Baby Boomers

The biggest fallacy about Boomers is that their interest in career development ends when they approach the usual age of retirement. True, some may be ready to leave the workforce at that point, but a significant—and growing—number of Baby Boomers actually want to continue working. They don't always want to stay in the full‐time positions they've had for decades; for example, some may be interested in phased retirement options or scaling back to less stressful job requirements. However their work situations change (or don't), though, keeping them in the loop on new technologies and innovations will go a long way toward motivating this generation. As with all employees, it's critical to ask for their input about what they want their jobs to be. But since Boomers are from the “just show up and do your work” generation, don't be surprised if they don't know how to answer those questions. So help them out by asking them what new skill sets they want to develop in the next year or two (and then focusing on those that will enrich your department or the company at large). If there isn't a particular position or promotion they want to go after, help them grow in place through training. And don't forget to look at how they can share their extensive experience and expertise with others (perhaps by leading training seminars). No one wants to feel irrelevant, and reminding Boomers that they still have plenty to contribute will increase their job satisfaction and their engagement.

Generation X

It should be somewhat easier to figure out this generation's needs for career development: if you ask a Gen Xer about this subject, he or she will probably lay out a career plan for the next 5 to 10 years. Gen X ushered in the take‐charge approach to career development after bearing the brunt of corporate layoffs and feeling a need to seize more control over their careers. Push Gen Xers to think about whether they're keeping pace with industry changes and how those changes correlate to their long‐term career plans. Focusing on strategic issues with this group is critical, because these employees are in the prime of their careers. Ensuring that they are out front in their skill sets will go a long way toward reinvigorating their enthusiasm and enticing them to stay with the company longer. This is also a great group to tap for their entrepreneurial abilities and independent spirit. No hand‐holding is required for Gen X employees: once you've laid out a career trajectory that spells out the benefits of their jobs, they will be off and running. That doesn't mean you get to dump and run, though—you still need to do regular check‐ins on how they're doing against their game plans and offer to help where and when needed. Because this group thrives on being visible, identify career development opportunities (such as presenting to peers and senior leaders) that take advantage of that drive.

Millennials

When you discuss career development with Millennials, keep in mind that for them career development also includes personal development. Millennials want to find meaning and fulfillment in their everyday work. So ask Millennial employees if their current roles are meeting their personal needs, and if they aren't, figure out what needs to change to make that happen—even if it puts them on a path that leads away from your department. At Oxygen, for example, I allowed my Millennial assistant to help the public relations department with coordinating the company's charitable activities. That work fulfilled her personal needs, and she performed even better at her job in my department. (Eventually, she moved into PR full time and has thrived in that field for the past decade.) Thinking outside the box to expose Millennials to different career options will increase their loyalty to both you and the company. Even though broadening their horizons does mean that some Millennials will spread their wings and leave your organization because you've exposed them to areas they may never have thought of before, they will tell all of their friends (who will tell all of their friends) that you're someone who cares about your staff as whole people, not just as employees doing their jobs, and with that reputation, you'll have the cream of the crop flocking to your door. In my entire career, helping others develop their own careers has never been a bad thing.

Generation Z

Generation Z, the newest group of employees to enter the workforce, has many similarities to Millennials and will likewise benefit from exposure to lots of new ideas and opportunities. Arrange for them to have monthly lunches with leaders from other departments (and help them ahead of time to prepare questions to ask), for example, or let them volunteer for projects outside their normal routines. To expose them to organizational strategy, invite them to attend meetings with you. Sign them up to attend company events and give them questions to think about that will help them learn from the experience. For example, if you're attending an awards dinner, “Who is being honored and why?” gets Gen Zers thinking about what hard work is needed to succeed. “What will you say to someone you're seated next to but don't know?” highlights the importance of networking skills, and “How will you introduce yourself and what will you wear?” teaches them about personal brand awareness and first impressions. Company events can be great learning opportunities as long as you follow up with employees afterward to analyze them (and underscore the business aspects at play during the festivities).

To Train or Not to Train

In a cartoon that circulated widely a few years ago, one executive says, “What if we train them, and they leave?” and a second one replies, “What if we don't, and they stay?”² If you've managed employees for even a short amount of time, you've surely encountered this conundrum! Although it's awful when highly trained employees leave (especially if you've invested time and money in their development), it's far worse to have unskilled employees executing your company's vision. When you link succession planning to career development, your employees see opportunities for personal growth and are therefore more likely to remain at your company.

When kicking off career development planning for employees below the senior executive level, consider this two‐pronged approach:

1. Identify the critical job functions at the heart of your operations. What skills, knowledge, and abilities are needed to lead these positions?
2. Identify the employees your company should work to keep. Conduct a gap analysis on your high potentials to determine where they are now—and where they need to be to fill the critical positions identified earlier.

Use the gap analysis as the basis for your career development plan, which ties into your succession planning document. Keeping in mind the twin goals of training employees for future responsibilities and honing the skills they need for their current positions, identify what is important now and what is required in the foreseeable future. The most successful development plans typically cover a time frame of one to five years but are still living documents that change as an employee's proficiency in desired skills continues to grow.

Tying Succession Planning to Career Development

Successful succession development involves a formal, individualized plan for each employee—not a one‐size‐fits‐all approach. Standard concepts can be taught in group sessions, but for everything else you need to offer measureable, challenging, and time‐bound developmental activities tailored for each person. Some possible activities include:

• Rotational assignments in departments (such as critical production areas) that will increase the employee's knowledge base or in areas where the employee needs development
• Projects that are in line with an employee's current skills yet challenging in some fashion
• Classroom training or case‐study analysis, with the results presented to senior management
• Individual coaching or mentoring from either an outside expert or a qualified internal executive
• Coaching and mentoring of other employees in their growth and development
• Specific reading assignments with reports to senior leadership (including discussions of how to use concepts and practices internally)
• Role‐playing, with observer feedback
• Shadowing executives

The goal of tying career development to succession planning is to have the right people in the right place at the right time—a goal that applies as much to your middle managers as it does to your senior leaders. Now is the time to start developing talent at all levels within your organization.

Step 1: Start with Company Goals

Any goal‐setting activities should start with a review of the company goals. After all, you need to ensure that future growth opportunities for your employees fit into the company's future growth as well (otherwise, all your efforts could be for naught). And don't focus only on your department's growth: thinking in holistic terms that encompass the company at large has the potential to lead to even more opportunities. (A broad perspective is especially important if you don't plan to move to another position in your company and, therefore, end up blocking those below you.) Based on your company's short‐ and long‐term business objectives, identify the competencies and skill sets that are needed to reach those goals.

Step 2: Involve Your Employees

My best piece of advice when it comes to creating career development plans for your employees is to not assume that you know their aspirations. Have a face‐to‐face discussion (or a videoconference, if you manage remote employees and cannot meet in person) with all of your direct reports to understand what career goals they have for themselves. Ask for their reasons for those goals, too, because if your company doesn't have particular positions that they want, you may be able to find some other way to fulfill the why behind their goals.

Some employees (especially those new to the workforce, such as Millennials or Gen Zers) might not have specific career goals in mind and don't know how to figure those out. So talk with them about what they like—and don't like— about their current jobs. Ask them questions that will help them focus on their long‐term goals. What do they wish they could do more (or less) of in their day‐to‐day work? What career ambitions did they have when they first entered the workforce? (That's a great question to ask employees of any age, not just younger ones.) What skill sets do they want or need to work on?

Another reason not to assume that you know an employee's career goals is that he or she may not have long‐term ambitions in your department but may instead favor other areas in your company. At Oxygen Media, I worked with my senior director of operations to create a career plan that put him in line to replace me. When he went back to school for a master's degree in a completely different field, his career objectives changed—and our plan had to change, too. I proactively pushed for a transfer for him to a different department more in line with his new interests to give him a new career path (thus helping the company keep a great employee) and upon his departure, I promoted his second‐in‐command to his post (thus expanding her career growth opportunities). Fortunately, this turned out to be a win‐win situation for everyone. I share this story with new managers to highlight how tough it can be to manage employees—and how rewarding it can be to help them succeed professionally.

Step 3: Decide What Competencies Are Missing

Once you've looked at your company's short‐ and long‐term objectives and had a conversation with your employees about what they're looking to do with their careers, it's time to see how their goals line up with what they're doing in their day‐to‐day jobs and where your employees need improvement. What skill sets do each of your employees need to improve upon in order to meet the future needs of your company?

Step 4: Create an Action Plan

Now it's time to get serious and create an action plan with specific SMART goals (see chapter 4 for more details), including a time frame for completion and a rubric for measuring improvement. With such a plan in place, your employees can track their performance so there won't be any surprises when it's time to discuss their progress. This is also the point at which you and your employees figure out which activities (training, job‐shadowing, coaching, etc.) will best help the employee improve. In essence, this is the fun part!

Step 5: Monitor, Measure, and Make Adjustments as Needed

A career development plan is a living, breathing document. So if you decided on a training methodology that's not working, no worries—stop doing it and find something else. Making adjustments is an expected part of the process, and ideally it takes place before you've spent too much time and money going down the wrong path. Once a plan is formulated, your continued involvement in your employees' career growth is key: at a minimum, meet with them individually once a month (Millennials may want more frequent check‐ins) to discuss their progress, and, if they aren't moving forward, provide the feedback and coaching they need to get back on track.

Determining What Matters

Before looking for potential candidates in your organization, first define what competencies are critical in a great leader at your company. What does it take to be a great leader in your organization? Competencies can vary by level (e.g., frontline supervisor, mid‐level manager, senior executive) and perhaps by business unit. In most organizations, however, fundamental competencies apply across the board. At the most senior levels, a great leader typically exhibits the following attributes (or some variation of this group):

• Visionary
• Inspirational
• Strategic
• Tactical
• Persuasive
• Decisive
• Ethical

Notice this list does not necessarily denote technical skills. Rather, it highlights a leader's ability to understand and process new information, make decisions (often before all the details are available), translate those decisions or visions into action, and then rally the troops to get on board. Technical mastery may be found on the leadership spectrum, but it certainly should not be the only criteria for leadership within your company (even if your company is technical in nature).

Your first step toward developing your LDP is to determine what matters most at your company. This knowledge will then allow you to compare your employees' current skills with the skills your company needs.

Identifying Candidates

Some programs allow employees to apply to participate in LDPs, whereas others specifically pick candidates who have been identified as high‐potential employees. Regardless of how applicants come to you, you'll need to define the selection criteria by which you'll evaluate them. One easy‐to‐identify factor is how much supervisory experience an employee has. Other key criteria include traits such as the ability to learn new things, an interest in leading (don't assume that everyone wants to be a leader!), the ability to engage in teamwork eagerly and effectively, a high confidence level, and any skills that are in alignment with the organization's future direction and growth. General intelligence is also important, but it's not the only trait that guarantees success in a leadership role.

A numeric rating system (a scale of 1 to 5, for example) is helpful for aggregating and comparing input from multiple executive leaders. In addition to giving you an at‐a‐glance view of any candidate you're considering for an LDP, it also allows the opinions of less verbose leaders to carry as much weight as those from reviewers who campaign vigorously on behalf of their candidates.

Assessing Current Leadership Skills

Once you've established the competencies important for your organization and selected the participants for your LDP, it's time to measure each employee's existing skill set against what he or she needs to have in order to be a great leader in your organization. Performance appraisals and 360‐degree leadership surveys are just a couple of the powerful measurement tools at your disposal. Another method to assess current skill levels is to have participants answer a series of essay questions on how they would tackle certain problems built around the critical competencies you've identified. Their responses to each scenario can help identify specific skills they lack.

You can also devise simulation activities that highlight an employee's ability to plan, organize, make decisions, and lead programs. Involving your senior leadership team in creating these activities can be a great learning exercise on its own (and sharpen the leadership skills of your current executives). If you have money to spend, consider hiring an outside company to conduct observation‐based assessments of your staff's current skill levels.

Developing Employees' Skills

Once you've identified the skills you need, it's time to develop them and take your employees' abilities to the next level. In his article “Creating a Leadership Development Program,” Robert Pernick wrote that leadership development typically occurs in three related areas:

• Technical—enhances the skills needed to perform work or to oversee the work of others
• Conceptual—based on thinking in a more abstract and critical fashion (this is connected to creativity, strategic thinking, and decisiveness)
• Interpersonal—related to the ability to work effectively with other people³

Although thought exercises and role‐playing are useful training methods, whenever possible leaders should receive their training while dealing with actual on‐the‐job issues. Real life—and real consequences—can motivate high‐potential employees to succeed. That said, it's important to understand that leaders‐in‐training can and may fail. Rather than crucify these young leaders for their mistakes, push them to learn from failures and to apply their hard‐won knowledge to future challenges.

It's critical to put all the parts of an employee's career development plan into writing. Unless goals, time lines, and measurement rubrics are carefully documented, the plan doesn't really exist.

Assessing Progress

Your performance evaluation systems should support employee development in the competencies you've defined as critical to your organization. In short, they need to make it possible for you to connect what you're teaching with what you're measuring. Six months after you launch your LPD (and then at, say, 6‐ or 12‐month intervals moving forward), reevaluate your employees according to the same criteria that were originally used to assess their pre‐LDP skill sets. Consistent and thorough assessments will reveal whether your employees are making progress.

Getting Honest Feedback

Once you've identified which slices of pie you need and start to work toward your goals, you'll need to measure your progress. But it is very difficult (if not impossible) to be objective about oneself. To increase the accuracy of your self‐assessment, therefore, solicit feedback from your employees and colleagues. That's easier said than done, though: for a host of reasons, it can be difficult for both direct reports and peers to speak honestly about a supervisor or coworker. To help alleviate any potential discomfort surrounding this situation, it's critical to be open‐minded about receiving feedback and suspend your judgment of what they tell you. And it's especially critical to control your defensiveness, because coworkers often fail to provide useful assessments when they have to spend more time defending that information than actually giving the feedback to the employee. (And anyone who's ever been put in that position usually resolves never to give feedback to a coworker again, even if he or she begs for it!) Instead, receive the feedback in a positive, encouraging manner that will invite more feedback. Listen closely, ask clarifying questions, and take notes to understand where your coworkers think your skills need improvement. If possible, get feedback from at least five (more, if you can) people. Those assessments of you that are widely held are more likely to be accurate and need to be addressed. Those that have a low frequency may be wrong and should, at the very least, be considered with caution.

If your company offers 360‐degree performance evaluations, which gather feedback from one's immediate work circle (including peers, superiors, and subordinates), sign up for one immediately! This valuable tool offers excellent feedback, partly because it includes a wide range of participants and partly because its inherent anonymity allows participants to give more honest feedback. (Don't try to associate comments with specific individuals—that defeats the point of getting anonymous feedback!) If your company does not offer 360‐degree performance evaluations, you can create your own versions of them through online survey companies. For an approach that's more low‐tech (but just as effective), you can distribute a survey as a Word document and ask respondents to submit their completed forms electronically to a neutral party who can remove identifying information (e.g., e‐mail headers) before passing them over to you, or ask them to leave printouts of their responses in your office mailbox. To ensure that your questions and wording do not breach any company policies, it's best to involve your HR representative or your boss when generating questions. Including your boss can also highlight you as a motivated go‐getter seeking to improve your skills on your own in the absence of a formal system through the company.

Identifying Training Opportunities

Once you've identified what you need to work on, speak with your boss about potential on‐the‐job training opportunities, such as taking on a rotational assignment in another department or office, spearheading a project in an area in which you need improvement, or shadowing your boss or another executive. Establishing a formal coaching or mentoring relationship with an executive other than your boss (either inside or outside your organization) can be another great way to expand both your education and the career options available to you.

Numerous LDP‐oriented classroom training options exist, but if your company is unable or unwilling to pay for one, you can put together your own course of study. For example, you can download case studies or books to read and discuss with your fellow executives. A great way to start compiling your reading list is to ask your boss and C‐level executives what books have been particularly inspirational or useful in their development. Perhaps you can start your own book club at the office and ask the executive who recommended a particular book to lead the discussion on it.

Online training is another route to gaining additional leadership experience, as is volunteering for a nonprofit group, school organization, or community‐based program. In addition to expanding your skill set, volunteering can also expand your network of contacts (which is never a bad thing!).

Staying on Track

Obviously, it's easier to stay on track if you're involved in a company LDP plan that structures and monitors your progress. But if you're on your own, you'll have to work hard to avoid getting buried in your day‐to‐day responsibilities and to keep your focus on developing your leadership skills. Once you've established specific objectives and a time line for achieving them, add milestones so you can recognize—and celebrate—your progress along the way. Remember, too, that much of what we do in life is habitual, so work to create good habits that will enable you to work toward your goals with both greater ease and greater success. Be sure to record your progress systematically, in a journal, in your online calendar, or in whatever works for you so you can easily see what you've accomplished—and what you need to improve—and stay engaged with the overall project.