How To Have Great Employee Development Conversations

The most important indicator of an employee's engagement, well-being, and productivity is a healthy and supportive relationship with their immediate manager. One of the primary ways that managers build strong relationships with their employees is by investing time in two-way development conversations. These ongoing conversations enable managers to establish a culture where employees grow, adapt, and evolve to achieve their career development goals. Here are four practices for meaningful development conversations:

1. Setting Development Expectations

The belief that employees should receive a promotion and pay increase if they acquire new knowledge, skills, or abilities creates unrealistic expectations for managers because of the limited opportunities to provide promotions or significant pay increases. That is why managers must clarify the expectation to employees that ongoing development is a baseline for job performance.

To represent this mindset shift, the career lattice model shows how job and career growth have shifted from a vertical ladder progression to a vertical, horizontal, and diagonal progression that can change throughout an employee's career. Movement on the lattice can be represented by growth in their job, on their team, or in their career. The image below illustrates this concept.

2. Clearly Define The Employee’s Responsibility

Successful development conversations resulting in real professional growth are not a one-way street. What often gets overlooked is the employees' role in having successful development conversations that result in meaningful growth. Employees have a shared responsibility with their manager to establish an ongoing pattern of effective development conversations by showing a desire for guidance, feedback, and coaching for improved performance and career growth.

Employee Responsibilities For Successful Career Development?

• Owning and managing their careers; identify their career aspirations.?
• Seek to understand priorities so they can align development goals with organization goals.
• Prepare for conversations by identifying areas of development focus.
• Reflect on progress along the way. Share their approach, progress, and insights with a support system.
• Seek support through feedback and discussion with the manager.?

3. Co-Creating Meaningful Development Goals

Setting clear and meaningful development goals provides the benefits of clarity, focus, and accountability. A meaningful development goal is a magnet for maximizing one's effort to achieve an intended behavior change. Helping employees define a challenging, achievable, and meaningful development goal is not a one-size-fits-all approach. To find success in developing challenging goals, managers should:?

• Engage in humble inquiry around developmental aspirations,
• Help the employee see real opportunities for growth, and?
• Consider ways that growth might look different for all employees.

The SMART framework is the most popular approach for setting goals, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Although helpful, this approach rarely gets employees all the way to where they need to be when creating development goals. The image below captures the SMART concepts while addressing other important aspects for effective goals.

4. Ongoing Coaching Conversations?

Once the goal is defined, the focus of development conversations shifts to coaching the team member on what's going well, what could be better, and how you can help the team member develop professionally.?

Effective developmental coaching requires leading by asking quality questions. Leading with questions allows leaders to understand the employees' perspectives before choosing what input they need to provide. Shifting from leading through telling to leading through coaching helps create an environment where employees feel valued, empowered, and motivated. Leaders who are best at coaching for development regularly ask the following types of questions.

Questions That Assess Development Progress:?

• How are you progressing toward your development goal?
• What is going well? / What is not going well?
• What are your new learnings and insights?
• What new habits and skills are you demonstrating?
• What is your biggest challenge?

Questions That Generate Solutions:?

• What are your ideas for the next steps?
• What can you do to develop this area further?
• What is your biggest obstacle, and how will you overcome it?
• What actions do you plan to take in the next quarter?
• How will you know if you are successful?
• What agreements can we make to stay focused on your development goal?

Supporting Healthy Development

With any development goal, setbacks and reverting to old, undesired habits are common. Leaders should help employees not view setbacks as failures that can cause disappointment and loss of the drive to accomplish the goal. Leaders and employees must understand that an occasional failure or setback is part of any development process. When there are setbacks, use them as an opportunity to help the employee reflect, resulting in insights and actions that will guide them forward.

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? Read more of my articles on Self-Leadership and Leading Others at my Forbes Leadership Strategy Homepage

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:?Tony Gambill is the President of ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm helping organizations, executives, and managers bring practical skills to Self-Leadership and Leading Others. He is the author of, Getting It Right When It Matters Most: Self-Leadership For Work & Life .