Talking Careers – How to hold great career conversations
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How often do you sit down and discuss careers with your team members? If the answer is honestly “All the time and I did it recently”, you may not need to continue reading this article! But for most of us, it’s more likely to be “It doesn’t happen that often and I can’t remember when the last time was”. If that’s familiar, read on…
Holding career conversations can be a tough thing. It can be an unpredictable request at a one-to-one meeting, it may be a company requirement and the team member may not want to do it – and it’s often difficult to know where to start. But the effect of holding good career conversations can be huge – it’s amazing how often a very simple conversation about someone’s longer-term aspirations can dramatically improve their performance and motivation.
So how can you get the best from an opportunity to ‘talk career’?
- Don’t just dive into the conversation. Sometimes people ask for a conversation right now. But it’s crucial that they prepare for the conversation in advance; and it’s key for you to have given some thought to how you can help. So before the meeting, ask them to think about:
- Whether they want to plan a full career move or focus on career development in their current role?
- What else is going on in their life at the moment that influences their career?
- Their current career thoughts, and specifically what they’d like to cover in a career conversation?
- Accept you are not a career expert. Unless you work in HR, you’re probably like most managers and feel that when it comes to career advice you’re just muddling along. You know what you do to advance your career, and you’ve watched what your peers have done – but that’s the extent of your expertise. In fact, half of the time you may just think “I was lucky to get here”!
That’s okay, and you don’t have to position yourself as an expert. Being authentic is the best bet – but also realising that you can be a great sounding board for someone thinking about their career. You’ll have ideas of the routes they could take, can give feedback on some of the gaps they might have – and often a network of people they can approach for more information. - Ask questions and offer your thoughts. You’ll probably feel some pressure to offer sage advice, but I genuinely believe that just having the conversation in the first place puts you ahead of most managers they’ve ever worked for. So relax, and be curious. Ask lots of questions: What are your best strengths? What kind of work energises you? Can you broaden or deepen your skills? How visible are you in the organisation? Do you need to build or shift your reputation? Gather information and then offer your thoughts.
- Let them drive it. Don’t feel the obligation to do it for them – it’s their career. If they create a career plan based largely on your ideas and thinking, you’ll get the blame if things don’t work out! If there are actions that need to be taken away from the meeting, make it clear that they should be the ones taking them. Clearly offer them support, just don’t do it for them.
- Don’t feel you have to do it all at once. There’s a temptation to neatly tie up a conversation in a bow, with a meaningful outcome and actions to take things forward. This meeting is not a one-off; it should instead be – not to become all X-Factor – a journey. If the conversation ends with just one action they need to take or complete, that’s enough – you can always follow-up to check how happy they are with progress, and offer to continue the conversation.
Career conversations can make a big difference to your team. At a Career Conversation workshop I ran recently, in less than 10-minutes managers identified at least 30 fantastic benefits of holding career conversations – for the company, the manager and the individual. Why not offer a career conversation to all team members who are willing to do the preparation for this?