Overview: Organizations must engage in intentional talent management to cover their leadership succession needs and secure their futures. By helping employees jumpstart, manage, and build their careers, leaders can secure their loyalty and alignment with organizational values. Leaders can also identify and create opportunities in employee skill development.
Every employee everywhere has goals and aspirations. Some aim to advance their careers in their current organizations by climbing the ranks and assuming leadership positions. Others may have less ambitious goals.
In every case, leaders and managers must support employees in their efforts to fulfill their potentials. Often, leaders are in the best position to help reports discover how to accomplish goals.
Leadership coaching encourages leaders to instill cultures of coaching in organizations. In coaching-focused organizations, every employee acts as a coach for his or her fellow employees. This way, everyone helps everyone forward their careers and achieve goals.
Intelligent leaders who lead by example promote coaching cultures by acting as coaches. How can leaders support the career goals of employees? What can they do to act as leadership coaching service providers for reports?
Establishing a Baseline
Leaders must understand the short and long-term career aspirations of employees. They need to know how these goals relate to where employees are in their careers.
Knowing where employees are and where they want to go allows leaders to define comprehensive plans to help them develop skills in alignment with the goals and values of their organizations.
Focusing on Efficiency
Smart leaders don’t overwork employees. On the contrary, they encourage them to find ways to increase their efficiency. Working smart should take precedence over working hard. The resulting efficiency leaves time for employees they can invest in activities that develop their skills and careers.
Active Involvement in Skill Development
Leaders can encourage and compel their teams to improve their skills. Organizations can update their job requirements to include licenses and certifications that require employees to upgrade their skills. In this case, they must be ready to support at least some of the costs.
Mentoring
Executive coaching understands the power of mentoring and encourages organizations to implement mentoring programs. A mentor is not someone who spoon-feeds data to mentees. Mentors see the hope and potential inside mentees better than the mentees themselves. They have the experience and skills to pull talent and abilities out of people.
Mentoring is perhaps the best approach to employee career boosts. It’s on-the-job training in its purest possible form, allowing mentees to create reservoirs of positive references they can later exploit whenever they deal with adversity and hurdles.
Proactively Searching for Mutually Beneficial Opportunities
Intelligent leaders know that by providing career boosts to employees, they boost the future success of their organizations. They also understand that a close interdependency exists between the future of organizations and the ambitions of employees.
To align the two variables, leaders can ask employees where they see their careers in ten years. From what reports tell them, they can identify solutions that can help organizations while taking employees’ careers in the directions they desire.
Helping Employees Define Development Paths
Often, employees know where they want to go, but have no ideas on how to get there. Leaders can act like executive coaching specialists and help them define blueprints to success.
By giving team members clear courses of action, leaders motivate and empower them to reach goals. Having a development path allows students and other stakeholders to measure progress.
Receiving and Providing Feedback
Leaders can practice what they preach by accepting and providing feedback. When feedback goes both ways, it establishes a constructive dialogue that can benefit all parties involved.
Through dialogue, leaders understand the aspirations of employees while clarifying their expectations and providing guidance and support.