Connected Leaders Help with Career Development
We are making our way through the list of key skills for managers. Last week I wrote about how Connected Leaders Listen and Share. I made the case that these seemingly contradictory attributes are really aspects of the same core skill — the connected leader shows regard for his team members. Listening and sharing demonstrate respect.
This week we are going to dive into the Sixth skill, how a great employees look for managers who help with career development.
For convenience, the complete list of 8 skills is as follows:
- Be a Good Coach
- Does Not Micromanage
- Cares about the Individual
- Productive and Results Driven
- Listens and Shares
- Helps with Career Development
- Clear Vision & Strategy
- Technically Competent
While respect is essential, another ingredient for high motivation is development and in the context of a job that amounts to career development.
Career Development
I suppose I have been fortunate enough to work in a variety of environments, from the very large (Motorola has 140,000 employees in its hay day, and Disney was of a similar size when I worked there), to the very small — Rainbow Studios has 12 engineers and artists TOTAL when I started, and GameTruck started with just me, then my brother, and eventually more people joined us. To a few things in between. GTX Corporation and THQ employed hundreds. Add to this, I was the Mentorship Chair for the Entrepreneurs Organization in Arizona in 2019–2020.
What all this means is that I have been inserted into some very large, pre-existing matrices, and I have had to make some up as I went along. I will say, of all the things on this list, I personally found helping team members with career development to be one of the most challenging things to do.
The Rule of Threes
The number one skill valued by employees in a connected leader is that they are a good coach. While coaching people to achieve their potential is awesome, coaching them up to the point that they leave your team and go somewhere else sounds flat out scary. Employees tend to fall into three groups:
- Top performers
- The Anonymous middle
- Bottom performers
It is not uncommon to get sucked into focusing most of your time and energy on the top performers. Assuming your top performers are trustworthy, they tend to get a lot done. They can act as problem solvers, are fun to hang around, and usually they make your life easier. The second group that vies for attention is almost always the bottom performers. More drama, hands on management, and troubleshooting seems to come from a small percentage of people at the “bottom” of the ranking system.
It is not uncommon to fear that your top people will leave, and you might find yourself daydreaming about how great things could be if you could just get rid of the bottom performers. The reality is however, your greatest risk of turnover tends to come from what I call the Anonymous middle. Why?
Because they are getting the least amount of attention from management. What’s more, they actually tend to get less career development than the other two groups. While you might fear someone will come along and pluck your rock stars — it is the forgotten middle that is most likely to go look for a job. What’s more, the bottom performers are not only receiving a lot of attention, usually their career goal is to stay employed. All of these factors redirect them back into staying on the job.
But the people who are ignored, who do not feel they are going anywhere tend to start looking for a job. And when these people start looking, it can blind side you. I know it did me when it happened to me, and I know it shocked my managers when I was a middling manager at Motorola, and I left.
From Individual Contributor to Manager
I heard this once that great managers are other focused. The challenge for most competent people when they first move into management is switching from competing for that next promotion to helping other people get that next promotion. For many people this does not come intuitively. What’s more, many, in fact most newly minted managers do not actually understand how their company sets criteria for promotions let alone how to handle career development.
Here is what I have learned over the years.
Career Development Is a Function of Two Ideas
First, very few people actually have a clear understanding of what career development looks like. Motorola was very disciplined in defining “E-levels”. An E6 was sort of an entry level engineers. They had accumulated enough information to create performance expectations from levels E6-E9. After that they split the ladder between Management (even numbers) and Technical proficiency (Odd Numbers). There was some fuzziness in there. However, most places I worked did not have clear definitions and understandings between different levels. I know when I was working to get promoted, I believed my manager knew exactly what I needed to do to advance. However, once they promoted me to manager, I had no idea.
What I came to realize that at the lower levels, most of the “grades” were set by time. At the higher levels, grades were set by reports. I remember a Corporate vice president reorganizing a multi-billion-dollar business so he could give his CFO a promotion. Company policy dictated that in order to be an E14, you had to have X many reports in your management ladder. Finance was divided across the many business unites in the \$2B sector. Imagine being the CFO of a two-billion-dollar business but you can only earn the same as a mid-level junior executive because not enough people report to you. This Corporate VP changed all that by forcing every finance person to report to her. It was a bold move and got a lot of attention. It was also bad for the business. However, it lead to another lesson I learned about career development.
A person can increase their value to the company by the value of the problems they are responsible for managing. The founder of a high-rise window washing company once told me, “Do you want to make a lot of money? Find a job no one wants to do then get really good at it.” Another entrepreneur once told me, “I find when I solve hard problems, I get paid. The harder the problem, the better I get paid.”
Both of these ideas run counter to the popular follow your passion story we love to read. As Warren Farrell wrote, “When you follow your bliss, it is the money you will miss.” It is amazing how many ex-drummers, ex-ski instructors, ex-painters, and former writers you meet when picking your kids up from kindergarten.
When kids arrive. play time is over. Someone has to pay the bills. This seems to confirm the concept that career value is related to problem value.
This leads me to point number two. If you want to help manage people’s careers, and your own, it is a good idea to understand the financials of how your business operates. I cannot recommend highly enough Financial Intelligence: A Manager’s Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean by Joe Knight. That was the first book that helped me understand that “raises” are not an infinite pool of money. In healthy companies there is often a connection between team value creation and revenue generation. (If you can’t find that connection, you might have a problem.) While no one may be able to draw this out for you personally, it does not mean the information is not available for you to do it yourself.
Like the person who solves hard problems get paid, the employee who creates value tends to advance in the organization, or at least in their career.
Career Development as a Practice
At different times in my career, I was both generous and stingy with advancement. Sometimes, when the situation permitted, I was excited to see people grow, others I was afraid of losing them. In the end, I came to a point where I began to admire Enterprise Rent-a-car and their commitment to help young people grow. They seemed to have the attitude, we will help you advance in your career, here, or somewhere else. They viewed committing to individual improvement as a competitive hiring advantage.
As a small business with up and down years, my company struggled to provide the stable path to promotion that people were looking for. I learned however we could compensate by giving people tremendous opportunities to learn and do new things. They could do the kinds of things for us that bigger companies would never let them do. In some cases, this experience made them more valuable to someone else and so they left to take another job. While it is always hard to lose good people, I learned to appreciate the people I helped improve their careers. The ones I help, I am still in touch with. The ones I tried to hold on to, left anyway and we are no longer in contact.
Looking back, I have come to value the relationships I made much more than the projects I worked on. Helping people live the best life they can imagine is rewarding in its own way. It is nothing to be afraid of. And I know that when people feel like you are genuinely rooting for them, they often give you their very best.