Why Should Leaders Help Employees to Develop the Right Career Strategy?
In general, the majority of people around you want you to be successful. Your parents, your friends, your family, your partner, your employer, your boss, your team members — all the people with whom you interact on a daily basis and with whom you have a relationship — all want you to succeed in whatever endeavour you attempt.
But that’s in “general”! More specifically, consider these points:
- Your parents would never want you to fail. That’s a given.
- Your “good” friends would never want you to fail. That’s acquired behaviour.
- Your partner would never want you to fail. That’s how it is supposed to be.
- And no employer would ever hire someone with the hope that the individual would fail! That’s just not logical.
Yet, many employers continue to spend a tremendous amount of resources to hire great and talented individuals and then leave them to their own devices as they navigate throughout their career. That non-management “hands off” style absolutely does not make any sense either.
The Costly Paradox
Many organisations today pay for health insurance, fitness centre membership, meals at work, tuition reimbursement, dependent care, car allowances, travel allowances, pensions, and other benefits. But when it comes to truly helping employees to learn more about themselves and their capabilities, leadership proclaims it is the business of employees themselves to figure that out. In essence, this belief is the same way as saying “as long as you do your job, we don’t care about what you want beyond the framework of your job.”
Do employers really mean that? We don’t think so. We simply think employers do not think deeply enough to enable them to tackle the root cause of misalignment, disengagement, and poor performance in their organisations.
But consider this idea: If you started to help your employees figure out what they really want and how they can achieve what they want, not only do you create a bond between you but also release pressure on your organisation. In effect, you are allowing a win-win scenario to exist.
