If You Want to Build Your Business, Help People Build Their Careers

As a CEO or business leader, the most impactful thing you can do to drive the success of your organisation is to help other people to get what they want. That’s true of your customers, investors and strategic partners, and it’s definitely true of your employees. Helping the people in your team to build exciting, rewarding careers is a competitive advantage, and will strengthen your business.

The days of people being with one company for their whole working lives are long gone. Some might be with you for a decade, others for a handful of months, but everyone who joins you on your mission should leave your business further along their own path than they were when they arrived.

Career progression is the most common reason that Biotech professionals move jobs, and has been every year since we began collecting data on this topic in 2019. By providing clear career progression, you’ll foster loyalty, increase engagement levels, improve your employer brand and ability to attract great people, and collectively become more capable over time. There’s a reason that the world’s most successful companies uniformly invest time and money into professional development and career growth for their employees – it drives their performance.

?You don’t need the resources of Apple, Microsoft or Nvidia to get started. There are some simple steps you can take today that will help you create clear career paths for your people.

Firstly, make sure every single person in your organisation has an explicit understanding of what’s expected of them today, and what “good performance” looks like in tangible, measurable terms. One of the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to career progression is focusing too much on what’s next, without taking care of the job in hand. This might sound counter-intuitive, but it’s extremely important – if those in your team take their eye off the ball and don’t do great work, then it becomes difficult for you to promote them or give them more responsibility. Clarity of expectations will help them to focus on achieving their goals and delivering what you need.

Then, help them to understand how their role connects to the bigger picture – the Mission and Vision of your organisation. Providing greater context does two things. It shows your people the value of each of their contributions, which is rewarding in itself, and gives them the opportunity to find ways to show initiative and add extra value. People are more motivated when they see that their hard work makes a difference and engaging them with your overall Mission and Vision helps them to imagine a future with you, tying their personal story to yours.

In small companies, it can be difficult to provide a comprehensive career framework in the same way that major corporations do. In most cases though, you don’t need to – providing clarity on the next career step for each of your people is usually enough. As already mentioned, career progression drives a significant proportion of job moves in the Biotech sector. The nuance behind this is that it’s not lack of opportunity in general that causes those moves, but lack of a specific understanding of what the next step is, and how to take it. Tell people, specifically, the difference between the role they’re in and the role they’ll move into, and what they need to do in order to progress into that role. Align this with what you need as a company, put it in writing, and honour it if they do what you ask.

Finally, support their efforts and make it OK to fail. At various points in our careers, we all reach our ceiling, at least temporarily, and need time to catch up to the progress we’ve made. We have periods of accelerated progress, punctuated by plateaus where we develop the skills we need. Support your team through this, and ensure that as they’re stretching, you treat failures and missteps as learning experiences.

Some leaders hold back from investing in employee development, worrying that they’ll lose their investment if people leave. The truth, though, is that by refusing to help your people to grow, you’ll accelerate their departure and struggle to get the best from them while they’re with you. Yes, some may outgrow you or get poached by your competitors, but their growth will drive your success – create the platform for them to get what they want, and you’ll get what you want too.