How employees transition from good to great
One of the books that help shape my approach to business was Jim Collins classic book from “Good to Great”. He explained what company did to make this transition. Over…
Offering career development opportunities to employees is extremely beneficial to employers
Given the changes in the way organizations are operating and the shifting demographic composition of the workforce, offering career development opportunities to employees could be extremely beneficial to employers. Informal and formal learning experiences can provide employees with a more comprehensive skill set and reassurance that their employer recognizes their values. When equipped with new knowledge and abilities, employees can better handle new technologies and innovations and may be able to contribute to enhancing their organization’s systems and procedures.
It’s human nature to want to be liked so people—even bosses—tend to tell employees how great they are when they don’t mean it. Rather than helping your employee, you’re actually doing something very cruel: You’re keeping them in the dark about what they need to do to improve.” -Betty Liu
Importance of And Satisfaction With Career Development Aspects
Source: The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in its 2016-Employee-Job-Satisfaction-and-Engagement-Report
SHRM reported that nearly one-half of employees said that career advancement opportunities within their organization were significant to their job satisfaction. Eight years, only 30 percent of employees considering career advancement opportunities as very important to their job satisfaction.
Productivity loss during recruitment and training of new employees has financial and operational consequences for organizations that do not strive to reduce turnover. SHRM reported that 45% of employees said that it would be likely, to some degree, that they would seek out job opportunities outside of their current organization in the next 12 months.
Of those employees who anticipate looking for new employment options, more than one quarter reported better career advancement opportunities as a reason for their search. Among the employees who said they would be unlikely or very unlikely to explore outside employment, only 9% noted career advancements as motivation to remain with their current employer.
This sharp contrast in percentages indicates that you may need to improve your efforts to promote employees from within the organization. It costly for employers to recruit external candidates, and it may harbour animosity among current employees. Always hiring outside applicants — implies that existing employees are not qualified, incapable of succeeding in the role or undeserving of a promotion. Mobility programs and job enlargement are methods that organizations can implement to boost engagement levels. Our employee career development plan provides you and your employees the tools to make this a reality.
Career Advancement Opportunities Within Organization
Succession Planning
Build Your Next Generation of Leaders
Organization’s Commitment to Professional Development
Our service set out a customized plan for an employee to expand and improve skills and knowledge through professional development helps them master their responsibilities in their current role. We believe that professional development encompasses various learning opportunities, such as formal and informal training and attainment of certifications or degrees. When you dedicate a portion of your budget to professional development, you send a message that you invest in your employees.
Additional benefits of professional development include:
- fostering a culture of personal growth
- proving more significant opportunities for career advancement
- increasing employee engagement
- attaining new knowledge and skills
- increasing the rate of internal promotions
- building trust and commitment among employees
We have a partnership with BambooHR—the leading provider of tools that power the strategic evolution of HR in small-to-medium-sized businesses to manage your employee development plans.
To achieve your goal you need a Development Plan
Your Professional Development Plan guides your development and assesses progress toward your career goals. Behavioural traits are the key differentiators in performance. High performers share a common subset of behaviours and competencies that they are incredibly adept at using.
It’s hard to say what makes for a successful career. Nor is there any “right path” to achieving your professional goals. Some routes may be more direct than others, but the ways to get there are innumerable. Developing a career takes time and attention. But many people get sidetracked when planning careers or pursuing job opportunities. Our post, 5 Tips to Consider When Charting Your Career Path offers some tips to help you chart a career path.
Here are a few steps to create a development plan:
- Understand your behavioural strengths - Have us do a SuccessFinder assessment for you. It is the only career assessment to measure 85 statistically distinct behavioural traits, 26 behavioural competencies, and 35 specific career theme scales – all of which deal with 2,500 occupational titles (few other tests measure more than 200) and 500+ Career Success Benchmarks.
- Build on your strengths - Excellence comes from using your powers to the fullest and managing your weaknesses.
- Identify support - Make a list of resources that will help you to make those changes: books, online courses, continued education and informational interviews.
- Create goals and action steps - Schedule a specific amount of time each day towards using those resources to meet your personal development goals.
- Monitor your progress - Track your progress by taking notes. This activity keeps you focused and encouraged. Take time to celebrate all successes, big and small.
- Take full advantage of the development opportunities offered - Engage your Human Resources department and seek advice from your direct manager. Know your company's policy for career advancement. Maintain your development plan and chart your career progress to make sure you know how to move up the ladder at work. You need a realistic plan to advance to new roles.
- Training – If there are areas that need improvement, training is a great option. Your employer may offer tuition assistance and paid time off to pursue learning opportunities.
- Change in job design – Make suggestions about how your job might be redesigned to increase efficiency.
- Seek special projects - Being assigned a critical task is a sign of respect and value. The more critical the assignment, the higher the implied confidence your employer has in you.
Learn More
Insights — Employee Development Plan
How to deliver negative feedback
Giving negative feedback is challenging for most people, as it requires us to communicate unpleasant information that could potentially harm our relationships with others. However, when done correctly, negative feedback…
How to develop a personal performance plan
Developing a personal performance plan involves a series of steps that help you identify your goals, assess your current performance, and create a plan to improve your performance. Here are…
How to Be A Remarkable Problem Solver
An excellent problem solver is a good thinker. To begin with, they tend to have fewer problems and less drama at work. Moreover, they do not get too emotional when…
How to Manage Your Perfectionism for Career Success
Some view perfectionism is an illusion. They believe it makes them better, while others see it as harming us. They are both right. Like any high-performance traits, you must manage them…
FAQ — Employee Development Plan
If I love my job, is being a workaholic bad for my health?
Being a workaholic isn’t bad for your health — if you love your job.
The general assumption is that being a workaholic is bad for you and will lead to a heart attack. People who are not engaged in their work have a higher risk of metabolic syndrome, which is the overarching measure for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Just working long hours doesn’t increase the risk of severe health issues (although it can cause stress-related physical complaints like headaches), according to a new study conducted by Simon Fraser University, in conjunction with the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina Charlotte.
What makes all the difference for a workaholic is engagement. A look at 763 employees of an international firm found that those who felt disengaged were more prone to significant health-risk factors like high blood pressure and obesity, while engaged and happy workers showed none of those signs. So if you want to burn the midnight oil to finish that assignment, go ahead — as long as it’s out of love and not ambition or stressful workplace challenges.
You need to be really honest with yourself about why you work and what the intrinsic motivators are. Do you work because it’s meaningful or because you truly enjoy what you’re doing? If so, those are healthy drives. But if you’re only working long hours because you need the money to fund your lifestyle or you’re addicted to the status, those aren’t healthy. Lieke ten Brummelhuis, assistant professor of management at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University
Workaholics have two different dimensions:
- those who work excessively
- those who work compulsively
The difference is the former group works that way of their own accord, while the latter is driven by compulsion and guilt.
An engaged workaholic is not immune to subjective well-being indicators, like sleep issues, fatigue, stomach upset and headaches, but their engagement indicates an active mentality. Committed people take action and do something about it, like re-evaluating their job and questioning if it’s right for them, as well as seeking support to make sure things improve.
… But it doesn’t mean you should never disconnect. Boston Consulting Group ran an experiment back in 2004:
They made each worker pick a weekday to disconnect completely. What they found is that communication, satisfaction, and employee retention soared; consultants worked more closely together and stopped sweating the small stuff.
They also had more space to do “deep work”—the sort of intense thinking that’s often much more valuable than the daily tasks that eat up our time. Yes, technology blurs the distinction between work and life but if we want to do anything more interesting and important than just answering e-mails and IMs, it seems a separation is necessary. Manoush Zomorodi, podcast host and author
SuccessFinder measures workaholism, guilt, compulsion, and satisfaction among its 85 performance traits to enable you to know if you are at risk. We analyze your unique performance makeup and career interests to predict your potential success across 500 of the most sought-after job roles – the right job is good for your health!
Can Allenvision assist with my career development plan?
This of career development as a journey. Your career development plan is to get you to the next milestone on your journey. SuccessFinder Career Development leads to career success and satisfaction. We encourage you to review your plan annually and adjust as needed. You need to make your way around our cycle annually.
SuccessFinder Career Development Steps
Identify your dream
- Self-reflection
- Read biographies
- Study role models
- Experiment
Identify your strengths & challenges
- List your strengths
- Performance Review
- SuccessFinder Assessment
- Test Results
Research career options
- Explore online resources; we have two on our Student page
- Look for the job on Workopolis, Monster, Canada Job Bank
- Gather labour market information
- Attend a conference — most have great rates for a student
Talk with successful practitioners
- Use the network of your parent, relatives, teachers, coach
- Cold call, most professionals will spare some to help out a student
Develop the required new skills
- Identify a specific job that uses your strengths
- Find out what the skills you are missing for the next step, online job posting boards are a good place to look
- Determine to best to get them—online, courses, self-study, volunteering, etc.
Link your education and career
- Focus on the competencies you have acquired i.e. problem-solving skills
Learn about yourself
- Self-reflection
- Approach all sorts of people for balanced feedback — What are some things that I did well? What are some things I could have done differently or better?
- Am I where I want to be?
- Where else could I use my strengths?
SuccessFinder career development is unlike other assessment approaches. We offer a single tool that can be used across the organization: for all roles and levels and at every stage in the employee life cycle. We help people discover their performance strengths and suggesting roles that optimize their potential. Our talent analytics are essential to an effective career development plan. SuccessFinder offers a predictor of success in any role.
In addition, SuccessFinder is only career assessment tool committed to meeting the rigorous APA C1 standard based on its validity for decision-making.
We offer an employee career development plan and a personal development plan.
Why focus on an employee’s strengths over weaknesses?
Gallup researchers have studied human behaviour and strengths for decades. They discovered that building employees' strengths are a far more effective approach than a fixation on weaknesses.
A strengths-based culture is one in which employees:
- learn their roles more quickly
- produce more and significantly better work
- stay with their company longer
- are more engaged.
In the current study, a vast majority (67%) of employees who strongly agree that their manager focuses on their strengths and poor positive characteristics are engaged, compared with 31% of employees who strongly agree that their manager focuses on their weaknesses.
When managers help employees grow and develop their strengths, they are more than twice as likely to engage their team members. The most powerful benefit a manager can provide his or her employees is to place them in jobs that allow them to use the best of their natural talents, adding skills and knowledge to develop and apply their strengths.
Leadership
Leadership is about behaviour, regardless of a person’s title or where they fall in the company hierarchy. As organizations face new and unfamiliar challenges, success depends on increasing the frequency of leadership performance from individuals and teams across the organization to ensure that the organization can deploy the right leadership at the right moment for the right context. So instead of redefining criteria and isolating a small group of “stars,” the challenge is to understand and unleash the largest source of potential: The entire workforce.
We take a holistic view of potential — beyond simply identifying leadership potential among individuals. Instead, we aim to surface, activate, and accelerate potential in every individual, within teams, and across the full force of your organization.
Our leadership ladder provides the framework and process to develop and support the leaders in your organization from first-level managers to CEO.
How do I handle a passive-aggressive boss?
Being on the receiving end of passive-aggressive behaviour can be infuriating — and it gets even more complicated when the person dishing it out can fire you. Moreover, dealing with a passive-aggressive boss can be challenging, but there are several strategies that you can use to handle the situation. Here are some tips to help you keep your cool (and your job).
- Stay Calm: One of the most important things you can do is to remain calm and professional when dealing with your boss. If you get angry or frustrated, it will only fuel their behaviour.
- Take the high road. You may want to talk back or complain about your boss’ behaviour. Don’t. It damages your credibility and may very well make your manager’s behaviour toward you even worse.
- Set Boundaries: You can set clear boundaries with your boss by letting them know what is and isn't acceptable behaviour. For example, if they send you a sarcastic email, you can respond by saying, "I prefer that we communicate in a direct and respectful manner."
- Communicate Directly: Try to communicate directly with your boss, as this will help to avoid misunderstandings. If your boss gives you vague instructions, ask for clarification so that you can make sure you are meeting their expectations.
- Clarification is key. If you have a boss who tends to blindside you with new information, try to beat them to the punch and ask clarifying questions in advance. The more you know, the less ammo they have.
- Document Everything: Keep a record of any interactions with your boss that are passive-aggressive or hostile. This can be helpful if you need to escalate the situation to HR.
- Seek Support: It can be helpful to seek support from coworkers, friends, or family members when dealing with a difficult boss. You may also want to consider talking to a therapist or coach to help you navigate the situation.
- Save your face, and theirs. Rather than matching his or her behaviour, ask if there’s something about your performance that they want to be different. The earnest, respectful route may very well neutralize the situation.
Remember, it's not your responsibility to change your boss's behaviour, but you can control how you respond to it. By setting boundaries, communicating directly, and seeking support, you can effectively handle a passive-aggressive boss.
Consider a Development Plan
Moreover, a personal development plan will help guide you on your career journey.
What is an entrepreneurial leadership style like?
Entrepreneurial Leadership is a primary force behind successful change. These wealth-building Entrepreneurial leaders are not merely "executing better" – they're radically changing the rules of the success game in the workplace. For the Entrepreneurial leader, creativity is a continuous activity. They are always seeing new ways of doing things with little concern for how difficult they might be or whether the resources are available. But the creativity in the entrepreneur is combined with the ability to innovate. They take the idea and make it work in practice.
This sees something through to the end and not be satisfied until all is accomplished. This is a central motivation for the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial Leaders need to encourage expansive out-of-the-box thinking to generate new ideas but also filter through these ideas to decide which to commercialize. Using a balanced "loose-tight" style of leadership alternates creating space for idea generation and freeing exploration with a deliberate tightening that selects and tests ideas for further investment and development. Looseness usually dominates the early stages of the Entrepreneurial Leaders process; in the later stages, tightening becomes more important to scrutinize the concepts and bring the selected ones to the market. A balanced approach is essential to Entrepreneurial Leaders. Those who remain loose too long generate plenty of ideas but have difficulty commercializing them.
What are the benefits of SuccessFinder to my business?
Business Benefits of SuccessFinder
A bad hire is bad for business. It wastes time, and stresses the organization and the person you hired and fired. Our approach to achieving strategy of business success focuses on achieving value for the shareholder and has two necessary conditions: satisfied customers and a satisfied workforce. We drive employee success and career satisfaction.
In addition to avoiding the cost of a bad hire, you:
- Slash onboarding costs with targeted development/coaching right from point of hire
- Increase retention due to better-fit hiring and promotion
- Avoid costly litigation by hiring without bias
- Differentiate high potentials from high performers
- Increase bench strength and know who to target for accelerated leadership programs
- Decrease training costs based on highest-need performance competencies
- Increase engagement due to people operating in their strengths
- Transform your workforce into one focused on performance at every level
We use SuccessFinder in all our talent analytics used for selection, employee career development, succession planning, team development and leadership coaching.
What is inspirational leadership style like?
Inspirational leadership is a leadership style where the leader engages with others in such a way that leaders and followers constructively raise one another to:
- higher levels of motivation
- effective relationships
- quality orientation
- overall workplace productivity
Inspirational leaders are team builders and place a great deal of faith in the value of teaching and coaching and will go the extra mile with their people while refusing to compromise on their vision or intent.
This leadership style challenges employees to be creative problem solvers, and develop followers’ leadership capacity via coaching, mentoring and provision of both challenge and support. Using the democratic leadership style or participative style, the leader encourages employees to be a part of decision-making.
We determine this style through the 85 performance traits measured in SuccessFinder.
The National Research Council of Canada has defined in detail the core competencies of inspirational leaders.
Why use performance competencies?
Using performance competencies, we can provide an additional view of a candidate versus a higher performer.
In addition to technical skills, academic background and professional experience acquired, an individual’s natural behavioural tendencies are crucial elements to achieving success at work. Our goal in creating this model is to provide better ways for organizations to capture these natural behavioural tendencies and leverage them to develop the strong, resilient leaders required to drive today’s business strategies. SuccessFinder measures 85 performance traits. The 26 performance competencies consist of three to six behavioural characteristics. The competencies are grouped into five categories. They are very useful for developing a performance plan as they reflect the interaction of the traits.
How the traits combine along with a career theme in different dynamic combinations to predict business and career success. These combinations constitute the complex behavioural trait dynamics that we see in the workplace and can be measured using competencies and a readiness to influence others directly.
Performance competency is the kind of skill set that an individual should have so that he or she can meet the goals of the organization. Measuring performance competency is a tough job for any human resource manager. SuccessFinder makes it easy. Due to the increasingly complex structure of the organization, it is imperative for individuals to have a good and healthy relationships with people across departments.
In some organizations, including behavioural competencies is part of their appraisal as well.
Why do organizations need to understand performance competencies?
Understanding performance competencies play an essential role in succession planning, workforce planning, and training and development.
Do you offer executive coaching after I complete my assessment?
We offer executive coaching after you complete our career assessment. Executive coaching enables you to achieve higher levels of performance, through demonstrations of your leadership, know-how, and interpersonal skills. We recommend that you commit to at least 15 coaching to get the full value. We bundle your coaching with either development plan or the career assessment. Setting up the sessions are simple, but the work you have to do is not simple — if it was you would have already done it!
Our personal development plan is a self-managed approach. Our employee development plan can be supplemented with executive coaching if you are doing the development with your current employer. We tailor our executive coaching to meet your needs.
Our Approach
We will help you reach higher and more sophisticated levels of development — conducive to superior levels of performance.
Confidentiality, open and relevant communications make sure the success of the coaching process.Decision-making diagnoses and analytics, including SuccessFinder, a comprehensive talent analytic system.
We suggest that during the first two-hour session we establish your needs and get you started. We urge you to embark on a journey of self-discovery. We are there to inspire you and support you.
Typically coaching occurs every two to four weeks depending on your needs. We find that spreading the coaching over six to twelve months with 90-120 minute sessions work best. We help you explore new horizons and offer you the necessary tools to enable you to integrate the transformation and acquire renewed awareness.
Featured Downloads
