Career development from the bottom up – Talk to Organisational Psychologists

Last week the Division of Work & Organisational Psychology (DWOP) of The Irish Psychological Society invited me to talk on the topic of career development. It was one of the first really fine evenings of the summer and I was a bit concerned about whether or not we would get an audience.  It turned out to be a great event, with real engagement from attendees and plenty of discussion. I want to thank them, and particularly Kathryn McCarthy, Heather Weight and Karen Lopez Moore for organising the event.

My slides and an audio of the talk are available here. It is roughly in three parts:

• My career story and how I came to be involved with career development from an engineering background
• The role and importance of career development in organisations, including some discussion about performance management and talent management. See these other posts for more on the topics discussed The new psychological contract , Performance Management v Career Development and The social enterprise, more equal or more successful? .
• A brief overview of how careergro can support employees in managing their career development.

I was scheduled to talk for 1 hour with 20 mins for questions, however I was interested in getting some discussion going with everyone in the room and so I spoke for less than 30 mins. The discussion continued for at least 40mins, which was great. Even better if the discussion continues here, so please share you comments, thoughts and questions below.

The new psychological contract

According to the CIPD, the traditional employee psychological contract is generally described as an offer of commitment by the employee in return for job security provided by the employer  – or in some cases the legendary ‘job for life’.  An employee joined an organisation and stayed for many years, working his or her way up the hierarchy.

The recession of the early 1990s and the continuing impact of globalisation are alleged to have destroyed the basis of this traditional deal since job security is no longer on offer. Very few organisations claim to offer careers for life any more. Organisations are flatter and need more flexibility, which means they cannot offer long-term career advancement in return for loyalty, organisational commitment, and good performance, which used to be part of the psychological contract.

A new psychological contract has emerged.  Employees still want job security, that much hasn’t changed.  What has changed is that now security comes from being employable rather than being employed.  Employees today offer high productivity and commitment while with their employer.  By contrast, employers offer an improved employability: employees can develop and practise skills in demand while employed, which gives them a better chance to find a new job when the current employer no longer requires them.

Responsibility for career management has moved from the company to the individual: modern employees do their own career management. Success is now seen as achieving personal goals, rather than attaining the lofty heights of an organisation’s hierarchical structure.  Although responsibility now rests with the employee to manage their own individual careers, the reality is that most employees do not do this.  Research suggests that most people rely on luck or random opportunity for their career development, as few as 25% do any actual planning.  Those who practice career development need to create their own opportunities to suit their own personal preferences.  This may involve working long hours, seeking guideance from more experienced employees and building strong network relationships.

However, studies show that most individuals are not very good at career self-management.  The common lack of personal drive in this area is possibly why organisations that offer career development support to their employees are popular with potential recruits.  A company that supports the development of its employees will garnish respect, because it is seen to attend to employee needs, and not just the needs of top management.  As a result, company driven career management encourages commitment, motivation, performance and reduces turnover, all good outcomes for the company.

Is this new psychological contract alive and well in your organisation?

Learning in the woods

Last week I attended the L&D Connect Unconference and met lots of people interested in a conversation about learning and development (L&D). Please have a look at this video by Martin Couzins and this storify by Ian Pettigrew from the event. One of the people I met was Flora Marriott who wrote this post on what she’s learned from trees. I’ve spent a lot of time in the forests in the Dublin mountains over the last year and Flora’s post got me thinking about what I’ve learned in the woods. Of course the discussions at the Unconference find a way in here too.

About 18 months ago I took up mountain biking and joined a local club. The first few times were a bit hairy and there were quite a few spills. I was hesitant, nervous and maintained a clenched fist on the brakes. However I really enjoyed the activity, the social side of it and getting to see a new side to Dublin, so I kept at it. Fast forward to last weekend and I took some friends out for their first time mountain biking. They were hesitant..you get it, they were like me when I started. I realised for the first time that I had developed my ability significantly (with still a long way to go!).

My development experience

As Flora says in her post, it’s long term. I didn’t develop new skills and abilities overnight, in fact I wasn’t even aware of how I had developed until time had passed and I was reminded of where I had started from. I did have a clear idea of what I was trying to achieve and I was able to draw on the experience of others in the club, on line resources etc as needed to help me progress. Mostly, I learned by doing, there were no training courses although that might be useful in the future. Learning was fun, social, and challenging. I was usually operating in a state of flow, immersed in the activity and at level of challenge that was pushing my ability (though not too much). Importantly there was no fear of failure, it’s expected that things will go wrong every now and then and if you play it too safe you feel like the odd one out.

Learning in the workplace

Ok, it’s nice to know about my mountain biking but what’s the relevance to work?

First I think it’s important to pay attention to how we learn. Is it engaging and continuous or tedious and short lived? I think on the job, experiential learning, in a social environment certainly works best for me and delivers results over the short and long term.

Secondly, how to balance short term and longer term learning needs?

Day to day learning needs arise due to performance requirements in your current job. Most people and organisations have this covered to some extent and it drives much of the learning in organisations.

Competency frameworks can guide learning and development (L&D) for more medium term objectives, like advancing to the next rung on the ladder. Competency models are developed from the top down and are relatively static, compared to the blistering rate of change in the world of work. Is it possible for them to capture the full picture, especially over the long term and to stay relevant in a changing world?

There are a wider range of career skills, skills in your chosen field and skills that go beyond the roles defined in the competency model, which may be essential for long term success. Each individual should think about what these career development objectives are for themselves work towards them over the long term and in a way is relevant to their current role.

Ideally career development will be a healthy balance of performance driven L&D, competency driven L&D and L&D driven by the career development needs of individuals. It should be a social experience,  engaging and tolerate failure. Mostly, I think the individual needs to be the one who owns their career development, even the performance driven elements of it.

How does all this work in your company? Do you struggle to balance long term and short term L&D? Who owns career development, HR, line managers or individuals?

Personal experience of becoming a learning organisation

One of the case studies to be presented at the forthcoming CIPD HRD 2012 conference and exhibition on Learning and Organisational Development (April 25 & 26, London) is titled: ‘Becoming a Learning Organisation’. The study is a joint presentation by Andy Holmes of Ernst & Young and Andy Doyle of ITV, see:
http://www.cipd.co.uk/cande/hrd/conference/_SeminarDetails.htm?guid={77E19A2D-8172-41B9-8EDD-57CC8B94848C}

Their presentation looks to cover the following topics:

• creating an environment where learning is embedded in the organisational culture
• the business benefits of focusing on learning
• developing a proactive approach to learning where employees take ownership of their own development

My colleagues and I at Careergro have spent the last couple of years working fulltime thinking about, researching and talking to a diverse range of people including HR professionals, business leaders and employees about the challenges they face and the issues there are trying to address in improving learning and development for themselves and their organisations.  As a result, we have built the online career development tool Careergro (www.careergro.com) and as is the want of technology companies who like to swallow their own medicine, we have been using Careergro internally to manage and track our own development, as individuals, as a team and as an organisation.  Now in the lead up to HRD 2012, it is perhaps as good a time as any to reflect on our experience with particular reference to the topics above.

To my mind, the key driver to creating a learning organisation is intrinsic motivation.  In our organisation, nobody is told what to learn, the requirement on each employee is to come up with a learning and development plan that meets the needs of their role and to be able to advocate and justify why their development plan is the right one to meet the needs of the organisation and increase the value they bring.  Each employee is still required to meet the performance goals defined for them as part of our strategic objectives.   However, we believe our individual employees are best placed to identify how they need to develop themselves to meet those goals.

The online career development tool Careergro has three main sections:

1. Assess: career coaching assessments designed to grow awareness both of ourselves and our fit with our current and/or future role, but also of the world of work around us which can be used to help identify areas for learning and development.  These include considering how we can better align our role with our values, identifying the skill strengths that we can work to master and considering the trends and changes happening around us in our team, organisation and industry.  There are also more advanced assessments which include for example looking at our limiting beliefs.This awareness is I believe key to creating an environment where learning is embedded in the organisational culture.  To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, if we don’t know what we don’t know, we are not going to be very motivated to learn.  Likewise, being told what we don’t know by our line manager and promised extrinsic rewards for learning has proven time and time again to be ineffective when competing for time against achieving other performance related goals.  The only true way to ensure the learning takes place is for it to be intrinsically motivated.
2. Develop: an online development plan supported by automated email reminders where we can define our learning and development objectives and the actions that we will take to achieve them.  This development plan is shared with our manager to get their feedback, approval and support.Providing our employees with the tools to allow them create a development plan for themselves that they can then collaborate on with their manager and colleagues is the most effective way to develop a proactive approach to learning where employees take ownership of their own development.
3. Share: an online enterprise activity feed where we can share achievements, completion of development actions and other development related updates, give thanks, ask questions and receive recognition from our managers and peers – essentially an ongoing social career development conversation with our managers and colleagues.  This is also the place where we capture private feedback from our line managers as part of more formal face to face development reviews.It is our experience that the key to creating a learning and development organisational culture is getting insight into how our peers are developing and the intrinsic motivation that comes from sharing our own learning and development progress.

The key outcomes for me of this new career development journey to date which are driving the business benefits are:

1. my awareness of what brings me satisfaction in my career has grown significantly, even in the tough times I now know why I am doing what I are doing and why it is the best thing for me, this makes going the extra mile very easy
2. I now look at our learning and development as driving our performance rather than as a distraction from it.  Learning and development have now become central to everything we do
3. actively managing my career has brought a great sense of control over our destiny which greatly helps with managing stress
4. the trust that transparency into our learning and development activities has fostered is greatly enhancing our team and organisational performance and  engagement

I am very much looking forward to seeing how my experience compares to the case study to be presented at HRD2012.  I would also love to hear what drives learning and development in your organisation.

Kevin

Twitter: @ksorohan

Performance Management v Career Development

I listened in to a HR seminar given by Mike McDermott from HumanR yesterday and it answered a very fundamental question for me: what should drive learning and development in a knowledge sector organisation, performance management or career development?

Mike described how performance management up until the turn of the century was based on the following paradigm:

PM = ability * motivation

With the advent of performance management tools over the last decade, alignment started to play a more significant role:

PM = alignment * (ability * motivation * opportunity)

According to Mike, this process is based on work that can be planned with expectations set, where performance can be monitored and abilities developed, performance rated, ratings summarised and top performance rewarded.  This approach is based on scientific management ideas from the likes of Fred Taylor from the turn of the last century, ideas designed for largely uneducated factory workers.

Automating this process made it more administratively efficient, a record was kept, there was legal compliance and it drove compensation within organisations.  Unintended consequences however included the process becoming too formulaic, it became a numbers game, inhibiting meaningful conversations, reducing the voice of the employee and growing the gap between managers and employees with a greater emphasis on external motivators and where the PM process is seen as a necessary evil.

The question Mike posed is what type of performance management system should we use for highly eduated knowledge sector workers who spend their time establishing relationships, evaluating priorities, identifying trends, making connections, brainstorming, focusing, creating new capabilities and strategies?  Mike’s answer focused on intrinsic motivation which directs behavious towards particular goals,  leads to increased effort, increases initiation of activities and enhaces cognitive processing, essentially leads to greater employee engagement.

Mike’s answer involves taking an holistic approach to performance management with 3 cornerstones based on everyday conversations, engagement principles and leadership practices.  Engaging conversations include conversations about what is important, about goals, learning, meaning, recognition and appreciation.  Engagement principles include widening the circle of involvement, connecting people to each other, creating communities of action and promoting fairness.  Leadership practices include speaking honestly, being transparent and being authentic.

Mike concluded with a new paradigm for knowledge sector performance management:

PM = [Org Capabilities * (Conversations * Community * Leadership)] – Under Performers

Mike then went off to ride his bike in the Washington sunshine having greatly enlightened the members of his audience.  The answer I concluded to the question of peformance management versus career development is that it is the wrong question, the real choice is between industrial age performance management and knowledge age performance management.  The sooner knowledge sector organisations realise this distinction the sooner they will increase their performance.