7 Questions About Your Employees' Future

It is very important that every one of your employees have a career path with quarterly learning activities that are being completed on schedule.

1. Employees who understand their future in an organization take more responsibility to achieve results.
2. People who understand their future in your organization stay longer and are more productive.
3. Better educated employees achieve more.

Do you have people who are certified technically or in sales, and now have been promoted into management? Would you like them to be trained, coached, and CERTIFIED as a leader?  Contact us.  We are introducing a 3strands LEADER Certification program soon.   I will send you information on the program for feedback. 

Here are 7 questions every leader should ask about how you are developing people to be more productive, profitable, and personally fulfilled in the work they do as part of your company:

#1 Are your people completing training and being certified by a third party that you trust so they can do their jobs effectively?

Do you feel like you are running an adult daycare program instead of your real business? Certified learning of technical skills, sales ability, and soon from MANAGEtoWIN - systematic leadership, have a lot of benefits:

1. Vendor certification improves vendor relationships, your skills to sell and implement their solutions, and gain more vendor funding to increase business.
2. Certification is often meaningful to your employees.
3. Certification is often meaningful to your clients.

#2 Do you have a career ladder so employees understand how they can grow in your organization?

Understanding the specific knowledge, skills and experience for each position in your company is important to fully engage employees.  They need to see their options for their future. We have a great career ladder format that most of our Clients can update to apply in their organization in two hours or less.  This is a great investment of your time.

The alternative is employees have different knowledge, skills, and experience in job roles yet are paid the same, performance expectations are often the same... and everyone is frustrated. 

#3 Does each employee have a 1-3 year career path?

Each employee should have clear, measurable professional development goals for the current year in their employee strategic plan.  Follow-up to make certain they complete the current year's objectives on schedule.

They should also define 1-2 years of additional learning they would like to complete.  Typically this is one learning experience a quarter.  We recommend you review this quarterly with them so it can be updated based on changes in your business, technology, or for other reasons. 

#4  Do your people have a mentor who is NOT their boss?

Mentoring is a great engagement tool, and it benefits both the mentor and mentee.  Too much to cover here, but I encourage you to consider piloting a mentor program sometime in the future.

Mentoring increases skills, keeps employees fully engaged, provides an outlet for discussion of sensitive questions, and encourages everyone to grow.

#5 Are your employees being regularly coached by their manager and/or an outside coach?

Managers should be effective coaches who help each team member achieve meaningful goals and a career path in their employee strategic plan. At times an outside coach can help individual employees or groups grow to a new level of knowledge, skill, and experience.  This is for a season, not a lifetime.  If you engage an outside coach, I encourage you to define the key objectives of the engagement in the beginning and stay on track to achieve them in a reasonable amount of time.  Then disengage. 

Yes, there are people who believe coaching is ongoing.  Maybe, but that is not our approach and so I cannot recommend it.  We believe the ongoing coach is a contractor. 

#6 Are you holding employees accountable to completing the learning activities in their current year's goals on schedule with excellence?

If not, then your inconsistency is encouraging employees to perform at a lower level and/or leave your company.   

3strands LEADERs follow-up systematically - with Systematic Power, the first strand of our "rope" that helps us climb the cliffs of our goals.  If this is not clear to you, or you struggle in this area, then email me for a conversation.  I am happy to help you consider a new direction. 

#7 Do we recognize and/or celebrate when a member of our team becomes better through our investment in their professional development?

Achievement should be appropriately recognized in ways each employee prefers.  Learning is an important achievement.  Do not let it be accomplished in the dark, unrecognized, unappreciated, and taken for granted.

Learning takes work.  Say "Thank you" or "Congratulations" in appropriate ways when employees help you build a stronger business through expanding their knowledge, improving their skills, and gaining more experience as part of their journey to become top performers who are doing work that is personally fulfilling to them. 

If you do these 7 things well as a manager, then you are competitively superior as a leader in the area of professional development.

Don't wait.  Take Sanctuary time this weekend to answer these 7 questions and act upon your answers.  You will be glad you did.