AxTenk Blog

Career Discussion Do’s and Don’ts

Here are the Don’ts:

Recognize Their Talents
• Don’t assume your employees for granted.
• Don’t interrogate — investigate instead.
• Don’t tell them just what to do—listen for what they aspire to do and reason why they can do better.

Offer Your Perspective
• Don’t say untruthful things just to avoid confrontation.
• Don’t just focus on performance feedback alone—complement with developmental feedback.
• Don’t emphasize on weaknesses only. Offer balanced perspective and capitalize on strengths as well.

Discuss Trends
• Don’t underestimate the impact of constant, progressive change on employees’ learning and development.
• Don’t avoid talking about an unpredictable, disrupting future.
• Don’t ignore the importance of how company culture can affect careers.

Discover Multiple Options
• Don’t let them pursue vertical career moves only. Explore possible Horizontal moves also.
• Don’t over promises and under deliver.
• Don’t forget to give several possible outcomes.

Action Plan
• Don’t use training alone for development program.
• Don’t avoid of recommending external sources from your department.
• Don’t ignore the current assignment as a practice field.

Career Discussion Do’s and Don’ts

Here are the Do’s:
Recognize Their Talents
• Do understand  individuals out and find out what makes them interested.
• Do give positive encouragement, nurturing and support.
• Do ask open-ended, probing questions, using words like what, who, where, why and when.

Offer Your Perspective
• Do ask individuals to assess themselves and ask others for their opinions.
• Do give specific, concrete, positive feedback with examples.
• Do clarify organizational standards and expectations.

Discuss Trends
• Do provide information on organization vision & mission, industry, and professional trends.
• Do allow talented individuals to access and expand into your network.
• Do discuss your insight on how current opportunities and challenges may affect their careers.

Discover Multiple Options
• Do discuss multiple, SMART career goals.
• Do encourage individuals to envision their future and realize their dream.
• Do help set individual goals that are aligned with organization and business needs.

Action Plan
• Do suggest available resources and job activities.
• Do get individuals to commit and take action.
• Do empower them to help strengthen and improve their plans.

How Can You Teach Your Employees to widen their network?
Try to link each employee to the appropriate person most able to fill their needs by looking for these skills:
    Nurturing.

Encourage your employees to build personal relationships with others in the organization.
    Sponsoring.

You can be a sponsor for your employee yourself or find a colleague or senior team member who can help your employee gain visibility, perhaps even recommend them for a new job. Different sponsor might offer something different.
    Teaching.

As a manager, you cannot be the only teacher for your entire employees. Find someone who can help them learn new skills, expertise and build themselves. Teach your employees to fish, rather them give them a fish. This may be a short-term teaching experience or a long-term, ongoing professional association.
    Informing.

Some of your colleagues may have different the power sources than you are, and other people may have different connections from yours. Find someone who has information about what’s going on inside or outside the organization and encourage them to share it.

    Advising.

Find a person who is in a position to give valuable advice. The more you can link these good advice-givers, the better.

Building an information-rich culture is quite challenging. There are occasions when you are sensitive to information that you simply must protect and cannot share with your employees. Here are simple guidelines that help you handle this delicate situation appropriately without alienating your employees. When the information must be kept confidential, follows these guidelines:
    Don’t share to non-relevant party, no matter how tempting the information and the situation might be.
    Never use information withholding as your political power tool. If you are given proprietary or sensitive information, do not tell people unless they ask you first.
    If people ask you whether you have information, give them candid, honest answer. Don’t tell them that you don’t have information when you do.

    Tell them that you are not at liberty to share, and importantly tell them the reason why; for example, “The information is sensitive, confidential or proprietary,” or “I have been asked to keep it confidential and protected, and I need to honor that request.”
    Be prepared for the possibility that people will not happy with your response, and they feel that you really should or could tell them if you wanted to. If you establish good track record of early, honest information-sharing, you will have more room to withhold information when the situation requires.

If enrichment is useful and beneficial for organization, why doesn’t it become standard part of every job? One good reason is this: What enriches one employee is different from another one. So, How do you tailor job enrichment to individuals and their unique needs? You need to ask them.

Try these six questions to help people probe for possibilities of enrichment:
    Do you know how important is your job to the company?
    What skills, expertise and talents do you use on the job?
    What skills, expertise and talents do you have that you don’t use?
    Do you find your job challenging and how to make it more challenging and rewarding?
    In what areas would you like greater responsibility for your current works?
    What are your goals in the next three to five years?
    How would you like your job changed? What areas of improvement do you want to achieve?

For All Directors or Managers of Managers,

If several managers report to you, how do you hold them accountable for the teams they lead and manage? Busy people do what is inspected, not necessarily what is expected. You can expect honest efforts to keep good talented people, because those people build the pillar of your business. Here are some options.

Develop a Retention Commitment Process:
 List all key strategies and let your team narrow down to just 10 strategies that are the most appropriate for your organizational culture. Ask each of your managers to commit to two Key Strategies they are willing to implement within the next six months.
 Six months later, ask them to report their implementation progress with a description of what they did for each of the strategies to which they have committed.
 Evaluate on your managers. Set a realistic performance goal of increasing retention by a specific percentage over the previous year.
 Rate your managers against those performance goal, and reward them appropriately.
Identify your top retention, most productive or innovative managers. And Exercise positive reinforcement throughout the process.

 Coach the managers who are poor in keeping talents within your organization. If they can’t change/improve, help them leave the job or the organization.
 Send a reply note to managers. Then, hold individual meeting with each managers in two weeks and talk about their responses.
 Model what you want them to do. Remember that your actions speak louder than your words. Tell your managers what retention strategies you’re working on (after you’ve asked what they want), and then really work on those strategies.

Here are reasons Why Most Employees Stay in the Organization:
1. Greater Job security and stability during economic crisis
2. Great company environment and culture
3. Diverse, changing job assignments
4. Flexibility: working hours, dressing code, and so on
5. Inspiring and motivating leadership
6. Full of  challenging work
7. Being recognized, valued, respected and rewarded
8. Clear Path for Career growth
9. Learning & Development
10. Opportunity to Work with Great people
11. Opportunity to making a difference
12. Pay according to merit
13. Good Benefits
14. Supportive and Inspiring management
15. Sense of Loyalty, good commitment to the organization
16. Job Excitement
17. Good Team Spirit
18. Have Pride in the organization, its vision and mission
19. Sense of Responsibility
20. Job Autonomy and sense of control

Key Criterias for effective decision-making processes:
    It acknowledges both subjective and objective factors and blends analytical with intuitive thinking;
    It is easy to use, straightforward, reliable, and flexible.
    It focuses on what is important;
    It requires only as much information and analysis as is necessary to resolve a particular dilemma;
    It is logical and consistent;
    It encourages the collection of relevant information and informed opinion;

Key Elements  for making effective decision:
1.    Consider all risks and consequences.
2.    Deal with the right problem and work on that.
3.    Understand all relationships and inter-conectivity between all decision elements.
4.    Clarify all areas of uncertainties.
5.    Specify goals and objectives prior to embarking the decision process.
6.    Create options and alternatives.
7.    Willing to make trade-offs.
8.    Understand risk tolerance and impact.