Business owners spend considerable time building strategies for growth, but an often overlooked aspect of a business’s trajectory is the continual investment in employee development.
Helping your team build skills, gain experiences and grow into more advanced roles is like sharpening your kitchen knives to achieve a finer, more precise cut. Creating and rolling out an employee development plan can help attract new talent, retain your existing team and position your business for continued success.
It’s an all-around win in our book.
If you’re considering creating and implementing an employee development plan, we have a few tips to get you started.
Clearly define your business goals
Yes, before you dive into your team, we recommend taking a step back to look at your business as a whole. First: levelset.
How is your business performing in terms of revenue generation, growth or other key metrics? What barriers are impeding your growth? What gaps exist in your offers, team or overall capabilities?
Once you’ve gotten a solid handle on your current state, look to the future.
Where do you want your business to be, and how will you get there? Do you have the team you need to achieve your ambitions? Are there clear gaps that team members could fill with additional resources or skills? Does your team want to grow into more senior positions within your business?
With this knowledge close at hand, you can begin to create an employee development plan that elevates your team and your business simultaneously.
Embrace a culture of learning
As a strategic marketing firm, Giant Voices operates in a field that is continually evolving. It’s interesting and exciting to reflect on how our business has changed.
The client work we generate today hardly resembles the work we were completing 10 years ago. Our team is developing complex and highly integrated campaigns, generating revenue and sales for our clients. We wouldn’t be able to offer, let alone deliver, this type of strategic sales enablement work had our team not been hungry to learn all along the way.
Back in 2019, when our business was reaching a critical tipping point in our maturity and ability to serve clients at a higher level, Giant Voices leadership created a short course for our team that explored Learning to Learn and the Navigation of Moods: The Meta-Skill for the Acquisition of Skills by Gloria Flores.
Our team had reading assignments followed by a classroom-like setting for discussion. Perhaps the most valuable lesson from this course is the incredible impact our individual moods can have on our ability to learn new skills.
Unproductive moods can plague everyone at times, but the ability to recognize and shift that mood into one of curiosity, excitement or wonder is a gift not just in the workplace, but in every aspect of life.
Once we, as a team, viewed ourselves as constant ‘learners’, we found more excitement around deeper exploration of complex marketing challenges and strategies for our clients.
We embraced a culture of learning, providing us freedom to try new things, experiment, fast-fail and to keep looking for better solutions for our clients. We eliminated the need to be subject matter experts immediately and replaced it with the freedom to learn, grow, explore and excel for ourselves, our business and our clients.
The Learning to Learn mindset has been so successful at Giant Voices that we dust off our copies every few years to explore it again with both new and existing Giants. There’s always room to learn, and in the right environment, that’s a recipe for continued growth.
Empower Your Team to Take the Lead
After you’ve completed the internal, operational legwork to define your business goals for the near future and create an environment that supports learning and growth, the next natural step is empowering your team to take the lead on individual development plans.
Yes, growing a stronger team will support business growth, but it’s up to your team to think about their future and what they truly want out of their career.
Ambitious, future-focused employees want to grow themselves and your company. Provide power and possibility, and there’s no telling how far they’ll go.
Encourage your team to reflect on the following questions and let them know you’re available to help provide direction, determine new goals and brainstorm action plans.
- What do you want to achieve in your role this year?
- What is your ideal next career step?
- What skills would help you in your role today?
- What skills would help you progress to the next level?
- What experiences will help you grow?
- How will additional training and development help you support this business?
- How can we support your growth?
- Do you have any technology needs?
Working together with your employees to create individualized development plans creates shared accountability and responsibility for growth and progression. Driven employees will seize the opportunity. Complacent or unmotivated employees may self-select out—and that’s an okay element of healthy turnover.
Once the plans are formalized and in place, let your employees run, explore, learn and grow for the betterment of themselves, their careers and your business.
We recommend a mid-year check-in to ensure employees are on track to achieve their ambitions, as well as a more in-depth annual review to reflect on successes and challenges and reinvigorate the employee development plan for the year to come.
Ongoing employee development leads to a stronger team, a healthier company culture and a higher quality of work. By nurturing the talents and potential of your team members, you’re not just investing in a brighter future for your company—you’re investing in the power of your people.
