to people management (at least I found it hard early days in my people management journey).
In the tech industry, career conversations are often steered on how to fast track someone’s promotion to the next level, than focusing on helping the employee build skills for long term success. It is important for managers and employees to recognize that career conversations should have more emphasis on shaping long term career success and promotions are just recognition along the way.
The first step of having effective career conversations is to know your employee’s career aspirations. Have a medium to long term outlook and not what they want to achieve in the next year. The senior employees in your team may already have a good idea on their aspirations, but the junior ones may need some guidance to define their career goals. Please make sure career development decisions are owned by your employee and not by you as their manager.
The next step is to help your employees progressively develop the skills and competencies that will help them equipped to achieve career their aspirations. Managers are primarily responsible to identify the opportunities and employees are responsible for developing the competencies and skills (with coaching and guidance from managers).
For example, a software engineer who aspires to pursue their career path as an architect/principal engineer role, they need to build their skills around complex system designs/architecture and should seen as a strong technical influencer in their organization. The opportunity to exercise their design skills may or may not exist in their current project. It is the responsibility of the manager to identify the right system design opportunity with a meaningful scale, but the onus on actually developing the design skills and any cross-team influencing competency is with the employee. Managers owe timely feedback, coaching and recognition along the way.
In this article, I would like to introduce a simple framework that will help the managers to have effective career conversations. I term this framework the i3 career coaching model. This model is derived from an intersection of opportunities and skills/competencies.
Once you have identified the skills and competencies required for your employee to achieve their career goals, work with them and map them into 3 buckets. In my model, the bucket is the opportunity provided to the employee and what goes inside is the skills/competencies that helps them to achieve their career goals.
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Invigorate Bucket — Opportunities and Strengths exists
This bucket is definitely the sweet spot in any career conversation, where the manager had met the expectation of the employee by presenting the required opportunities and employee is already demonstrating strengths in the required skills/competencies. Take advantage of this as a manager in career discussions by providing positive reinforcement to your employees. Positive reinforcement is a powerful tool that can help your employees to stay motivated. It can also act as a key retention tool for your top talent.
Investment Bucket — Opportunity exists, Strengths to be developed
This is a crucial bucket and I term this as an investment bucket. You have done your initial part as a manager by identifying the opportunity, but if your employees is still developing their skills. Your job as a manager is not yet done and you should spend time giving quality feedback and coaching. When I say quality feedback, you should highlight their strengths, acknowledge progress and be prescriptive about areas where they can do better. If they need a mentor, help them identify the right mentor, which is also an opportunity that you provide them to become successful
Inverted Bucket — Opportunity does not exists.
This is the bucket, where the manager is fully responsible for identifying the missing opportunity. I call this inverted bucket, as without flipping the bucket, it is hard for you to coach or support your employee towards your growth. Identify opportunities within your scope of influence, but also be aware it is not always possible. In the earlier example, if your employee don’t have a complex system design opportunity that exist in your immediate team, never be hesitant to find an opportunity in your peer teams. If that requires you to support them with a team change don’t be afraid to do so. Being possessive of talent is not going to help you or your employee long term.
You’d be often surprised that the inverted bucket could become the innovation bucket for the organization, when you tap into the untapped strengths of your employee.
To summarize, to have effective career conversations know your employee’s career aspirations, identify opportunities for them to accelerate their growth, map them into the 3 buckets and coach them to succeed in achieving their aspirations.
I hope this model is useful, but as always I welcome your feedback and curiously looking to learn from other strategies that worked.
