Organizations & Careers Fueled by Aligned Talent Development

Mutual benefit stems from empowering your team’s personal growth to accelerate their career and your business

The teams you lead, consisting of career professionals, have career goals and aspirations. They have goals and want to make progress, find fulfillment, and build wealth through career growth. You as a business or company leader, have company or group business objectives and growth aspirations. But do these priorities align with the work your team does and wants to do? Do your associates’ goals support your business objectives? Do they plan for their work supporting your company’s business as the backbone to build their career on, or is this a stepping stone for them, and they’re out in 1-2 years? These are important questions about leadership’s perception, awareness, and talent management approach, and I’d venture to guess that many of us as leaders, don’t know theses answers for many of our team members, or for our company. This alignment is critical to making long-term sustainable company and personal growth, to exist in harmony, and not working against each other.

Aligning your teams growth with company growth, ensures mutual benefit

The rise of personal growth and development has been remarkable over the last 50 years. Companies have supported the worker more and more with multiple avenues for development opportunities, including everything from online learning modules to conferences and many types of learning and development avenues in between. These trainings or learning and development opportunities can be great, but can be limited in effectiveness when real genuine alignment is missing for some companies. Organizations can easily miss fostering and promoting personal growth that aligns with company growth, which adds to the bottom line with gains in skills, confidence, and commitment, but also brings value to the associate. Providing development opportunities is great and it’s a big step in the right direction for companies that would have balked at it the further you go back in history, but the magic for companies to realize the full up side, is to link employee development to company growth and success. Mutual growth and success, in alignment, is the way for learning and development to support your organization of the future.

How to align individual career growth with organizational objectives

• Individual Development Plan (IDP) or Personal Development Plan

• Organizational succession strategies or maps

• Assigning/requesting projects aligned to personal interests

• Seeking promotion or lateral moves in areas of interest

• Employee understanding of organizational structure, business units, or groups and the associated roles relevant to their skills and experience

• Organizations leading talent reviews to understand each individual’s skills and experience at a deeper level

• Companies providing exploratory development beyond training, like company, business unit, group, product, or development update sessions (good old lunch and learn)

• Companies looking at their core objectives, and aligning talent management priorities, IDPs, and talent reviews to assemble one clear talent development roadmap

• Strategic hiring - pause, and before hiring externally, consider who internally can do this job, who has relevant skills, who can we train for the role, versus hire each time)

Importance to talent

As a talented professional or if you are interested in achieving more in your career, consider prioritizing organizations that invest in your development and go above and beyond with supporting your efforts to prepare yourself for your next role. This doesn’t mean your company steers your personal development journey - that’s your job, but look for employers that will foster an environment of mentors, leaders interested in promoting their team members, a culture of succession planning, opportunities for stretch assignments, and real tangible time allowed for personal growth. For additional context on personal development, check out one of my features on Medium regarding career development, a the article on getting promoted in corporate America and another on designing and building and intentional career.

For companies, prioritizing personal development will continue to differentiate you as one of the best places to work if you embrace it, invest in your people, and show it through action. If you want to be a top place to work, invest in your people, promote your people, and show them that their growth is one of your top three priorities. In today’s talent landscape, this isn’t a nice to have, or something we can be okay at as an organization, but a requirement to compete for talent and requires real work and commitment. Competing for talent without a strong culture of talent management and leadership development, quickly becomes a commoditized salary bidding war. Some of this can come down to where you want to prioritize investing in your people for organizations that don’t have the ability to take on both investments - prioritize healthier salary, benefits, or other compensation oriented value for your teams, or invest more in personal development opportunities and resources. In today’s world, you don’t have that option - the answer is you need both. If talent retention, talent development, and talent attraction are real priorities, you need to invest in it to fullest. These are not areas to cut key investments from your HR and Talent budgets. In order to have a fighting chance at top talent, investing in your people will continue to be critical, and the better you plan on your priorities, in alignment with business needs for personnel, the better positioned you will be.

Effort and vision

In order to make this happen for a firm, this takes the real work, where organizations truly care and show that support and actually support their team members. It’s not talk, but it’s reality, proven by action and investment, communicated across the organization in various way to ensure equal access and visibility across roles, levels, groups, as it makes sense for your organization. This does not mean adding more modules and calling it good, but it means investing in areas where it’s going to make people better. Yes, this may take more technology, travel, talent management, hiring, or resources, in some cases. It takes commitment from the top down, and the bottom up to be better, and this alignment will drive better organizational results.

As you grow your people and the investment is dedicated to their development, make sure you have the communication and visibility into the the what, the why, the how, the results, outcomes, etc. Investing, but not sharing can limit the impact of goodwill and shared success that can come from this investment. Touting results without context, or sharing tools without a why, can limit their impact. Communication is equally important as the investment.

Leadership embracing a new way

What does this mean on the day-to-day for business? Investment in learning and development, talent management, leadership development, and related areas doesn’t get leaders off the hook for the real-time, weekly, and team feedback and development activities. In fact, all the aforementioned should be considered supplements to what the company’s leaders provide as development, not in place of. This can be a real miss for the culture of leadership and development in some organizations with a misconception that training and development does your job for you with developing your people. There are few replacements for in the moment coaching, feedback, radical candor, discussions throughout the course of each day and week. That’s where some of the most effective and beneficial development takes place, and often what separates the good and the best leaders from the mediocre and poor leaders - real solid leadership with your teams, in the moment, consistently, and on-going, and in alignment with your development, not replaced or in place of. Establishing this cadence as a leader is essential to even being a leader. You may wonder, what other value can come from these development conversations? Discussing the real work that needs to be done, crushing politics, acknowledgment of effort and achievement, and moving work forward.

Freedom to explore

One item that has been increasingly a hot topic with employers, is the part-time gig, side hustle as it’s affectionately called, or whatever variation you want to label it. This may be a somewhat in conflict with the view from many companies’ perspective, but consider allowing your team members to branch out and get a feel for other things. Let people explore their interests, hobbies, extracurricular activities, side hustles, side gigs, and money-making endeavors. The more you freedom and trust you give them, the more loyal they will be, as they will appreciate and respect your understanding and support. In some cases, it will actually show them they can find more fulfillment than they thought in their current role or with their current company. Or it may show them their true passion and help them find their next role within your organization. If people are eventually going to leave, they were going to leave anyway, so restricting their activities unnecessarily is just going to extend a negative impression on them, and may push them out even sooner.

This doesn’t mean let them be a direct competitor, steal intellectual property, steal your employees, but the guidelines should be very free on what they can do, and quite specific on what they can’t do. This of course can vary by industry as well, as with some industries, the limits must be tighter where clients can be easily moved from one agency to another. But in a lot of cases, we restrict team members from spending time on passions, hobbies, exploring their interests, and in most cases, all that does is force our employees to be unsatisfied or to leave. Make sure your agreements and policies are in place for the right reasons and protecting against actual risk, not just there because you have always done it that way.

The founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, wrote a book originally intended as an internal manual, but later released publicly, called, “Let My People Go Surfing”. If you’re interested in learning more on the story, check out this Founders episode. Chouinard’s perspective on employee satisfaction and freedom can be helpful context for leaders looking to transform or learn how to empower and promote a more freeing culture.

Value to the organization

Organizations have an opportunity to find that linkage of tying personal growth to company growth, which improves retention, engagement, and tangible performance and results. Alignment of personal and organizational development is a powerful concept that companies can gain a lot if they explore, while finding how to accelerate growth and success for individuals and the organization. As technology, markets, and people evolve, so will organizations in order to adapt their response and support for their teams’ growth and development. You don’t have to have all of the answers for personal and organizational development alignment now, but it’s important to start somewhere. Regardless of company size, consider dedicating some time to explore this unique opportunity in front of your organization. Personal growth and development may offer a new way for your organization to align with your people in a transformative way. Lead your space with this endeavor to uncover the power in organization and personal development, in alignment and harmony, working together, not in silos.

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