Want to Keep Your Best Employees? Value Their Expertise
Although career path progression has always mattered to individuals and immediate leaders, the current emphasis on talent retention makes it more important than ever. Understanding what motivates employees can help in tailoring opportunities to grow their skills and capabilities.
The Importance of Checking In
As a leader, I survey my team every quarter and ask the following questions: What do you love doing and want to do more of? What do you least enjoy? Do you have future management ambitions? If so, in how many years do you want to achieve it, and if not, what else can we do to keep you challenged and engaged at work? Although employees aren’t required to answer every question, most of them like to offer feedback.
My team is very diverse and has clearly defined career objectives made clear from quarterly surveys. These range from internal mobility to management to a desire to hone their technical skills, or to have more "evangelism" opportunities such as conference speaking slots.
In addition to being a key data input for crafting individual career path progression plans, survey results also highlight larger trends occurring in the talent space. Leaders in particular must understand the value of having career progression plans that incentivize and reward individuals for developing deep domain expertise and skills, if that’s the direction they want to take with their careers.
Don’t Force Your Employees’ Hand
In the past, domain experts often faced a difficult career progression choice: continue to hone their knowledge in the hopes it’ll be appropriately valued, or move up to management to more rapidly alter their pay grade.
As one observer notes, “unintentional career growth often leads to the management track. Becoming a manager is often presented as the natural next step after senior — but for many developers, it can be a huge mistake…” Of course, developers in this context could be substituted for any knowledge worker or professional with specialist expertise.
Related Article: Employee Stay Interviews: the Key to Retention?
As leaders, we should support people who harbor management ambitions, but we must also find ways to recognize and value the people that prefer to be or remain individual contributors — professionals in non-management roles who enjoy helping their organization reach their goals.
Recently, organizations have been increasingly concerned with letting employees make their own choices, thus turning the traditional view of career progression on its head.
For example, the Australian government is considering creating “specialist pathways“ that carve out spaces for “senior specialists that don’t look after people”. Internationally, specific engineering career paths are becoming more common.
However, these programs are not without challenges — the main one being that leaders must work harder to keep roles interesting and challenging for individual contributors. That way they feel like they’re continuing to grow professionally and being rewarded appropriately.
Strike that balance, and great things can happen for the individuals, their teams and the organization as a whole.
Learning Opportunities
Valuing Talented People
In our current macroeconomic environment, organizations and leaders are more interested than ever in keeping domain experts in their employ.
They are also focused on finding and nurturing people with good “mindset” skills that show a keen interest in learning about their organization’s specific domain area and then applying that knowledge.
By “mindset” skills, I’m talking about soft skills like an ability to learn or the desire to remove distractions or inefficiencies from business operations. These are the skills I hear executives talking about trying to bring in and maintain, and there are good reasons for wanting them.
Related Article: Increase Retention and Engagement with Internal Mobility
First, every organization has its own set of products or services. To be successful in business, you need internal experts who understand the products well enough to be able to sell or configure them for paying customers. Successful organizations value this appropriately because they know how difficult this kind of knowledge is to source and nurture. The people most likely to succeed are those with an openness and capacity to learn.
Second, the value of attracting and retaining these domain experts — and honing their expertise — is that they’re often best placed to identify effective change or process improvement opportunities. Organizations are always chasing operational efficiency, and this is one way to achieve it.
For existing staff, their domain knowledge affords them a fine-grained understanding of how things work internally. The more they know, the more they’re able to influence improvement within the organization. With the current business focus on saving money and improving efficiency, a valuable skill is being able to recognize where inefficiencies and process improvement opportunities lie and what change might be beneficial.
There’s also value in bringing in new but receptive employees and training them up on these internal domains. This way they can a) hit the ground running by providing immediate value to their organization, but also b) act as a ‘fresh set of eyes’ to the process inefficiency problem. Using a different lens to assess a problem can be the difference that sets your organization apart from its competitors.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
About the Author
Chris Ellis, director of pre-sales at Nintex, gained invaluable experience in SharePoint, Office 365 and the Nintex Platform as a pre-sales solution specialist within the partner network. Hailing from Aberdeen in Scotland, his work with the Nintex Platform exposed him to the full lifecycle from analysis and requirement gathering to delivery, support and training, contributing across a spectrum of projects in various industries and in some interesting places.
Connect with Chris Ellis:
Featured Research
Buyer's Guide
Read Now
Research Report
Read Now
eBook
Read Now
Research Report
Read Now
White Paper
Read Now
Research Report
Read Now
Guide
Read Now
Guide
Read Now
Related Stories
Reworked CONNECT 2024 - Pre-Registration is Now Open!
