At some point during your performance planning meetings, the employee may want to talk about his career options. He may want to know where you think he should go next. A healthy career discussion rarely happens all at once. Instead it is a product of many different conversations, at many different times. However you choose to handle these conversations—and each will be unique, according to the potential and the performance of the individual employee—you need to ensure that, over time, two things happen. First, the employee needs to become increasingly clear about his skills, knowledge, and talents. Lacking this kind of clarity, he will be a poor partner as you and he together plan out his next career steps. Second, he needs to understand, in detail, what this next step would entail and why he thinks he would excel at it.
He must come to these understandings by himself. But you can help. You can use these five career discovery questions, at different times, to prompt his thinking:
Q.1 How would you describe success in your current role? Can you measure it?
Here is what I think (Add your own comments.)
Q.2 What do you actually do that makes you as good as you are? What does this tell you about your skills, knowledge, and talents? Here is what I think. (Add your own comments.)
Q.3 Which part of your current role do you enjoy the most? Why?
Q.4 Which part of your current role are you struggling with?
What does this tell you about your skills, knowledge, and talent? What can we do to manage around this?
Training? Positioning? Support system? Partnering?
Q.5 What would be the perfect role for you?
Imagine you are in that role. It’s three P.M. on a Thursday. What are you doing?
Why would you like it so much?
Here is what I think. (Add your own comments.)
These questions, scattered throughout the year, will function as cues to get the employee thinking in detail about his performance. Does he want to build his career by growing within his current role? Does he want to move into a new role? If so, what strength and satisfaction would he derive from it? These five questions won’t necessarily provide the answers. But, asked in the right way, at the right time, they will help the employee focus his thoughts, and he will come to know your thoughts. Together you will form a few firm conclusions about his present performance and his potential. Together you will now make better decisions about his future.
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