NELSON =THE MANAGEMENT BIBLE=

BUILDING BETTER EMPLOYEES

Why is it that so many employees are hired with the best of intentions and then—a few days or weeks after they arrive—they are promptly forgotten? It’s easy to take the orientation and training needs of em- ployees—both new and veteran—for granted. Managers are busy people and so long as there’s no crisis, then there are more important things to attend to. Right?

Wrong.

In every organization, employees have so much to figure out: formal and informal chains of command, the ins and outs of office politics, the right and wrong ways to get the support and resources you need to get your job done, which people are “in”—and which are “out.” And this is just the beginning; employees also have to learn new skills and techniques to improve the way they do their jobs. All of this requires training, and it requires the attention of the managers who are responsible for ensuring their employees have the opportunity to develop their talents.

But here’s the rub: Employee development doesn’t just happen. For employees to learn new skills and develop their expertise and knowledge, both managers and employees must make a concerted effort to ensure employment development stays at or near the top of everyone’s list of priorities. Believe us—the results will be well worth the effort.

WHY DEVELOP YOUR EMPLOYEES?

So, why bother developing your employees? One key reason is that your employees will learn a variety of new skills that will make them better and more effective in their jobs. Not only will they do a better job for

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their organizations, they will do a better job for their customers—earn- ing their long-term business and loyalty in the process. Another key reason for developing your employees is that they will transfer the skills they learn to other employees in your organization—multiplying the impact of your development efforts many times over. Finally, when you spend time developing your employees, you are sending a message loud and clear: Your employees are important to you and worth your time and attention. And employees who feel that you think they are important are employees who will become important, bringing with them a high level of loyalty and commitment.

But, before we get into the details of what employee training and development is all about, let’s first establish exactly what it is that we’re talking about.

Training usually refers to teaching workers the short-term skills that they need to know right now to do their jobs. Development usually refers to teaching employees the kinds of long-term skills that they’ll need as they progress in their careers. In many organizations, employee development is instead known as career development.

We’ll ask the question again: Why bother developing your employees? As it turns out, there are plenty of good reasons, including:

•You may be taking your employees’ knowledge for granted. Just because your employees aren’t having obvious problems doing their jobs, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are doing their best jobs, or that there isn’t room for improvement. You may have looked at hundreds of resumes to fill a particular position, and interviewed a boatload of people before you found the right person for the job. And while you might assume that this individual knows everything there is to know about the job to be done, there’s a good chance that he doesn’t. Every organization has its own unique approach to doing business, and even the most knowledgeable employee can learn something new. That’s where employee development comes in.

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•Employees who work smarter are better employees. Wouldn’t it be great if all of your employees worked at 100 percent of their potential, at least most of the time? While no employee can possibly be 100-percent effective every moment of every working day (even robots need the occasional maintenance break), employees who are better trained and more knowledgeable about their jobs have the potential to do a much better job than employees who aren’t. Employees who have achieved their development goals simply work smarter. Not only will your organization reap the benefits in greater employee efficiency and effectiveness (well worth the price of admission), but also you’ll sleep better at night—some- thing any manager in any business can appreciate.

•Someone has to be prepared to step into your shoes. Although it may be hard to imagine right now, someday you may decide to retire, or you may be promoted and moved up the career ladder. Who is going to take your place when you’re gone? Developing employees is all about providing them with the skills they need to be able to step into your shoes in your absence. And, while you might not be retiring or getting promoted anytime soon, you might like to take a week or two off. Have you ever envied fellow managers who don’t have to call their offices when they are on vacation? They are able to unplug from their offices because they make a point of developing their employees so they are able to take over when the manager is gone. Guess what? You can, too.

•Your employee wins, and so does your organization. Your employees win when you provide them with higher-level skills and new ways of viewing the world. And, at the same time, your organization wins because employees become more motivated and their work skills improve. The impact of every dollar spent on employee development is therefore magnified while employees are prepared to fill the roles in which your organization will need them to move in the future.

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•Your employees are worth your time and money. It costs a lot of money to recruit and hire new employees, and it costs a lot to train them. Employees are one of any organization’s greatest investments, and it’s in your interest as a manager to ensure that these investments are protected and allowed to f lourish. By backing up with action your words of support for employees, you show them that you really mean what you say—leading to employees who are more engaged in their jobs and who will better serve your customers.

CAREER DEVELOPMENT PLANS

Sometimes you can get where you want to go in business—if you’re lucky. But, more often, it takes a plan, and effective career development requires well thought out and executed plans. Make no mistake about it: Career development plans take time to develop and they take time to monitor, track, and adjust as needed. But the investment of time required will pay off many times over in employees who perform better and who are happier in their jobs.

The best career development plans contain at minimum the following five key elements:

1.Specific learning goals: By identifying specific learning goals with your employees—classes they should take, skills they should learn, expertise they should develop—you provide them with a clearly marked path to travel as they proceed through their careers. The learning goals for a contract negotiator might, for example, include coursework in contract law, negotiation techniques workshops, and a progression of assignments from relatively simple low-dollar negotiations to very complex, high-dollar deals.

2.Resources required to achieve the designated learning goals: It’s not enough to create learning goals; managers also have to designate the organizational resources that will be devoted to making the

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goals happen. Such resources might include assignment to specific teams or job shadowing, formal training (conducted by outsiders, by internal trainers, or perhaps online), and of course the money required to pay for all this.

3.Employee responsibilities and resources: Career development is a joint responsibility of an employee and his or her manager. A business can and does pay for things, but so can employees (as any employee who has paid out of his own pocket to get a college degree can attest). A good career development plan should include what the employee is doing on his or her own time.

4.Required date of completion for each learning goal: Every good plan also needs a good schedule, so therefore each learning goal must have a corresponding date of completion. Schedules must be above all else realistic while keeping an employee’s forward progress in motion. Ideally, schedules will allow employees the flexibility to get their daily tasks done while keeping a step ahead of the changes in the business environment that necessitate the employees’ development in the first place.

5.Standards for measuring the accomplishment of learning goals: Of course, employees and their managers must have some way of knowing when (and if ) a learning goal has been completed. Standards might be unambiguous (a course has been completed) or it might be more subjective (the employee has some measure of expertise in a particular area of learning). Whatever the situation, managers should always ensure that the selected standards are clear and attainable and that both you and your employees are in full agreement with them.

Are you by now wondering what a simple career development plan might look like? Here’s an example of a basic career development plan for an interest rate analyst. Note that a career development plan doesn’t have to be complicated and it doesn’t have to be as big as the book that you’re holding in your hands. When it comes to employee plans of any sort, simpler (and more concise) is usually better:

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SKILL GOAL

• Become proficient in interest rate analysis.

LEARNING GOAL

• Learn the basics of employee supervision.

PLAN

•Shadow supervisor in daily work for half days, starting immediately.

•Attend quarterly supervisors’ update seminar on the first Wednesday of January, April, July, and October (no cost: in-house).

•Complete “Basics of Interest Rate Analysis” class no later than the first quarter of fiscal year XX ($550 plus travel costs).

•Successfully complete “Intermediate Interest Rate Analysis” class no later than the second quarter of fiscal year XX ($750 plus travel costs).

•Continue self-funded accounting certificate program at local community college.

This career development plan contains each of the five necessary elements as described earlier. Remember: Career development plans don’t have to be complicated to be effective. The exact format of the plan is not important; what’s important is that you create career development plans for your employees.

HELPING TO DEVELOP EMPLOYEES

The role of the manager in developing employees is to help employees figure out exactly what they want to go, and then to provide the

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support and organizational resources for employees to get there. But employee development is a two-way street, and managers cannot take on this task in a vacuum. Employees must also participate by identifying the areas where development will help to make them better and more productive workers in the future and relaying this information to their managers. Once needs are identified, plans developed, and resources identified, managers and employees can work together to turn them into reality.

In the following steps, we’ll explore the best way for managers to approach the development process with their employees.

Step 1: Meet with your employees about their careers. What’s the best way to determine the path your employees want to take in their careers? Ask them! You might, for example, think that your top software engineer has her sights set on your organization’s chief technology officer position, when she would actually much rather keep coding software. Once you determine where in the organization your employee wants her career to go, then you’ll have a baseline from which to work.

Step 2: Discuss your employees’ strengths and weaknesses. Every employee has certain areas of strengths, and other areas of weakness. A decision will have to be made: Do you further develop an employee’s strengths (making him the best die cutter in the business), or do you try to shore up weaknesses (turning a lone wolf, for example, into a team player)? Or do you do both? Be frank with your employee about both his strengths and weaknesses, and then decide where you will direct your focus and resources. Our own feeling is that it’s more important to develop your employees’ strengths (further increasing their value to the organization, along with their self-esteem) than to improve their weaknesses (which may raise these areas only to the barely adequate at best).

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Step 3: Assess where your employees are now. A career plan is like a story arc—there is a beginning, an end, and a lot of events in between. To better understand where your employee should go, you’ve got to first determine where she is now. By assessing the current state of her skills and talents, you’ll end up with an overall road map to guide your development efforts.

Step 4: Create career development plans. A career development plan formalizes the agreements that you make to provide formal support (tuition, time off, travel expenses, and so on) to your employee in developing his or her career. Effective career development plans contain milestones for the achievement of learning goals and descriptions of any other resources and support needed to meet the goals that you agree to.

Step 5: Follow through on your agreements, and make sure that your employees follow through on theirs. Once you agree on specific career development plans with your employees, be sure that you uphold your end of the bargain, and that your employees uphold their end as well. Be sure to check your employees’ progress regularly—once every quarter would not be too often—and if they miss schedules because of other priorities, reassign their work as necessary to ensure that they have the time they need to focus on their career development plans.

Career development is something that tends to get put off because of other priorities. And, even when it is conducted on a regular basis, the frequency of discussions is often few and far in between. Many managers, for example, conduct career discussions only when they conduct annual employee performance appraisals. While this is certainly better than never having career development discussions at all, this really isn’t often enough—especially as most businesses find themselves in a state of constant whitewater change, where markets and technology are anything but stable and predictable.

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ASK BOB AND PETER: I am an office manager of a doc-

?tor’s office, and we recently added a new doctor. This new doctor has chosen one staff member to be his

“pet.” He has asked that we lighten her load, pitch in to help her, and so on. When I instructed her in writing to complete a project previously assigned, he told her she did not have to do it because my request that she explain why she had again failed to do something was too harsh. Please offer your suggestions.

We all have favorites in our personal and business lives—people with whom we prefer to spend our time. However, when a business owner or manager gives preferential treatment to certain employees over others for reasons that aren’t based on their performance, there is a serious problem—one that must be addressed immediately. As office manager, it’s your job to supervise the administrative staff. The new doctor is not only confusing the lines of authority within the office but also undermining your ability to get your job done. Our advice is to first sit down with the new doctor for a little heart-to-heart discussion. Explain that it’s not fair to the rest of your staff when he plays favorites and that his actions are creating confusion about who is really supposed to be in charge (you!). If he doesn’t take your message to heart, approach the other doctors in your office and ask for their help. They may not be aware that there is a problem, and once they are, they should realize that it’s in their best interest to fix it. Good luck!

The Top 10 Ways to Develop Employees

1.Provide employees with opportunities to learn and grow.

2.Be a mentor to an employee.

3.Let an employee fill in for you in staff meetings.

4.Assign your employee to a team.

5.Allow employees to pursue and develop their ideas.

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