Help Others Manage Their Careers

Up to this point in the chapter we have looked at human capital investments through your eyes: how you can make the most of your most important asset. By doing what’s best for yourself, you may be doing your company a favor. After all, the company will benefit if your long-term interests are aligned with its interests; if your skills, knowledge, and experience are utilized fully; and if your human capital is expanded through training, career development, or some other means.

What’s good for you is also good for those you manage. As a manager, you should put yourself in the shoes of your direct reports and see human capital issues from their perspective. Are there mismatches between their individual goals and the company’s interests? If there are, those mismatches eventually will produce frustration, lower productivity, and costly turnover, and you will fail to make the most of the human capital at your disposal. Thus, every executive and manager has a motive for supporting intelligent career self-management among employees.

Here’s a short list of things you can do today:

• Encourage people to take more responsibility for their careers and to think like investors.

• Provide the facts. What is being rewarded? What is the likelihood of being promoted this year? Greater information creates a more efficient internal labor market and reduces the likelihood that either the company or the employee will have a misunderstanding.

• Challenge the “conventional wisdom” and anecdotes about hires, promotions, transfers, and turnover in the organization. Then take it further by testing deep-rooted beliefs about the way those internal labor dynamics affect business performance and your own success.

• Help employees understand the prospects for having successive careers in the same company, for example, moving progressively from technical professional to manager to executive.

• Provide all talented employees with a career ladder and the training and progressive assignments that will help them move from rung to rung.

• Help people understand the implications and risks of generalized versus firm-specific human capital both for themselves and for the company.

Doing these things will help your people make the most of their own capital, and in the long run this will pay dividends to you and the company.