Getting the best out of people

“There are no career paths anymore, only crazy paving, and you have to lay it yourself”. I used to put that up as a PowerPoint slide and it got an immediate response—it got a laugh and it seemed to ring true for many employees on the company career development workshop, says Stuart Mitchell. There was some truth in the cliché . Charles Handy declared that in the immediate future, we would have portfolio lives and that careers, as we’d known them, were dead.

I believe that we are in a new world of work where employers need to be open about careers inside their organisation and all employees need to be offered help to manage their careers. Managers need to be interested in the careers of their team members and employees need to engage their managers in a dialogue about career expectations. If organisations are going to manage the careers of the selected few, they are storing up problems for themselves as the war for talent gets more intense.

A recent Gallup poll reported that 63% of employees are non-engaged and a further 19% were positively disengaged in their organisation at a time when organisations need their employees to use ‘discretionary behaviour’ to deliver high performance, higher productivity and innovation.

In this new world of work, employees are receiving career advice mainly from the outside of their organisation—much of it is saying the grass is greener “over here.”

So how can organisations respond positively and in a timely way, when line managers’ relationships with their team members can be short lived? The answer is in upskilling managers and HR in providing high quality career coaching support and in assisting employees in self assessment, synthesising their career aspirations, and valuing the choices they can make to lay down some career paving. Employees need access to Corporate HORIZONS type software programs which enable them to understand themselves better, explore their options and make things happen.

This is culture shock, and the past cannot be dug up and the future re-laid without the buy-in of executives and influential managers. They need to see the benefits and manage any risks, and as one commentator put it: ‘There is no alternative’.