Key Takeaways:

• The traditional understanding of professional growth — promotions and formal training — is limited and misleading.
• What employees crave is doing meaningful work with impact.
• Job descriptions are starting points created in the past in a rapidly changing world. Yet many are confined by them.

The #1 Reason Employees Leave (And Disengage): Lack of Career Growth*

And the traditional understanding of professional growth — promotions and formal training — is limited and misleading.
 

The good news is there’s a treasure trove of growth opportunities within your organization waiting to be tapped into; opportunities that are ripe to engage employees and develop them on an ongoing basis while also having immediate business impact.

Unfortunately, many career initiatives are left gathering dust in organizations.

Are We Solving the Wrong Problem?

Our efforts are often based on the assumption that career growth = promotions, training, and skills.

Many try to solve the ‘career growth’ need with considerable effort in succession planning, development planning, complex skills inventories, and competency frameworks. We top things off by telling employees ‘You own your career’. We post resources on the LMS, hope for the best, and little happens.

Overall, our efforts are a mash-up of organizational processes layered with the organization's needs to develop talent and retain people.

Important stuff, perhaps, but to whom?

The Blindspot: we unknowingly forget to stand in our employees’ shoes.

The result: Not all, but much of our career efforts often land with employees as ‘weird HR stuff.’ They don’t see the practical relevance to what they really care about.

Employees Don’t Really Care About Skills (or HR Process)

If you dig deeper into ‘career growth’ requests, you’ll find that what employees actually want is to learn and do new stuff. We’ve found, almost unanimously, that what employees crave is doing meaningful work with impact.

So why don’t 98% of them have a career plan?

‘Career’ is a loaded word.

‘Career’ is a big deal to most people. Their egos and identity are deeply intertwined with their work. By their nature, careers are hard to figure out and navigate. At the same time, they expect themselves to be clear about their futures when that’s just not possible.

And those expectations have a psychological impact: fear of failure and financial security can paralyze them.

So, they put it off, do the bare minimum about it, and slip into ‘The Grind’. And while they often don’t want to leave, in a world of flat organizations and perceived lack of internal opportunity, they do just that.

Or worse… they stay and disengage a heart-breaking 68% of the time.**

Have you experienced any of these things personally? Almost certainly.

As HR, we’ve been guilty of trying to get our employees to focus on the things that don’t matter to them – all that weird ‘HR stuff’. We need to meet them where they are instead.

We can begin meeting them there by reframing ‘career growth’ from promotions, training and upskilling to doing meaningful work with impact (over time). In other words, we need to get more interested in what they are really interested in.

What’s Useful? vs. Your Job Description

Does what you do match your job description? Probably not. Job descriptions are starting points created in the past in a rapidly changing world. Yet many are confined by them.

What if you could do more of that work you’re interested in today? All without the hassle and risk of changing roles or companies?

74% of jobs can be modified, yet less than 18% of people do!*** This represents a gaping opportunity in crafting roles and creating growth opportunities that few exercise.

‘What’s useful?’ is the ultimate hack to creating impact in the world.

’What’s useful?’ forces us to focus our time and effort on results. In this case, on areas that are valuable for the business, employees, and HR.

At its highest level, ‘What’s useful?’ could be about making a profit or supporting the company’s mission, but that is often divorced from our ‘as-lived’ experience. ’What’s useful?’ directly relates to the needs of their function, team, department, or manager. Like nesting Russian dolls, this crucial question gets closer and closer to the heart and experience of the employee.

Solving Interesting Problems Is the Goldmine of Growth Opportunities

The currency of ‘What’s useful?’ is solving problems. We solve them every day. But not all problems are created equal.

1. 'The Grind' is the never-ending parade of predictable problems. Here, they’ve lost interest - comfortably schlepping away on ‘useful work’ they might be good at but no longer jazzes them like it did before. For the employee, ‘The Grind’ is the crappy part of “What’s useful?”.


2. 'The Magic' happens when employees tackle problems that are useful and interesting to them.


3. 'The Garden’ are those untested, interesting opportunities at work. They’re the ‘farm team’ of their future capabilities. Innovation and new skill growth live here. They need tending to. They’re unproven and not urgent; sometimes uncomfortable, riskier, or outside their current role.


4. ‘The Goldmine’ is the immediate sweet spot for employees and the organization - maximum engagement, immediate impact, and leverage of current skills.

Our goal in HR is to move people from ‘The Grind’ to ‘The Garden and Goldmine’. While spending 100% of our time in those places isn’t realistic, the bar is much lower than you think. Research suggests that a mere 20% of our time doing work we enjoy every day is the threshold to a job well loved.***

Your Four-step Path to the Goldmine

1. Remember, employees don’t really care about our ‘HR stuff’


2. Make it relevant: Reframe career from process and promotions to meaningful work with impact


3. ‘What’s useful?’ = growth opportunities. Encourage employees to identify problems in this light


4. Enable people to work on more interesting problems

References:
* McKinsey, The Great Attrition, 2022
** Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2023
*** HBR IdeaCast, Marcus Buckingham, Find Joy in Any Job, 2023

Author Bio

Jamie Broughton is the award-winning author of “The Emerging Leader”, retired executive coach and the CEO of Avenue Careers. His work has been endorsed by Stephen M.R. Covey and Marshal Goldsmith, among others.

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