4 Unusual Signs you Might be Messing up With Employee Development

Employee development is an easily forgotten and less discussed issue.

Rather, most of the times the focus is on dealing with problems that arise due to neglecting employee development as a part of cultural growth of the company. A major one of them is losing your most valued employees and then finding someone suitable to fill the void. Which can be quite expensive. 

As a better approach, managers should take employee development as helping their employees shape the future of their careers. Yet many managers handle this as a bureaucratic exercise and don't take it personally. And this is the number one mistake they do.

In a way they are unknowingly messing up with employee development whether they admit it or not. And even if they think their team is performing well and that everything is under control, there are things that they do which create distrust among their employees.

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With this in mind let us see what they are doing wrong:

Failing to Show The Right Support

Employees who are talented have a natural tendency to advance and succeed in their careers. As a way to it, they look for meaningful support of their managers. Employees who are high achievers or are young and ambitious want to train themselves via proper channels of mentoring and coaching. They mean business and want to gain valuable skills as they progress through their jobs. They also want to become versatile.

So, if you are not showing your support to them, you are naturally killing their development. And this will not go unnoticed to your employees. The flip side would be, if you don't provide them what they want they will have someone else do it for them.

Undervaluing Their Work

Many times the good work done by some of the talented employees of the company goes unnoticed. This may due to many reasons. But whatever the reason may be, as a leader it is manager's job to cut through various channels and be aware of performance of his or her employees at every level.

In a large organization this may not be possible. But still, the upper level leaders can create leaders below them who value employee development as a top priority. Not doing it will only make talented and hardworking employees feel that their efforts are not being valued and supported.

Also, one may never know where the gold mine can lie within their own organization. So, if managers won't value what they already have they will be in a big loss. A loss they will remain unknown to. Good employees will leave and managers will only know they were good when they have left.

Not Listening To Their Ideas

Many employees see their personal development through the way of enhancing their interpersonal and leadership skills. If all they do is what has been told to them (as if they are only meant to follow orders and never have a say in the matter) they will become unhappy with their jobs.

I have seen that many times employees come with new ideas and want to share things that they think can bring a change. But when such ideas are not appreciated and valued by the management it creates a distrust in employees.

This distrust is hard to let go, because the talented and hardworking employees generally know whether they are right or wrong with something they came up with.

For example, if an employee comes with a plan that he thinks can increase the sales by slightly changing the sales strategy, the manager should at least give it a try once or at least discuss it rather than simply saying NO to it. He should let the employee take leadership stance, if he or she is asking for one, in taking the plan further. This will create a feeling of trust.  

If the plan is ignored it will not only demotivate the employee, but he or she will also look at it if the manager is coming a little haughty. The employee will no longer be able to trust the manager if the manager doesn't answer all the questions that the employee has, with a rational mentality, as to why he or she didn’t go with the plan.

Overburdening Them

Sometimes, the cause of the overburden is the increase in the performance of the employees. Some manager’s shadow it in the sense of providing an increased responsibility to their employees. But employees know the difference between increased responsibility and increased workload.

If an employee does his work well, he should be provided with an opportunity to increase his skill by letting him learn new things or letting him try out different approaches to work. Doing good and quality work is a way of the employee to let his manager know that he or she is ready to move to the next level. And it should not be confused with he or she wanting to do more of it. 

Finally, the managers who take employee development personally are able to win trust of their employees, attract good people and nurture employee talent for company’s own sake. So it's time to take this issue more seriously.

Author Bio:

Vartika Kashyap is the Marketing Manager at ProofHub and has been one of the LinkedIn Top Voices in 2017. Her articles are inspired by office situations and work-related events. She likes to write about productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, entrepreneurship among others and contributing to a better workplace is what makes her click.