Career Conversations

How to Get the Best from Your Talent Pool

Greg Smith

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780730372028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Retain your talent with a proactive approach to employee development, one conversation at a time

When employees are happy at work, the energy and creativity they possess is virtually limitless. But many leaders are ill-equipped to discuss and gauge the career satisfaction of their employees, and risk losing their talent to their competitors. Career Conversations is your guide to developing the skills needed for effective career discussions with your staff, providing step-by-step instructions on how to incorporate this capability into your leadership routine.

It has never been easier for employees to seek other job opportunities. Search firms and online platforms such as LinkedIn make the danger of the competition poaching your best employees all too real. To take active, dynamic and genuine interest in their employee's career satisfaction and development, leaders require the skills and knowledge to have ongoing career conversations.

Packed full of case studies, practical exercises and key insights, career development expert Greg Smith explains how leaders can guide their employees to achieve career satisfaction by taking an active, dynamic and ongoing interest in their development.

• engage with employees on career aspirations
• listen critically and build trust
• help employees reinvent themselves for the future of work
• gain self-insight and become a more effective leader
• empathise and respond to your staff's needs.

Career Conversations is a must-read for current and aspiring organisational leaders, Human Resource directors, HR practitioners, senior executives, supervisors, managers and business owners. This book will help you guide your employees through their careers and, in turn, help your company thrive.

Chapter 1
The case for proactive career development

‘It is never too late to be what you might have been.'

George Eliot

The impact on labour markets of demographic changes, together with emerging skill shortages and the rise of talent management initiatives, has prompted organisations to consider innovative attraction and retention strategies. In recent times succession management has become an organisational priority. Indeed, it is now high on the agenda of many organisational boards as well as a key performance indicator (KPI) for chief executives. These labour market trends have placed new importance on employment relationships and leadership, and have combined to profoundly affect career development for individuals and organisations.

It is broadly recognised today that leaders need to truly ‘connect' with their employees in order to understand and support their professional and personal needs, recognising how these may change over time.

Effective leaders demonstrate authenticity in spades. They build trusted relationships by being open about their position while assisting others to be open about theirs. They appreciate and respect differing points of view and follow through on their commitments. Role modelling these behaviours is key to fostering connection and quality relationships. Employees should feel they can turn to you, as their leader, for objective career advice, and know it will always be in their best interests to do so.

Trust is the great enabler of learning. When trust is absent so too is learning, and both are critical to positive career development.

Moving from the old to the new career model

The traditional, paternalistic style of employment relationship, in which organisations were expected to manage their employees' careers, has long gone. In the contemporary career model, employees are considered free agents and loyalty is to the individual, not the organisation. Career development has evolved to become the responsibility of the individual.

Nowadays, progressive employers do not manage their employees' careers. They discuss career pathways and make available accessible career ladders and career development resources (such as coaching) to help employees achieve career clarity, identify career options and determine the best career direction for them.

The traditional career model of the last century was linear and one-dimensional. Young adults were encouraged to find a ‘good job in a good company', nurture it and stick with it as long as possible, ideally until retirement. In his book The Psychology of Careers (1957), Donald Super discussed five life stages: growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance and decline. Super also talked about a fantasy sub-stage of growth, when stereotypically a boy dreamed of becoming a fireman, policeman or doctor while a girl imagined herself a ballerina or nurse (remember, this was a different era!). The exploration stage generally coincided with leaving school or, for some, taking up tertiary studies. Once employed and settled into a single organisation, usually for life, their career would pass through establishment (with advancement as a sub-stage) and maintenance stages, before winding down towards decline (disengagement and retirement). Figure 1.1 represents a greatly simplified version of a traditional linear model.

Figure 1.1: the traditional career model

Source: Adapted from D. E. Super (1957), The Psychology of Careers, Harper & Row, USA; and D. E. Super (1990), ‘Life-span: Life-space approach to career development', in D. Brown, Career Choice and Development (2nd edn, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA).

As an indication of the evolving nature of career development theory, Super much later referred to ‘recycling' when discussing transitioning through his life/career stages.

Figure 1.2 represents a progressive, cyclical model that reflects a continuum of career exploration, engagement, growth, advancement, maintenance and disengagement over the course of a lifetime. Today's world of local and international career mobility has generated a career model in which many individuals can expect to ‘recycle' and reinvent themselves through various career stages. Over their working life they can expect on average five careers and more than 15 jobs. Similarly, the traditional notion of retirement has given way to more flexible engagement options in the tertiary stages of career development.

Figure 1.2: a contemporary ‘recycling' careers model

Source: Adapted from D. E. Super (1957), The Psychology of Careers, Harper & Row, USA; and D. E. Super (1990), ‘Life-span: Life-space approach to career development', in D. Brown, Career Choice and Development (2nd edn, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA).

The traditional approach to career management assumed a paternalistic and ‘transactional' style, rather than the more mature ‘relational' employment relationship described by Denise Rousseau.

Transactional relationships were founded on limited emotional attachment. Organisations typically provided job security and material rewards in return for performance, conformity and loyalty. The employee's identity was linked directly to their skills and competencies.

Relational employment relationships are grounded in strong emotional attachment. They emphasise flexibility and personal accountability for performance in return for career rewards and development, with a long-term view in which the employee's identity is linked to the organisation. Both transactional and relational employment relationships relied on the acceptance of a basic social norm of reciprocal commitment or mutual obligation.

In the early to mid 1990s, the shift from transactional to relational work relationships had just begun, but was smashed apart when organisations embarked on widespread and large-scale downsizings. Many of the affected employees were well advanced in their careers, with tenures of 30 to 40 years or more. Back in the mid twentieth century, at 16 and looking for work, some had simply presented to the guardhouse of their nearest factory and asked for a job, any job! That was all that was required to get an immediate start for most factory work in those days. Many lacked formal qualifications and were ill equipped to transition to new careers after retrenchment. Subsequent research has shown that a third of these employees never worked again.

These events became a generational marker and changed the nature of employment relationships forever.

The children of the affected workers vowed not t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the author
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The case for proactive career development
• Chapter 2 Reimagining careers
• Chapter 3 Fit your own mask first
• Chapter 4 Building career self-insight
• Chapter 5 What's your personal brand?
• Chapter 6 The goal of goal setting
• Chapter 7 Who motivates the motivator?
• Chapter 8 The skilled listener
• Chapter 9 Facilitating communication techniques
• Chapter 10 Structuring unstructured conversations
• Chapter 11 Leading a career conversation
• Chapter 12 Ethics and protocols for career development
• Chapter 13 Now you're ready to hold career conversations!
• References and further reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement