Investing in High Potential Talent Through Career Check-Ins

Written By Laura Costain

Proactively seeking out high performers on your team and inviting them to have conversations about their development goals and career path is a surefire way to show you are invested in them. It may build retention as junior leaders start to see themselves as valued members of your organization. Career conversations are also an opportune time to serve as a coach to your team, arming them with skills they can use to approach future career decisions.  

Earlier in my career, I was not shy about asking for career advice from senior leaders I aspired to emulate. While most were supportive and motivating, some leaders shared their career path with me and then subtly encouraged me to take a similar approach. At the time, this struck me as mildly unsatisfying advice. In some cases they had made massive sacrifices that didn’t seem consistent with my values or bigger life goals. I’ve since come to understand that choosing your career path is about knowing your strengths, considering the bigger picture of your life goals and contemplating alignment with your values. Focusing on just one of these areas will invariably lead to challenges down the road. 

Here are some approaches to try during these conversations that can serve your team and showcase your leadership:

Share the why behind your choices: Give context for your decisions. It’s more helpful for your team to understand your thought process and the why around your decisions as well as the tradeoffs you made along the way. Helping them to understand your missteps and learnings will show vulnerability and help them paint a fuller picture about who you are as a leader. 

Ask them about their long term goals and values: Encourage them to zoom out and design their career around their life and not vice versa. Identifying goals for each segment of their life (career, family, relationships, community, spirituality, etc.) can help them make choices that are complementary to each. This approach also underscores that their career window is longer than they might realize and that it will contain different chapters based on the broader context of their life at that time.    

Champion Them: If you are coaching a woman or an under-representented minority with strong potential, it’s possible that they have fewer role models who look like them in the positions they are contemplating. This makes it harder to imagine their future in these positions. You can help demystify these leadership positions by highlighting some strengths you see in them that they will need for those roles. As you are coaching them, listen for self limiting beliefs (e.g. I don’t know if I have the financial modeling skills needed for that role) that can get in the way of them even applying for roles that they could excel in.  

Invite Experimentation: When you are earlier in your career, decisions about your career can feel monumental. Help them to lower the bar for making big decisions by inviting experimentation. If they are interested in pursuing a marketing role but are currently in a research position, help them brainstorm about how they can gain this experience without taking the leap. Ask them what they hope to learn from an experiment they are trying, and offer to meet with them to unpack and interpret their learnings together. Prioritizing future career check-ins will remind them that you are invested in their long-term success.

Now take a moment and think of at least one person in your organization you want to proactively invest time in developing and start having more meaningful career conversations today.  


Helpful resources for anyone in career transition: 



Laura Costain
Previous

A Blueprint for Leading a Team through Transition