Sparked Vol. 036 – Spark your Team by Holding Productive Career Pathing Conversations

Sparked, Fired Up! Culture’s every-other-week newsletter, is focused on what drives culture and engagement in the workplace. This newsletter is for leaders who are ready to get intentional about bringing their team together, building engagement, and harnessing the power of culture to build high-performing teams. Sign up here to get every edition of Sparked delivered straight to your inbox.

Spark your Team by Holding Productive Career Pathing Conversations

Personal development is a core driver of team member engagement.

When team members see potential in their career development, they lean in and engage, driving themselves and their organizations forward in a positive way.

Adding to this, research from our 2024 Culture and Workplace Engagement Report showed that the missing presence of a personal development plan was one of the highest points of active disengagement by survey respondents.

Many leaders are missing a key engagement point when proactive conversations around career pathing don’t happen.   

Written development plans are not required for team members to feel like their personal development is being accounted for, but the presence, or absence, of a development plan, is a likely indicator of how well organizational leaders are able to prioritize meaningful career development and pathing conversations.

A conversation with individual team members is where successful career development and pathing starts, but it often lands on the bottom of managerial to-do lists for leaders just working to get through the day-to-day. 

Looking for ways to fire up your team members and build a high-performing team?

Hold productive career pathing conversations. 

Take Action to Hold Productive Career Pathing Conversations

Still trying to figure out where to start? Here’s how to take action today:

• Prioritize the Topic: Productive career pathing conversations should be met with leadership proactivity. If team members come to leadership with career development-focused questions and needs, leaders are already behind the eight ball. Show that a team member’s professional development is important to you by being proactive. This is often challenging for leaders when work that could easily be deemed more urgent lands on their to-do list. 

• Start with Interest Areas and Problems to Solve: When it comes to career development, team members often get caught up in job titles, recognition, and compensation. Those are not unimportant aspects of career pathing, but leaders should dig into what a team member is genuinely interested in and what problems they are genuinely curious to solve. Genuine answers here provide a much better indication of what direction a team member should pursue.

• Identify Skill Gaps: Either through informal conversation and/or formal feedback like an effective performance review process, it’s crucial that leaders are able to clearly articulate skill gaps that are present in between where a team member is today and where they want to be in the future. Clearly identifying those skill gaps provides both leadership and team members with clarity around where development needs to occur.

• Share What the Organization Needs: Successful career pathing and conversations about career pathing also require context about the needs of the organization. Desired career paths may not be in alignment with what the organization needs. For leaders, organizational alignment trumps career path desire when resources get allocated and plans are made. If there isn’t alignment between what a team member wants and what the organization needs, it may be hard to say it, but it needs to be said and acknowledged.

• Acknowledge Progress: When progress (or lack thereof) occurs, acknowledge it! Proactively sharing where the skill gap is closing, staying stagnant, or, in some cases, growing is crucial. A leader’s evaluation is crucial to staying on the same page with a team member around their career path.

• Make it Recurring: Is it realistic to have productive career pathing conversations with a team member every day? No. However, it’s important that leaders find some regularity in how and when the career development topic is covered. At the very least, find a way to check in with your team members every quarter. Stepping out of the day-to-day to discuss their career path, desires, and ambitions is time well spent.

Further Exploration on Acknowledging What Didn’t Go Well

• What Is Career Pathing and Why Is It Important?
• Strategies for Effective Career Development Conversations
• Creating a Career Progression Framework for Employees