Maintaining the dedication of skilled employees in their respective fields for as long as possible is always the desire of leadership, as they are performing in their areas of expertise. However, right now, one of your key members might be considering leaving. They have always been fully committed and are a valuable asset to your organization. Yet, the current position no longer offers them opportunities to learn. A new challenge is what this exceptional group of employees needs as motivation for personal development.
To make sure their star employees feel engaged, the author argues that managers must provide constant opportunities for growth and professional development. While this can be challenging, the best bosses are those that figure out how to keep their employees constantly learning — finding them new assignments, new challenges, even new roles elsewhere in the company —in order to keep them engaged.
When talented employees can no longer grow in that position
As their boss, you don’t want anything to change. After all, she’s super-productive, their work is flawless, and they always deliver on time. You want to keep them right where they are. That’s a great way to lose them forever. After eight years as an award-winning stock analyst at Merrill Lynch, one employee needed a new challenge.
“I’ve always liked mentoring and coaching people, so I approached a senior executive about moving to a management track. Rather than offering his support, he dismissed and discouraged me. His attitude was, We like you right where you are. I left within the year” he said.
Every learning curve – every role has a certain expiration date
And the cost is enormous in terms of both time and money. But if I had stayed and disengaged, the cost may have been even higher. When people can no longer grow in their jobs, they mail it in — leading to huge gaps in productivity.
According to Gallup, a lack of employee engagement “implies a stunning amount of wasted potential, given that business units in the top quartile of Gallup’s global employee engagement database are 17% more productive and 21% more profitable than those in the bottom quartile.”And yet engagement is only symptomatic. When your employees (and maybe even you, as their manager) aren’t allowed to grow, they begin to feel that they don’t matter.
Feeling a bit bored after mastering each job
If you aren’t invested in them, they won’t be invested in you, and even if they don’t walk out the door, they will mentally check out. How do you overcome this conundrum? It starts with recognizing that every person in your company, including you, is on a learning curve.
That learning curve means that every role has a shelf life. You start a new position at the low end of the learning curve, with challenges to overcome in the early days. Moving up the steep slope of growth, you acquire competence and confidence, continuing into a place of high contribution and eventually mastery at the top of the curve. But what comes next as the potential for growth peters out? The learning curve flattens, a plateau is reached; a precipice of disengagement and declining performance is on the near horizon.I’d estimate that four years is about the maximum learning curve for most people in most positions; if, after that, you’re still doing the exact same thing, you’re probably starting to feel a little flat.
I became a little bored with each job and started
Take, for example, the experience of the character in the following story: He moved to New York City with a college degree in music. He is a pianist who especially loves jazz music. But quickly became overwhelmed by Wall Street, in the late 1980s, and dreamed of working there. So he got a job as a secretary in a financial firm and started going to investment school in the evenings.
When we stop learning, we cannot feel happy or satisfied. The human brain is designed to learn, not just during school years, but for a lifetime. Managers need to keep this in mind. Every organization is a collection of individuals with different learning trajectories. You build a strong team by optimizing these individual curves with a mix of people: 15% of them at the beginning of the curve, just starting to learn new skills; 70% in the sweet spot; and 15% at the mastery level. When you manage employees On the learning curve, give employees the opportunity to move to a new curve once they reach the peak, and you will have a team of engaged individuals. We are all learning machines. We always want to challenge ourselves by not knowing how to do something new, learning how to do it, mastering it, and then moving on to something else. Instead of letting employee motivation wane, lead them: Learn, leap, and repeat the process.
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