TRUTH 2 If you’re a manager, you’re a career coach

No one is in a dead-end job, not even those people who think they are. There is always a way out—even a way up—from any job. Help your employees find that line of sight between what they’re doing now and what they’d like to be doing in their future. You are helping develop the future of your entire business.

Managers who help their employees control the quality of their career prospects control the quality of their own prospects, including the high costs of turnover and replacement. Sooner or later, your employees will start looking for their next opportunity. You should have already helped them spot it, plan for it, and train for it—within your company, not down the street. Career pathing—the practice of helping employees identify where they want their careers to go and what steps they need to take to get there—is a people service any company can provide its employees, no matter who they are or where they sit on the org chart.

Before you can advise others, understand how your company maps and tracks the success steps of all its employees throughout the organization. Talk to as many long-tenured, high-performing employees as you can to discover what behaviors, work habits, and transferable skills helped them move the most freely throughout the entire organization. What characteristics, knowledge, and initiatives does your company reward beyond the strictly defined skill set of any one particular job?

Then research more job-specific promotion opportunities that might be available to your people. This project actually has two channels—researching the jobs most commonly filled by people in your department looking for any next step and those jobs most commonly desired by your people looking for the next step of their dreams. Discover what skills, education, experiences, and attributes each of these jobs requires. And if a collection of these descriptions doesn’t already exist, put one together! A binder with sheet protectors—one page per job descriptionssu—could do the job just as effectively as an elaborate internal Web site. Just make sure it’s always available to your employees to browse through in relative privacy. And make sure you’re available to talk to your employees about what might be their next developmental goal.

Make career counseling one of your most important roles in your department. And assume nothing when you speak to your people about their individual ambitions. Let them tell you what their ideal next step is. It might not be a promotion for the sake of more money. It might not be a transfer out of your department. It might not even be a job that already exists, but one that you can custom-design for your employee at no additional expense.

In a Tucson call center, a young war veteran was happy in his job as a customer service rep, but he wanted to use the leadership skills he had learned in the Army to help his coworkers develop their own prospects. No specific job title already existed that would officially tap into that employee’s drive, so his supervisor helped him design his own job description, folding coaching into his role. In addition to a set number of hours he was still expected to take care of customers, he now had permission to use another portion of his workweek to counsel his coworkers on their own performance and prospects.

And now, instead of being frustrated that his boss didn’t see and make good use of his energy (and consequently leaving), this one customer service rep remained on the job. He is still enthused about his work, exciting others about their duties and speaking to community groups of small businesses (his customer base) and high school and college students about what a great company his employer is.

Not only did his supervisor creatively work with him to find a way to stay and grow, he’s now helping other prospective employees conclude that they can find their future with this company as well.