While time constraints often limit employers from tending to their employees’ career development, Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni suggest a simple way for managers to fulfill employees’ development needs: brief but frequent conversations.
In their recent book, “Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want,” the authors recognize the effectiveness of active career development in retaining, engaging and motivating employees. Through tips, guidelines, questions and more – all centered on the power of conversation – they advise employers on ways they can help employees realize their strengths and weaknesses, formulate career goals, and understand the direction their company is taking.
As Kaye and Winkle Giulioni insist, by fostering hindsight conversations, foresight conversations and insight, managers can reshape career development so that employees hold primary responsibility of it. In the authors’ words, “Talk is the most precious and result-driven commodity managers have to share.”
The book is available on www.800ceoread.com for $14.36.