The Principles behind a Great Career Conversation

Career conversations are a crucial part of line management. Helping people to clarify what they want to do and where they want to go is one of the most important tasks you need to complete as a leader. This is not something that can/should be delegated to HR. If you are in a leadership position, this is your responsibility.

Why do you need to do this?

If you don’t know where people want to go in the long-term, how can you help them get there?

The simple fact is that you can’t.

Leadership is not just about achieving the task at hand. It is about balancing the needs of the tasks, the team and the individual to achieve long-term success. These conversations are designed to help you ‘make your people successful’.

Great leaders really know their people. They know what they’ve done and where they want to go.

The following process creates the opportunity for you to understand where your team are on their journey. Once you know that, and have an idea of where they want to go, you can start adding value to them by helping them get there.

Not enough people do this. Largely because they don’t know how to do it. If you take the time to do this properly, the level of engagement you will get from your team will go through the roof. This is because you’ll create a sense that you actually care about them and their success. You probably do – this is just a way of showing it.

How do you do this?

There are three distinct phases to this approach. Past, Present and Future.

How you do it is up to you. This is a principle based approach. Take these principles and apply them as you see fit. See what works and what doesn’t, seek to improve the process as you refine it.

The way I have done it is create three separate conversations, separated by at least a week to allow people to reflect. I usually plan for each conversation to take an hour.

This might seem like a lot of time but I guarantee it will be worth it because of the impact it will have on engagement.

Conversation 1: The Past

Ask your team member to tell you ‘the story of their life’. Starting with where they were born and right up to the present day. Get them to talk about what they’ve done, what they enjoyed doing and probe as to why they made certain decisions. Give them permission not to talk about things that might be a little uncomfortable. For example, if someone lost a parent at a young age and is clearly uncomfortable when talking about it, be respectful and move the conversation on.

Questions might include:

  • Where were you born?
  • Where did you grow up?
  • What did your parents do?
  • Where did you go to school?
  • If relevant, where did you go to university and what did you study?
  • Talk me through your career history from the start to where you are now.
  • Why did you make certain career moves?
  • What do their personal circumstances look like?
  • What do you do with your free time?

Try and get a sense for what makes this person tick. What is driving them and where might there be opportunities to help them?

David Heron, a partner at Wilton and Bain said that when he had this conversation with a member of his team, they mentioned that they didn’t own a house but were saving up for a deposit. This created an opportunity for him to help that person by aligning their goal of ‘saving up for a deposit’ with the company’s bonus structure.

As David said ‘It sounds simple but aligning people’s personal aims with business ones can make a real difference to an individual’s performance.’

Conversation 2: The Present

Before you have this conversation, get the person to do some self-analysis.

Get them to answer the following questions.

  • What do I love doing?
  • What do I dislike doing?
  • What am I really good at?
  • Where are the gaps in my skills or experience that I’d like to fill?

These questions get people to reflect on themselves and help them to clarify what they like doing and what they’re good at. Again, this might sound obvious but some people really don’t know what they’re good at and what makes them unique and valuable. The role of the leader is to challenge and support the individual and help them to develop their thinking.

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Sometimes they will miss what you believe to be their biggest strength. I once worked with someone who had the ability to relay complex and technical information to a relative simpleton like me! That’s a valuable skill because it helps create clarity and gives people useful information on which they can base decisions.

If someone is people focussed and warm, they tend to be able to build strong relationships and ‘make things happen’ through influence. Other people might be more technically focussed and enjoy working with numbers.

The answers will vary between person to person. What matters is that people look to the future and chose a path that they’ll be good at and enjoy what they do.

Conversation 3: The Future

This conversation focusses on what the individual wants to do in the long-term. You want to try and get a sense for where they want to be in 10 years time. Again, you can ask them to think about this before you have the conversation.

Questions might include:

  • Where do you want to be in 10 years time or a time-frame of your choosing?
  • What does the perfect role look like for you in the long-term? There might be a few options. That’s fine, they don’t need to have one clear path just yet.

The role of the leader in this conversation is to challenge their thinking. Just because they have done something and have built skills and experience in one area, doesn’t mean that they have to do it forever.

Look for opportunities to challenge their thinking and help them realise that there are far more opportunities available to them than they once might have thought.

In 2012, the Royal Marines lost a large number of people to the private maritime security industry. When I asked some people why they wanted to leave the Corps, they said they wanted to spend more time with their family and get better paid work in the maritime security industry. What some of them didn’t understand was that in that environment, you only get paid for the days you work and you will be away for long periods of time. The career move didn’t align with what they wanted from life.

As a leader it is not your job to chose the path for them. Your role is to challenge their thinking and logic without judgement.

Help the individual to clarify their long-term aims by asking ‘why’? Why do you want to work in that sector? Why do you want to work in a small company vs a large corporate? Why do they want to work in a specific type of industry?

The value you add in this instance is bringing together what can often be disparate thoughts and sometimes dreams into a clear focussed picture that they can start to work towards.

Action Plan

The final step in this process is to create an action plan. ‘Who will do what and by when?’

Without an action plan – these are just three nice conversations.

The action plan turns dreams and ideas into concrete steps.

If someone has shared that they have some gaps in their skills or experience, how can you use the current workload to help develop them? For example, if someone is lacking experience of managing a budget or a team – what can you add to their current role that helps them develop that experience?

If a team member has shared three options with you, the next steps might be to help them find people that are in those roles currently. If they want to become the Head of HR in a large corporate, can you introduce them to anyone who can tell them what those roles are like?

In the long-term, the best place for the individual might be outside the organisation in which they are currently working. That’s okay. The focus of these conversations is on the individual. It’s okay if someones long-term aspirations can’t be met by their current organisation. People leave but you never know when they might come back, perhaps at a senior level once they’ve filled gaps in experience that other companies can offer them.

The Impact

What do you get from having these conversations?

Greater Engagement: People don’t work for companies, they work for people.

You will get far greater levels of engagement if they feel they are working for someone who has their best interests at heart. Would you like to be on the receiving end of these three conversations? Probably. Then so would your people. This is an example of a leader putting their team members above all else. Happy and engaged team members do great work – and that’s what great companies are built on.

Clarity of Direction: You can’t set out to get somewhere, if you don’t know where you are going.

Creating a sense of clarity about the future helps people to be proactive. If you don’t take ownership for your career, someone else will. These conversations help people to focus on what they want to do and where they want to go in life. If you can align the organisational vision with the vision of your people, you will stand a much better chance of making both of them become a reality.

Understand the principles. Adjust them to fit your needs. Have the conversations. Support your team members. Be amazed at the results.

 

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