Hello everyone!

Early in January, I read an excellent report on the main trends and changes in talent management. Gartner, a respected company, surveyed over 500 HR leaders from 40 countries to explore current challenges and priorities in the field.

They identified five main areas:

• Development of leaders and managers

• Development of organizational culture

• HR Technology growth

• Change Management

• Career Management and Internal Mobility

I will not go through all of them here in the newsletter. But if you want to read it in detail, I wrote an extensive article about this report on Medium.

Today, I want to focus on two priorities: developing leaders and career management. This is what we face at work every day.

We build our careers daily and work with our teams and managers. Let’s see what to expect in these areas.

👔 Development of leaders and managers

Based on the research, this looks like a #1 priority for the international HR community.

Currently, leaders face two main challenges:

• 75% of HR leaders say their managers are overwhelmed by the growth of their job responsibilities.

• Conventional training strategies fall short - leaders lack the skills to deal with change.

What does it mean for us? We can see that most managers are simply not trained for their manager’s job. Unfortunately, management is often considered an “add-on” to the “actual job.” By building management as a habit, re-positioning it is crucial to highlight that management is an actual job. Managers aim to work and guide their teams, not to do it as an extra task.

According to Gartner’s research, there’s also a problem with training programs for managers - they can help you learn some skills, but they don’t solve most of the issues:

I personally often see that a lot of managers become managers not because they want to lead and not because they have some team leadership skills, but because they are a) the most experienced employee in the team, b) they need to grow and become a manager is the only way. None of these options is a good reason to make someone a team leader.

Gartner's Recommendations:

1️⃣ Reset expectations for the role of leaders, focusing on coaching and employee development. The manager’s job is to be re-positioned and re-explained.

2️⃣ Allow leaders to assess their desire for managerial roles. According to Gartner’s observations, letting managers self-discover their fit for roles increases their likelihood of finding manageable jobs by 2.3x. i.e., you are more motivated to do what you actually like doing.

3️⃣ Assist leaders in developing management habits and integrating them into routines.

4️⃣ Simplify processes, empowering HR to remove non-value-adding elements.

📈 Career Management and Internal Mobility

There is a common employee confusion regarding their careers. At the same time, multiple research shows that career opportunities are one of the most motivating factors. At the same time, they can be one of the most substantial reasons employees leave their companies.

When they know what to expect, how to develop, and what they can achieve career-wise, they will stay motivated and longer in your company. I have seen it myself when I conducted multiple engagement surveys - clear and transparent career tracks have always been one of the most critical challenges.

If your team knows about career opportunities, if the opportunities are clear and transparent, the team will know what they can receive and what they should fight for. If career paths are unclear, employees lose motivation to grow, and eventually, they leave in search of career opportunities.

According to Gartner research, many employees lack clarity about their career paths, with less than one-third knowing how their careers will evolve in the next five years. Traditional fixed-point career planning is ineffective and does not meet business requirements or employee expectations. Over the next five years, fewer than one in three employees know how to progress their careers. And only one in four employees is confident about their career at their organization.

Gartner proposes a "Stop and Shift" approach: 

⛔️ Static career plans.

⛔️ Dependency on AI for career planning.

⛔️ Organization-centric career planning.

Shift to more Flexible Career Planning: 

✅ Promote employee career growth aligning with business needs, goals, interests, and skills.

✅ Outline employees' professional journeys through searchable career portfolios to ease transitions.

✅ Create roles based on new experiences to help employees broaden their expertise.

Advocate for a career path through work fragmentation into short cycles and frequent iterations. Focus on assisting employees in gaining experience rather than simply informing them about career options. This approach provides employees with the confidence they currently lack. Gartner suggests moving away from the traditional map analogy and embracing the metaphor of satellite navigation for modeling career development support.

I think that career maps or career development frameworks can really help you in this case. Show the clear map to your team members. Tell them what is expected from them and what the required skills, competencies, performance levels, and behavior are. Show them how it can change along with their growth. But this is only the beginning. When you do this for one team - spill it over to another- then you can think of broader roles rather than just functional teams. This will lead you to build cross-functional career maps. For example, suppose an excellent data analyst wants to broaden their knowledge and experience. In that case, they can try building financial or risk models instead of working in the customer analytics department.

For your further reading, check these earlier Naiman Labs newsletter posts related to building your career:

• Why do people leave their jobs?

• Mistakes at work are good

• Advance your career

• My career story

• Remote vs Office: improve your experience

• Go the distance and become better every day

• Why you don’t understand your manager (and why they don’t understand you)

That is it for today; I hope you find some insights.

If you want more career-building tips, follow me on Medium and Subscribe to my weekly newsletter.

Things I love this week

This week, I found a great learning approach - evergreen notes. It is about creating a note with a sound title dedicated to a single concept or idea. For example, “Morning coffee increases productivity.” Then, as you learn, you add more relevant information to this note, and you add various links of relevant information to this note. So, in the end, you have a note regularly filling up with additional, more relevant information. This note is ready to use in your projects, writing, or anywhere else.

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