Employee career advancement is typically thought of as climbing the ladder of success with one promotion after another, but today’s guest says promotions are so yesterday. And when we come back, we’re going to find out why.

 

This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner; helping you see business issues, hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.

 

Welcome to Business Confidential Now. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner. And today, I’m delighted to welcome back to the show, a special guest. Someone who was on several years ago in the early days of the program. She’s Julie Winkle Giulioni. Julie is a champion for workplace growth and development. She believes that everyone deserves the opportunity to reach their potential.

 

As a regular columnist for Training Industry Magazine and Smart Brief, she contributes articles on leadership, career development and workplace trends to numerous publications, including The Economist. Plus, she’s also the author of a new book titled Promotions Are So Yesterday: Redefined Career Development Help Employees Thrive. So, we’re in for a real treat today because Julie has been named a top 100 leadership speaker by Ink Magazine.

 

She’s known for offering fresh, inspiring and actionable strategies for leaders who are interested in their own growth, as well as supporting the growth of others. So, let’s bring her on now. Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Julie.

 

Thank you so much, Hanna. I’ve been so looking forward to returning.

 

 

CHANGES IN THE MARKETPLACE THAT REQUIRE RETHINKING EMPLOYEE CAREER DEVELOPMENT

 

Me too. I really appreciate your being back on the show and the title of your book, “Promotions Are So Yesterday” is very provocative. Because I can imagine some listeners are saying, “Hey, wait a minute. I like my promotions. What’s wrong with them?” So my question for you is, what has changed or is changing in the marketplace that make us need to rethink employee career advancement and think about it differently?

 

Yes. It boils down to, I think, kind of two trains of thought here. One is what’s changing in the marketplace? And we know that organizations are going through massive reinvention. I mean, downsizing and layering, Boomers living longer, working longer. Even now, the remote and hybrid workplace has eliminated the boundaries that used to allow for more opportunity, in some cases, within an organization.

 

So, the opportunity to climb that ladder, which has gotten really rickety over the years, is less. But, what’s also changed is the inner landscape. These last couple of years have changed many of us forever. We’re looking at work differently. We’re looking for our jobs to do different jobs for us, and we’re looking for a different relationship with what we do for eight, or 10, or 12 hours a day. And so it’s the perfect time to really confront some long-standing definitions, and I really think of them almost as blinders that we have on when it comes to thinking about career development.

 

HOW EXPECTATIONS OF EMPLOYEE CAREER DEVELOPMENT HAVE CHANGED

 

That’s interesting, especially what you said about wanting things different from our jobs. Could you please elaborate on that? Like, what else are we looking for in terms of job satisfaction, career advancement that we didn’t have before?

 

Well, we can look at the exit interview data. Organizations are collecting as the masses join the great resignation, reevaluation reshuffle, whatever we want to call it. Folks are leaving for a whole lot of reasons. They are looking for more purpose in their work, more meaning. They’re looking for greater flexibility. That’s a huge one.

 

In fact, gosh, was it Mercer that did their work? One out of three people would give up more money for a flexible work schedule. And they’re looking for more in the way of learning development, growth and career development. And what’s interesting is, and I’m sure you’ve read the research, too. A lot of folks who left are now discovering, “Hey, the grass isn’t any greener over there.” And they’re looking to change again for similar reasons: purpose, flexibility, growth and the ability to advance.

 

Well, it sounds like leadership needs to get on the stick here. People are just going to have deja vu, sort of like Groundhog’s Day, where they’re reliving the same thing just in a different organization. So, all right. The landscape has changed. People have different expectations, and probably on a position to demand it, too, because there’s such a shortage of talent.

 

Everywhere you go, you see – people are hiring. People are hiring. So, help us understand what options are available that provide meaningful employee career advancement. Because especially in smaller organizations that tend to be flatter just from the get go in their organizational chart, there’s not that much room. There never was that much room to climb a ladder, and even in large organizations where there’s a small department. Climbing a ladder was more like a step stool, to begin with. So, how do we think differently about employee career advancement or development?

 

HOW TO THINK DIFFERENTLY ABOUT EMPLOYEE CAREER DEVELOPMENT

 

Yeah, I love that. You’re right. It was a step stool in many cases, and it was an illusion in many cases as well. Over the years, we have just bought into this kind of limited definition, this limited set of expectations and pictures around what career development is supposed to look like? The career is the title and the development is the promotion among those titles. And though, as you said, intellectually, we know things are different.

 

We still continue to measure our success by that artificial yardstick or the marker of the promotion. And so, now is the perfect opportunity, as you said, for leaders to get off the stick, to recognize that careers are bigger than that, and the career development is much more expansive than that. And so, that was why I had written the book was to introduce at the core…

 

…the heart of the book is what I refer to as the multidimensional career framework, and it offers seven alternatives to that climb up the corporate ladder. Seven alternate ways that people can grow and develop and expand their capacity, and thrive without having to look to the ladder or the step stool or another position will or move for growth to happen. Some of the dimensions are natural and you would normally think about things like growing your competence or challenge.

 

A lot of leaders are really good at framing challenge for the purposes of growth, but there are some other dimensions that maybe aren’t on our radar screen when we think about career development that that offer enormous opportunities for growth.

 

3 NONTRADITIONAL GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES FOR EMPLOYEE CAREER DEVELOPMENT

 

So, things like contribution. People have this innate desire to contribute, to make a difference, to be of service, to align with their purpose. When we do this consciously, we were deliberate and intentional about it, there’s tremendous growth that we can derive from that, or there’s connection. There’s that expression, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” which, yes, I think is overstated. But you can’t understate or I guess you can’t overstate the importance of learning with and through people.

 

So, building relationships, networks, community, visibility, are all powerful ways for growth and development to happen. We’ve got dimensions around choice, a really timely one, as people are being invited back into the workplace, and we’re hearing loud and clear, “Hey, I want more control with volition and autonomy, with flexibility around when I work, and where I work, and how I work.”

 

When you think about choice, even in terms of more decision-making authority, there’s a lot to be learned as the decisions we make have higher stakes and more complex. And so, what we found, is these other seven dimensions are based upon the research that we conducted with 750 folks worldwide, they’re actually an aggregate. They’re more interesting to people than that climb up the corporate ladder, and they’re in the control and under the influence of managers and employees to a fact.

 

That’s really fascinating; the research that went into this, and I applaud your doing the deeper dove into this. Because it’s so easy for senior leaders who are preoccupied with other things to just gloss over this and keep on doing it the way we’ve always done it, right? [Laughter] So, that’s just a little bit of a cop out. I’d like to come back to two areas that you talked about. First, this idea of connection.

 

I can understand why that’s important and how that drives more employee engagement and employee retention and all the good things that leaders are striving for. But I can also imagine that, for some leaders, not being able to – I shouldn’t say “not being able to” – but being asked to allow employees their direct reports sort of cross over into other lanes, could feel threatening, because access to other people in the organization is a way to build influence. Influence is a form of power. And some leaders could feel threatened by that.

 

WHY AN ABUNDANT MINDSET IS ESSENTIAL TO EMPLOYEE CAREER DEVELOPMENT

 

You’re right. You’re absolutely right. And a leader who’s going to feel threatened by that is a leader who’s going to struggle to retain top talent. In today’s marketplace, the leaders who are succeeding are the ones who approach talent and talent development with an abundant mindset. The idea that we can somehow keep people small so that we can keep people, it just doesn’t work today.

 

There’s too much competition for that talent. The only thing that’s more dangerous than allowing your people access to others and to reach their potential is not allowing it, because, chances are, you’re going to lose them altogether. And I think that applies to all of the dimensions, whether it’s letting people step up to greater challenges, or as your, through your example, the connection and building greater influence across the organization. If we thwart these efforts as leaders, we do that at our own peril.

 

Interesting, but as you pointed out, it really requires a mindset of abundance and not everybody has that. The other point I wanted to come back to. Go ahead.

 

Oh, I just I there’s a gentleman that I was speaking to a bit ago who heads an Office of Financial Services Organization, just a fabulous developer of people, has become a bit of a funnel to others in the industry. They know that he’s developing his folks, his organization can’t pay, as well as some of his competitors, and he’s losing the talent. And when I spoke with him, he was remarkably good natured about the whole thing.

 

And I finally had to say, “John, you’ve got to just let me in on this. How is it that you’re approaching this as cheerfully as you are?” And he shared with me that he had just recently closed the biggest deal of his career in partnership with a competitor, but the competitor was someone he had trained who had been a mentee, who he had grown, who had gone off to work for another organization. And he said, “I could never have done this deal alone.”

 

“And I couldn’t have partnered with anyone whose skill, level and integrity I didn’t trust.” And so to me, that was the ultimate in terms of this abundance mindset, going even beyond being abundant to your colleagues within your organization, but just think even to the level of your industry and competitors, to build that capability, to lift an entire industry up can be an outcome of that as well.

 

That’s a wonderful example. And who would have thought of that, right? Great. One other thing that you mentioned as one of the touch points in your multidimensional career development framework was this concept of contribution, and allowing employees to make a difference.

 

I would think that the nature of their job, the nature of their function in the organization is already making a difference because if it didn’t, they wouldn’t need them, so there’s that piece of it. But, would you please elaborate a little bit about making a contribution and what you mean by that; going above and beyond their job function?

 

AFFIRMING EMPLOYEE CONTRIBUTION AIDS EMPLOYEE CAREER DEVELOPMENT

 

You bet. And you’re so right, Hanna. I mean, people are in organizations doing things that contribute day in and day out. And it’s so easy, isn’t it, to lose sight of that when you get into the daily grind, and you’re just putting your work product out. So, one of the tools in the chapter on contribution is called Connect the Dots, because sometimes all we have to do is help remind people of the contribution that they’re already making, to connect the dots, and what they do to – what the team is capable of doing…

 

…what the organization is capable of doing, to what is delivered to the customer or other stakeholders. Simply illuminating that, reminding folks in many cases can be awfully energizing and engaging. But on a broader level, what we know is that contribution was the most interesting of all of the dimensions in our research, in aggregate, and it was either first or second across all age ranges.

 

So, folks from new entrants to the workplace to those approaching retirement, in large part, have a desire to contribute. And so as a leader, you have an opportunity to sit down with folks and talk about, in what ways would you like to step up and how could you offer more in your current role, and what are you going to be able to learn in that process? Or how can you find greater purpose and meaning in the work that you’re doing right now? How can you align better with that?

 

How can your strengths and talents be brought to the fore in a way that aligns with that purpose? So, understanding what means something and what people want to give to the enterprise is the first step.

 

And then the key is how can you and the employee figure out, “All right, if you’re going to step up and give more, then what can you get out of that? What new skills can you be pulling from that experience? What new connections? How do you broaden your network? What experiences do you get to pack away in your portfolio now so that it’s an intentional two-way street of contribution to the organization?” But then contribution back to the individual in terms of learning and growth.

 

That’s very helpful. I think it’s also a terrific exercise for a business leader in terms of getting to know their employee better and tapping into sort of that latent resource, that hidden resource, so it could be good.

 

Yeah. Yeah. And energizing for everyone, employees and leaders alike.

 

THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL EMPLOYEE CAREER DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK

 

So tell me, how did you come up with this multidimensional developmental framework to begin with? What gave you the idea for it?

 

I published Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go with Beverly Kaye about 10 years ago and have had the opportunity to work with leaders and organizations around the world, digging into this idea of career development.

 

And over the course of all of those engagements and keynotes and trainings and talks, the common themes around what careers mean to people, what career development could be, and what’s possible in organizations, either kept kind of hearing some of these themes that settled for me into some pattern that took the form of these seven alternative dimensions. And as I mentioned, I did some research because, while people knew that the dimensions were viable because it came – the framework came from real people,

 

what I wasn’t sure of was really down deep. How valuable were these other dimensions if they were ranked against the climb up the corporate ladder and everything that comes with that? And so we did that research, and it was just, to me, it was so heartening to see that – the way I kind of have internalized it hinted, we only had promotions on the menu all these years. That was all we thought about when it came to career development.

 

So, everybody was ordering the promotion, and now what we’ve got is an expanded menu and a lot more options for people to choose from. And when they see that expanded menu, they see things that, “I want that, and then maybe in six months I’m going to want a little bit of that.” A lot more ways to access meaningful development, and also to remain really engaged and energized around your work.

 

That’s interesting how you’ve phrase it as a menu. It reminds me of Henry Ford when he first started building cars. They came in one color: black. Boom. That’s it. So, [Laughter] that was the promotion, right?

 

[Laughter] Right. Yes.

 

But, I’m sure there are some people listening who are like, “Oh, god. But I really like promotions.” [Laughter] How do you appeal to the people who still want them; who still equate the prestige and status with a title, and really, really like the raises that are associated with promotions? How do you address that? [Laughter]

 

[Laughter] Oh man, we could do a whole other podcast on that, couldn’t we? So, promotions, despite the title of my book “Are So Yesterday,” they are so today, they’re going to be so tomorrow, they’re going to be with us. And, to be honest with you, there are different points in our careers when it’s absolutely the right developmental strategy, when that’s appropriate.

 

The challenge is we don’t have very much control over that, neither employees nor managers. The beauty is these other dimensions can be deployed as a means toward that end, as ways to help people remain engaged and growing and motivated on the road to that promotion whenever it arrives. But you also touched on sort of the unnatural incentives that exists to move up the corporate ladder, because it does come with the pay and the prestige and the perks.

 

And so, in many cases, folks are incented in a way that that doesn’t serve them nor the organization. And so a lot of organizations right now are really working on the whole compensation picture, and how can we bifurcate some of that, remove some of the unnatural incentives, and figure out creative ways to compensate folks in ways that don’t demand that necessarily the climb up the corporate ladder or the move into people management. At the same time…

 

…though, as I mentioned earlier, Mercer’s research found that one in three people would take – would give up extra money for the flexibility.

 

Increasingly, as we change our relationship with work, as our expectations for what our jobs are going to do for us more, we’re going to see more opportunities for organizations to create a total compensation package that includes not just the money side of it and those traditional benefits, but other things like the flexibility, the ability to have volunteer time to go do what’s of meaning to you and whatnot. I think we have an opportunity right now to start looking at that differently as well.

 

That sounds really exciting, and I’m really happy that more organizations are embracing this and working through this in order to help employees have really a little bit more work life balance, which I think is really important. In your research, one last question before we wrap up here.

 

I was just wondering, as you were developing this multidimensional career development framework for career advancement, did you discover that different generations or age cohorts gravitated to different pieces of the dimension, or were they all pretty much the same?

 

GENERATION GAPS IN EMPLOYEE CAREER DEVELOPMENT PREFERENCES

 

There was a lot of commonality, to be honest, with you, which surprised me. We did see that in the cases of 20-somethings and 30-somethings, their top choice was competence and contribution with number two for them. All of the other decades, it was contribution number one and competence number two. But it’s one and two for all. The one distinction was climb was dead last for 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, and beyond.

 

The one group for which climb was not last was the 20-somethings. And for them, choice was dead last and climb was right ahead of them. And the way we have to do more research to really unpack that. The way I internalize that is that maybe those younger entrants to the workforce are a little bit more open to some of the structure of sorting out how they’re going to do their work, and so that was less even less interesting to them than the climb.

 

Interesting. Well, Julie, this is really been awesome. Thanks so much for your time and your insights about employee career advancement and some new ways to think about it and focus on it. If you’re listening and you’d like more information about Julie’s terrific work, her multidimensional career development framework or her book, “Promotions Are So Yesterday,” you can find that information in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com.

 

And if you know someone who could benefit from today’s interview, like maybe your boss, please tell them about this podcast episode, share the link and please leave a positive review. Thank you for listening to Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner. Have a great day and an even better tomorrow.