Step 4: Discover Multiple Options

Help your employees consider multiple career goals while they grow within their current positions. When employees analyze their potential development goals in terms of business needs and the strategic intent of the organization, everyone wins.

GO TO Goals

Caution! The employee is still primarily responsible for his or her career. Our suggestions do not mean telling the person what to do. Instead, offer choices for employees to analyze and consider.

Offering choices is important, but sometimes difficult. For generations, the only acceptable career direction has been up. (Actually, that is still often true in many cultures and companies.) But there are at least five other ways employees can move their careers along. You can help your employees consider options like these:

• Move laterally (a change in job, but not necessarily a change in the level of responsibility)

• Explore (requires answering questions like “What else can I do?”)

• Enrich (seeds the current job with more chances to learn and grow)

• Realign (reconciles the demands of work with other priorities, or readies them for another area)

• Relocate (yes, leaving the organization if the work simply cannot match a person’s skills, interests, or values)

You can give your employees permission to discover the possibilities based on their interests, what they value, and what they can contribute to the organization.

The more options your employee identifies, the better. Exits and disengagements occur when an employee’s only goal is thwarted.

Once you have helped your employees look at options so that not all of their plans reflect the vertical mindset, they will feel as if they have more leverage to manage their own careers.