Career Development is Key to Your Organization's Success

Who is responsible for career development?

The employee, manager and the organization. Unfortunately two pieces of the puzzle are usually missing when it comes to career development. The employee and the manager rarely have discussions about future plans and or growth for the individual. Sometimes this comes down to the manager not wanting to lose their star employee, or the employee not knowing where they can go, or where they want to go.

Since implementing a Career Development Model (CDM) at the City of Richmond, we have discovered by implementing a process, providing curriculum, and one to one support that an organization can truly start to develop its true potential, while engaging and retaining its key talent.

What things should you do?

The main learning that we have had, is that you need to really know your employees. It is recommended that you take the time to interview them in detail about all aspects of their work history on a regular basis. A lot of employees working part-time in different jobs, volunteering in significant positions, going back to school and paying for it themselves etc. If you don't know this about your staff, you need to. By conducting career interviews, we have discovered that a lot of our employees are under utilized in their current positions. By working with the either in groups or individually we have started to help them plan their career plan and learn how to navigate the organization to get a job that is better suited to using their full capabilities.

Next Steps?

The key in this process being successful, is giving the managers the tools to understand that it is their responsibility to assist their employees in advancing thei career in the organization. A key stumbling block is that managers are not sure how to navigate the organization outside of their own business unit or how to assist the employee in creating their learning plans.

What are we doing?

At the City our next steps are to look at how to put some career resources on-line, and enable the employees to be more independent when planning their career. In addition, we will be hosting some more in-depth career planning workshops for managers to help them develop the skills that they need.

Experiential Team Building and Insights Powerful Tools for leadership reflection

We just recently held a 1/2 day experiential team building session for our Supervisory Training Certificate program. By building in learning debriefs after each session and asking the mini-teams what they learned and how they were going to improve their performance on the next activity, we created some significant learning moments for the teams.

Having it integrated with insights made it a even more powerful experience, as team members could give feedback to each other on how to improve their communication and enhance the teams productivity in a safe and non-threatening way.

When we did a larger debrief, we had staff sharing deep insights, and creating development plans on a go-foward basis in the moment.

I highly recommend using Lewco Consulting, and the Insights System through Insights Vancouver with Joyce Gwilliam as a way to increase self awareness, and real leadership development.

Personal Branding

Check out a video from Harvard Business Review on the importance of Personal Branding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtjWXzajQXw&feature=player_embedded

What is your personal brand? Mine is "Helping People and Organizations Succeed". Where do I add value, by coaching and mentoring people to succeed in managing their own career.

Engagement is not as hard as you think!

The key to engagement is actually talking to your employees. But these days who actually does this? If you can get your managers understanding this key concept that knowing your people's talents and strengths, and then leveraging them in different and new ways is the key to engagement, then you have taken your organization to the next level.

We experienced this at the City of Richmond, when through the simple concept of getting staff excited about the Olympics we asked them to participate in the making of a video to send to our athletes. From this simple request, we were able to draw on the talent of our own people, and enable all staff to participate in different ways. From forming a dance team, to playing in one of our three house bands, to co-ordinating the actual filming, we had everyone involved. The end result was a fantastic video that will not only make our athletes proud and feel supported, but will help a young artist Matthew David get his first leg up in the competitive world of music.

Find out who your staff really are, and ask them how they would like to contribute to the organization, you will be amazed at the results!

Holland Codes a useful Tool

Holland Code Assessment can be used as a way to help individuals identify what they like to do in their job and what kind of environment would be best suited for them when doing career exploration.

I typically do this one on one with clients using a Peak and Valley exercise whereby I ask the client to tell me what they like the most or least about each of their jobs. We then look at all the "peaks" or highs of what they like and that generally gives me a pretty good idea of potential career paths that I can recommend for them to investigate.

The Holland Code model does the same thing in a more scientific way and certainly has more resources attached to it, as you can take someone's Holland Code and start to match up potential career paths using the National Occupany Chart or NOC listing of careers.

Check out the following link for a free Holland Code Assessment that you can use with your client groups when doing career counselling.

http://www.roguecc.edu/Counseling/HollandCodes/test.asp

A Lesson Learned - Service Recovery is Critical!

Think twice before you fail the customer. With the most recent example of bad customer service, United Airlines is paying the price. What could have easily been solved with an offer of $600.00 United is now paying thousands as a result of having their "gaffe" broadcasted all over the world on U-Tube. The lead guitarist from the Sons of Maxwell tried patiently and calmly to get the situation resolved for 9 months when United Airlines brokes his guitar in transit. Finally fed up with the situation he made a song and a pretty corny, yet amusing video. Since posting it the song and video to utube it has been hit 1.5 million times, making United Airlines look like the bad guy all around the world.

Having a service recovery policy in place, and enabling staff to make good customer service decisions is critical to ensure that something like this doesn't happen to your business.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

MetaPlace the new Second Life

Creating a new virtual world to conduct leadership simulations is a thought that has been bouncing around for a while. It would be interesting to give different individuals different parts of a case study with attached scripts, and then get them to act out how they would solve the problems applying the leadership learning that they receive in the classroom.

Each individual would be assigned an avatar with a code name, that wouldn't be identifiable until after the simulation or experience is over. An instructor would be on-line giving student feedback on all their interactions and problem solving methods.

Or you could even have different avators coaching each other without knowing who exactly they are.

I found a new site that is like second life except way easier to create your own virtual world. Within minutes I had my own space, furniture, trees and yes even a pet squirrel. Check out where the world of learning is going...


If anybody has done this type of learning using a virtual space for leadership simulation I would be very interested in hearing from them.