Let's Talk About Talent - Week #1

Last week I wrote that placing people at the forefront necessitates a commitment from leaders and managers to lead by example, and companies of all sizes can take small but significant steps toward becoming more people focused. This week’s newsletter is focused on a small investment of time that leaders and managers can make that can have a dramatic and immediate impact on an employee’s engagement and their ability to develop and grow within an organization. Outside of the time commitment and having the discipline to stick with it, creating an Employee Growth Plan program does not have to be costly, and in most cases will cost nothing.

Working with an employee to create a growth plan for them does not have to be complex. Going through the process of creating their growth plan is something I have found managers can easily pick up. While the end goal is to create a documented plan, the key is the initial and ongoing conversation between the manager and the employee on their growth and development.

Employee growth plans generally fall into two categories:

🌱 An employee looking to gain new skills or knowledge, or

👩 An employee looking to improve their leadership skills.

Most growth plans that you will create are likely to be focused on helping an employee gain new skills or knowledge to do their current role more effectively or prepare them for a future role. For example, an employee may want to become better at Excel to do their job better or they may want to learn a programming language to take on a new role at a future point in a different area. In instances where employees are looking to improve their leadership skills, the manager must act as more of a coach in helping people get better at some aspect of their leadership or help them change a behavior that is preventing them from becoming a better leader (pro tip: if you want to be a top manager in any industry, you also need to be a great coach).

Keys to success:

💓 The development plan is a living and breathing document. I would recommend revising the growth plan goals once a year and then monitoring quarterly thereafter.

🧫 Have the employee focus on 2-3 growth goals. It is more important to have success rather than stretching to do more and then failing. In the case where an employee is looking to improve their leadership skills, I would recommend only having 1-2 growth goals.

✅ I have always liked the idea of the manager’s manager participating in the initial discussion with the employee to review the new development goals along with the employee’s manager. It’s a great display of commitment to the employee and helps create broader awareness of areas in which the employee wants to develop.

📈 Start small and build. To get started, pick a couple of managers who you know will be committed to implementing an Employee Growth Plan program and maybe have done it before.

🤝 Involvement of HR. Your HR leader(s) and team need to be engaged, aligned, and have joint accountability in implementing an Employee Growth Plan program.

🦮 Assign an executive sponsor. Someone on your leadership team needs to be the voice for the program and have joint accountability for it getting successfully impemented along with HR.

🏁 Commit and stay the course. There is initially some heavy lifting to get an Employee Growth Plan program underway, but after awhile it will become part of what your managers do.

Someone will inevitably ask me what the payoff is in implementing an Employee Growth Plan program. Let’s start with better engagement, greater productivity, and higher retention. And, if you achieve all those things, the cost of having to replace employees that are not happy working for you will likely go down. For the companies out there that say “our people are the most important driver of our success”, creating an Employee Growth Plan program is a relatively easy and cheap way to live up to that statement.

If you are interested in receiving the Employee Growth Plan template I have used for years, please comment on this post and I’ll DM it to you here on LinkedIn. If you have questions on implementing an Employee Growth Plan program, please DM me here on LinkedIn or email me.

All the best!

Marc Butler #wealthtech #wealthmanagement #employeedevelopment #employeeexperience #employeeengagement #leadership #puttingpeoplefirst