How to start with the Career Paths framework in your organization
Before starting
The Career Paths, as a framework, is part of the whole management process. This is a key point.
Running a Career Paths session is not a goal, it is a way to reach your goal.
So the first question to ask yourself is: “What do you want to achieve?”
Do you expect to transform your organisation? Are you looking for valuable persons to reach an objective? Do you want to diagnose your team?…
Process
The Career Paths process can be set in 4 distinct steps, depending of the teams and the objectives you have.
- Self-diagnostic, the persons (helped by a faciliator) will fill their paths according to their experience.
- Reality check, the persons (helped by someone who has information, facts, feedback from customers, colleagues, projects…) with the manager (as an example) will discuss if the auto-diagnostic matches the facts. We can compare this step to the 360’s approach.
- Target definition, the persons will define their next steps where they want to make progress, what they want to explore.
- Planning, the persons will define (with management, HR…) the steps to reach their personnal targets.
The above steps require specific skills:
- For the auto_diagnostic step, the challenge is to define your position relatively to others. The exercise is difficult, the person often either underestimates their value or overestimates it.
- For the reality check step, being conscious of their real value can be disturbing. They may have some good suprises or the reality may hurt.
- For the target definition step, clarification may be difficult. Defining objectives, being aware of and sharing one’s internal motivation are not so common.
- For the planning step, defining SMART objectives is a challenge of its own.
Examples of next steps
Let’s take a concrete example. A front-end developper, specialized in Angular. Their target is to be able to diagnose front-end systems.
They have a lot of topics to learn and capabilities to develop:
- in order to have a global front-end culture, they need to have at least basic practice level in VueJs, React…
- in order to share their diganosis, they need to develop their ability to synthetize
- in order to diagnose, they should know how to interview, communicate, facilitate…
- they should also have in mind that developing their knowledge of DevOps and backend practices will help them understand front-end systems even further
So, it is clearly not a 6 months plan. And defining baby steps, with clear objectives, makes sense.
The whole process may take several years. And of course, the target may change over time.
Keeping all this in mind is a key point to embrace change.
From the individual to the organisation
The diagnostic part will help you assess your organisation strengths against the challenges you have to adress.
You can build a radar of your teams and compare the current situation with where you need to be.
From this point onward, you may either train your team to acquire the missing skills, or adapt your recruitment plan accordingly.
In any case, the plan must balance out the individual dreams and the organisational goals.
Sharing about the organisation challenges with the teams can help individuals identify new growth opportunities.
Going further, a common mistake for organizations is to solely rely on the managers own conception of what people want and what they can do.
By directly discussing with the individuals:
- good surprises can come up,
- people may naturally volunteer,
- people can be less frustrated from the feeling of “missed oppportunities,
- opportunities can be proposed to other people than the usual ones.
Overall, motivation is a key factor to achieve performance. Therefore, it is advised to regularly involve field people in opportunities assessments, as opposed to arbitrarily selecting “those who can do the job”.
If you are interested in Agile Organisations skills, you can have a look at what Agile’OA did.
Required skills to help teammates
Helping people fulfilling their career objectives requires specific skills, such as:
- Individual / personal coaching,
- Transformation coaching,
- Facilitation,
- HR guidance,
- Management.
All skills can help at different points of time in supoprting one’s career path journey.