What are your strategies for professional development in your teams?
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I try to find out what each individual in my team has passion about and what he is really good at, then position him with more tasks/projects in that area.
I occasionally give them something outside their comfort zone just to see how well they adapt if to see if there are areas that they never thought will be of interest with them.
When someone ask for a promotion, I ask two questions: who will be your replacement, and depending on the situation it might lead to that being a requirement for their further progress, they need to indefinitely and empower someone to take more of their tasks so they can move upward. Second question is how they see their duties and responsibilities will change in the new positions. Here I hear what they think and explain what are the expectations. Sometimes, they might want a promotion just for the acknowledgment of their skills, or for more money, but you need to understand why they want to get promoted and they need to understand of your/organization expectation for that postpone.
For example you have senior system admin and there is a manager position available. If the sys admin wants to get a promotion just to get more money or to show that he is progressing in the career/company but he does not want to manage others then its better to create system architect position and give him/her more money and title then to move him/her to manager, and both of you will realize soon that its not working. This way you are loosing a good employee, who likely will start looking for a new job.
I try to make sure that everyone who joins my team also belongs to a 'guild' with other people in the company who perform a similar function. So, our designer has a mentor and other designers that she meets with weekly.
Love this! A community of practice. I have been building this in my company around security. So that anyone in security or interested in security has a forum of people they can ask questions, or seek help.
One thing I did when I joined ZoomInfo is ask my direct reports about what each person is passionate about. Matching the job to their passion is critical. Understand that and if you can move things around to align with their passion, then work doesn't feel like work. That's something that I wish we could do more of as we are building the organization.
We can all name at least a dozen people who were the best engineer or the best coder until they were promoted to a position of leadership. They were promoted based on the hope that their skills could then trickle down to the people they're leading, but the reality is they'll never be a good leader because that's not what they wanted to do. That's often overlooked in talent development: Are we putting people in jobs they will excel at, or are we making it harder for them to be their best? Because that impacts culture.
My team and I discussed this recently and we decided that each Thursday afternoon we would block out for Professional Development. And once a month on one of those Thursdays we are going to come together to discuss what we have learnt. So that we can benefit from the learning and thinking ofthe team. I'll let you know how it goes!