As a manager you actively participate in career building: providing opportunities to those assigned to you to develop current and future competencies and to take on greater responsibilities in developing the organization’s future. You should quickly recognize that experience builds careers and lack of experience destroys careers. You will find people who have had ten years of experience in ten years of work and others who have had one year of experience ten times. There is a significant difference in these two career paths. Remaining in the same position and doing the same work in the same way for many years seldom creates the necessary challenges for developing a successful career. Unfortunately too many employees find themselves in this position because their managers prefer to react to circumstances rather than take a proactive position.
Successful careers are built on accepting new challenges that span a continuum from minor to major. What may be a minor challenge to one person may be a major challenge to another. However, not all employees can accept a major challenge. The challenge must somehow correlate with the ability and the desire of the individual to accept change. Level of education is not the issue. Attitudes and personal characteristics of the individual determine the desire to accept a challenge. While not every person can accept a major challenge, all must accept some appropriate level to justify their existence in the organization. If you avoid challenging employees to improve their performance, you will eventually face the prospect of terminating some of these employees.
Building the careers of assigned or newly hired people does not fall solely on your shoulders. The individual must eventually take responsibility, but the manager plays a role in directing that career. If you fail to act in a timely manner with an employee who is not meeting expectations and recognize that his or her career has stalled because of some set of circumstances, then you’re not performing your responsibility as a manager. Too often managers give an employee too much time to correct the situation and in the process exacerbate the situation. You deal with such situations through extensive communication with the employee and an agreement of some kind of probationary period during which the individual will have an opportunity to correct the situation but with your guidance. If as an example you hired a new person and after a year or more the person does not meet performance targets, you need to look at your past actions and see where you dropped the ball. What was your role in this employee’s failure? Indifference on your part? Lack of direct communication regarding performance? What was the cause? There must be an answer.