CHAPTER 8

Understand Your Employee’s Wants and Needs

Employee development is a process for managing a person’s professional growth. Learning, building new skills, and working to one’s full potential is both rewarding for the individual and helpful to the organization as a whole. For your direct reports, it means getting the opportunity to focus on their upward mobility. For you, it offers a chance to boost employees’ productivity, motivation, and engagement while also retaining and growing your top talent.

Development is invaluable for your employees. Frederick Herzberg, in his classic HBR article “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” argues that growth is a powerful intrinsic motivator and can increase job satisfaction. Job seekers at all levels, from recent grads to executives, are more concerned with learning and development opportunities than with any other aspect of a prospective position. And in a study of Millennials in the workplace, professional services firm PwC found that training and development were the two most-valued benefits for these workers—even more than money, which ranked third.¹

Companies whose employees are inspired and equipped to fulfill their greatest potential yield the best business results overall. And if high-performing individuals feel that they are regularly being given chances to grow, they will be more likely to stay with the organization, even during tough times. Likewise, having strong career development opportunities in place helps your organization prepare for the future; by giving them the training and skills they need, your employees will be ready to move into key roles when the opportunities arise.

Employee development, like motivating and coaching employees, should be an ongoing part of your performance management process. Tailor development efforts—which can include training, temporary “stretch” assignments, mentoring, and coaching, among other approaches—to the individual, and work with them to determine which ones are the right fit for their skills and aims.

Your Role in Employee Development

While development was once largely considered the domain of HR, it’s actually every manager’s responsibility to attend to their people’s growth on an ongoing basis. Managers who take employee development seriously are more likely to lead a team with good morale and high standards, maintain a spirit of continuous improvement, and achieve better results.

Yet many managers are hesitant to develop their employees. Some argue that they don’t have the time, especially if there are no challenging or interesting opportunities currently available for a direct report. Others find the conversations difficult if their employee isn’t ready for promotion or if the manager doesn’t have a clear plan of action in mind.

But neglecting development has consequences. Your employees may feel unsupported, and their morale and motivation may decline. Even your strongest performers can begin to feel stuck in their careers, and that increases the risk of them leaving the organization (see the sidebar “Preventing Career Plateaus”). Worse are the disillusioned, weaker performers who don’t quit, leaving you with a destructive morale problem that can infect the culture.

On the other hand, people who are challenged and engaged describe their development process as exhilarating. When people are energized by learning, it’s easy for them to stay engaged and perform at their peak. Satisfaction levels rise alongside challenge.

To be sure, investing in your direct reports’ development takes time and thoughtful effort devoted to discussing and thinking about each of your employees and their futures. To best help your people develop, you’ll need curiosity about each individual and patience for the learning process. But your employee will have to do the hard work of development—starting with taking ownership and embracing accountability for their own growth. You can’t just hand your direct report a development plan and expect them to commit and run with it. Each employee’s drive to grow needs to come from within. “Highly structured, one-size-fits-all learning programs don’t work anymore,” explains consultant and author Keith Ferrazzi. “Individuals must own, self-direct, and control their learning futures. Yet they can’t do it alone, nor do you want them to.”²

Start with the Employee

What do your direct reports want to learn? What are their career ambitions and interests, their passions and values? These aren’t questions you can answer on your own. You’re best off making ongoing career development a regular part of your conversations with your employees—but start with a comprehensive discussion about where they’re headed.

Identify employee aspirations

A development-focused conversation can build rapport, help you connect on a personal level, and show your commitment to helping your direct report grow while you gather useful information. Your frequent discussions about an employee’s performance and progress toward goals may naturally lead to conversations about their career aspirations—but if the topic doesn’t arise naturally, ask directly. Give your employee a heads-up that you’d like to talk about their career plans and future development so they can reflect beforehand.

Your goal in the discussion is to understand your employee’s aspirations as well as their current state of workplace know-how and daily performance. Explore their current developmental level and goals (for example, what they are ready for, how much more work they can handle, what the next step should be in their journey), their learning style and preferences, and their motivations and values. What makes your employee tick? What is it that they’re after? Recognition? A raise or promotion? Autonomy? Aim to identify what your direct report wants to achieve most both in the short term and in their long-term career.

To elicit information, ask open-ended questions rather than ones that require a simple yes or no response, and practice active listening (see the sidebar “Be an Active Listener” in chapter 5). Some sample questions you can use are:

• What do you want to be known for?
• What matters most to you?
• What do you see yourself doing a year from now that you’re not currently doing?
• What does success look like for you?
• Where and when do you feel you are at your personal best?
• What’s your favorite part of what you do?
• Where would you like to be in your career in three, five, or 10 years?

While you may have discussed some of these aspirations and interests in your goal-setting meeting—or even in your feedback and coaching sessions—ambitions can shift over time. When it comes to development, revisiting these topics ensures that you and your direct report will choose a productive path to meaningful growth.

By better understanding your employee’s personal and learning goals, you’ll both be in a stronger position to identify developmental opportunities.

Align ambitions with organizational needs

Match an individual’s interests, values, and skills to growth opportunities based on their level of performance and potential. You’ll want to find a development path that is meaningful to your employee to ensure their commitment, but work toward an overlap between what will bring them the most satisfaction and what will be best for the organization.

Erika Andersen, founding partner of the coaching, consulting, and training firm Proteus and author of Be Bad First, suggests focusing on three questions to help choose a direction for your employee:

• What will drive the economic engine? Identify capabilities that provide value to the organization. For example, someone in operations could reduce cycle and delivery times by learning how to better manage complex custom client projects, reduce expenses by learning more about sourcing materials, or boost productivity by setting and communicating clearer direction for their own direct reports. Jot down or make a mental note of all the options to choose from.
• What is the individual best at? Once you and your direct report have identified useful capacities that they might develop, consider whether they can excel at them by assessing their innate strengths. Are they good at performing other, similar tasks? Someone who is organized and sequential in how they approach work may easily grasp complex project management—and they could better share that thinking with their team by mastering some communication and management skills. But if they struggle with research, learning to excel at sourcing materials may be more difficult.
• What is the individual passionate about? After assessing where an employee’s strengths overlap with valuable areas for potential development, think back to your discussion about their aspirations. Identify how interested they are in those areas. Strengths are not just things that we’re good at but things that can energize us as well. Perhaps your employee perks up at the idea of managing complex projects, but the very prospect of leading a team sounds draining to them. Development efforts work best when they feel exciting, not burdensome, so capitalize on your employees’ interests by helping them choose a path that energizes them.

Rethink the Traditional Promotion Track

As you think about a direction for your employee, consider their career trajectory. A traditional path of advancement may not make sense given a direct report’s interests, skills, and ambitions.

A long-trusted concept in career development has been the career ladder: a logical series of stages that move a talented and promotable employee upward through progressively more challenging and responsible positions. But clear career ladders are less common in the rapidly changing, sometimes unpredictable world of contemporary work. Simple and straightforward career paths are harder to identify as hierarchical structures break down and organizations flatten. In some fields and companies, the traditional ladder model has shifted to what Deloitte vice chairman and managing principal Cathy Benko calls a “lattice.” In the case of a lattice, people shift roles, responsibilities, and even business areas over the course of their careers, sometimes more than once.

“In the industrial era the corporate ladder was the standard metaphor for talent development and career paths. Its one-size-fits-all, only-way-is-up rules were clear, and incentives uniformly supported them,” Benko notes in her coauthored HBR article “AT&T’s Talent Overhaul.” “The lattice, in contrast, represents career paths that change continually and adaptively through multidirectional, zigzag movements.”

In the ladder model, career paths were clearly delineated—an editorial assistant who is promoted to assistant editor, to associate editor, and finally to editor—and headed one way: upward. But the multidirectional lattice model allows for greater flexibility: an editorial assistant who discovers an interest in video production develops those visual and technical skills, and through apprenticeships and training opportunities shifts from a text-heavy role in their organization’s book-publishing division to a multimedia-focused position in its e-learning branch. With the lattice, employees can move laterally or diagonally; they can ascend or descend.

This may require a shift in thinking as you consider what your employee’s direction may be in the organization. Preparing a direct report and shaping their skills to fit a traditional role in management may be a mismatch if they’d prefer another position that taps into their strengths and interests.

Instead of putting each of your employees on the same track of automatic advancement (once they’ve learned the appropriate skills, of course), think about their career aspirations. What does your direct report most want to do or be? Whether they hunger to become a manager, want to expand an exciting aspect of the current role they generally enjoy, or yearn to learn a new skill that overlaps with another department, identify a direction that meets your employee’s personal needs as well as those of the organization, even in the long term.

Once you and your direct report have identified their wants and needs and pinpointed a specific direction or area they should develop, don’t jump right into action. There are a variety of ways that they can grow their skills. For example, you might sign them up for training programs, introduce new challenges in their daily work, or let them try a temporary new assignment. Carefully consider the options available to you and what may work best with your employee. We’ll explore potential development tactics in the next chapter.

NOTES

1. “Millennials Survey. Millennials at Work: Reshaping the Workplace,” PwC, http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/talent/future-of-work/millennials-survey.html.

2. Keith Ferrazzi, “7 Ways to Improve Employee Development Programs,” HBR.org, July 31, 2015 (product #H028T9).