In this episode, Laurie explains how to develop a core promise as part of your employee experience that defines what it means to grow in your business. He steps out the three key ingredients needed when designing an experience of growth that attracts, develops, unleashes and retains great people fully committed to bringing your vision to life.

You can read his blog article here.

Learn more about Within People and the work we do here.

All right.

Hey there.

This is Laurie, and welcome to this episode of Re-Imagining Work from

within this episode's actually a recording of a blog I wrote in March,

2023 as part of a series we're running.

Which explores four areas of focus.

Key to developing an equitable employee experience.

There's a flexibility, connection, reward, and growth.

This blogs about growth.

It talks about how companies and leaders can help their employees

take responsibility for how they want to develop their skills and why.

Forward thinkers are talking about personal growth, not

professional development.

Enjoy.

Professional development is dead long.

Live personal growth.

The way we work is changing.

The way we lead is changing.

The way we look at performance is changing.

How we think about careers is changing.

So the way we think about professional development at better be changing too.

How do leaders help their people grow so that their business can grow?

How do individuals combine skills and passions to flourish at work?

A few years ago, I had a conversation with a client where I mentioned

personal growth plans for his team.

He was quick to correct me.

You mean professional development plans?

Right.

It wasn't just a jargon battle.

His point was that a business has no business helping

their people grow personally.

But rather to help them develop professionally.

The former was the job of parents pals and gurus.

I remember being struck by how distinct he felt the two ideas were.

In the end, it sparked a lively conversation about the relative

merits of working with whole people rather than employees.

The benefits of teaching leaders the art of being better humans.

Not just better managers.

The idea that taking an interest in people's wellbeing might

support rather than squash a more professional level of performance.

You might be reading this thinking it would be bananas not to embrace the

personal and personal development, but you'd be surprised how recent a shift

that's been and how long it's taken.

Taking even to really drive that thinking into the way learning and

development programs are designed and delivered In many companies, it was only

during the pandemic, for example, that the idea of empathy as a fundamental

leadership quality really took hold.

But like just about everything else in the employee experience, how people

want to learn and grow is changing.

Growings, one of the lenses in within employee experience framework,

inviting leaders to make promises about how they focus on balance,

wellbeing, and personal growth.

And it's never been so hot as it's hot right now.

Here are three ingredients leaders need to be thinking about in 2023 to ensure

their supporting career journeys tailored to individual talents, committing to

equal opportunity so that everyone has a fair chance to advance and understanding

what each person needs to thrive in their personal and professional life.

Number one, skills, pathways and powerups.

How do people chart their own growth pathway by gathering skills

that align to their passions and the vision of your business?

We're starting to look at people differently.

Instead of badging them with titles they've occupied an experience they've

gathered in their careers to hear.

We're starting to see a more fractional picture, the kind of tapestry of

skills they've assembled and applied.

That's helpful As roles and even whole industries get more fluid, as

companies stop operating like silos and more like networks, they start to

think more like a marketplace of skills than a set of defined and rigid roles.

That's energizing cuz it doesn't pigeonhole people into certain

positions, but encourages more creative mobility within companies as people

bring their skills to challenges faced by different departments.

And that's magic dust for innovation and resilient growth in this environment.

Employees stop seeing their future as a career ladder that they need

to ascend one step at a time.

Instead, it becomes a pathway which might snake around a little

more guided and fueled by their passions as much as their pros.

As businesses look into their own future, they're asking themselves what skills

they're going to need to thrive there.

Right now that's not just a conversation about products and services they need

to build capacity to deliver, but the kind of skills needed to lead and thrive

in a remote or hybrid environment.

For example, ask yourself from recruitment through onboarding to

development, how are you enabling people to chart their growth pathway?

What menu of skills are you offering and incentivizing, and how can your people

power up both their own career and your business's capabilities by getting them

number two, wellness, balancing, strength and stretch.

How are you encouraging wellbeing as an enabler of personal growth?

The workplace wellbeing market was worth over 49 billion in 2022.

That's perhaps unsurprising when you learn that three in 10 employees

in the US reported being burned out either very often or always at work,

and that only 24% of employees felt their employer even cared about

their wellbeing according to Gallup.

The relationship between growth and wellbeing seems remarkably obvious.

Yet there's an enduring narrative in business that real growth comes

from challenge and adversity.

The school of Hard Knocks theory has some truth to it.

We really do learn a lot in times of challenge, but as an approach to

lasting skill building, it's about as sustainable as an unwanted plant.

A healthier approach to personal growth centers more around the ability to find

flow in an increasingly challenging world.

And for fans of miha chicks and Maha's work, you'll know that that requires

a proportionate increase in skill.

As we build mastery, we're able to operate in greater challenge with less stress.

When burnout really hit its peak towards the back end of the pandemic.

We had some really interesting conversations with clients challenging

their reaction that giving folks time off as an antidote might sometimes be

less effective than giving them new skills to cope with new challenges.

In this case, wellbeing and growth aren't just bedfellows, they're spooning.

So ask yourself, how are you matching the challenge of growth with the care

and support people need to be able to bring themselves fully into learning.

Hint, if you are a learning organization that allocates hardly any time for

learning, you are not doing this well.

And number three, equity access to growth opportunities.

How are you ensuring everyone, including the most marginalized

has the opportunity to advance?

Building a personal development program that's equitable is tough.

There are so many factors that influence how people learn from their lived

experience of education to their preferred learning styles and the practical

constraints they face in their jobs.

Three things play a powerful role here.

The first is understanding how people learn and what stops

them on an individual level.

Building out a blended approach to how people can learn new skills then allows

people with different styles to find the one that suits them best, especially in

more self-directed learning environments.

That means leaders taking more marginalized employees by the hand

and supporting them to step in.

The second is enabling people to learn through their work,

not making development.

Something that always has to happen separately on the job, on a course

or in a book, but rather making work a constant source of learning.

This is particularly valuable for time and resource, poor employees or

programs, which surfaces the third, the ability for people to seek and receive

quality feedback on the work they do.

A major challenge for black, indigenous, and people of color traditionally,

for example, has been receiving honest feedback either out of a racial bias or

an over-corrected desire to avoid that.

White supervisors often avoid giving critical feedback to black

subordinates and peers outta the fear of being viewed as biased.

So ask yourself, how are you catering to the diverse learning

needs of your employees?

How are you enabling people to learn at work and equipping

leaders to provide honest, quality feedback to everyone on their team?

Trying to peel professional development apart from personal growth

has never been more impractical.

If your culture set up to develop employees without acknowledging their

needs and passions as individuals, human beings, it's not going to work.

Similarly, all of this must work within the larger container of the culture

as a whole, trying to encourage self responsibility for personal growth

in a system that hoards control at the top simply won't work either.

How we change Professional development needs to be

addressed at source, not symptom.

It's just not gonna fly anymore.

To see growth opportunities as a perk for talent attraction rather

than a promise embedded deeply into the experience of your culture.

Thanks for listening everyone.

We hope you enjoyed learning about personal growth in organizations.

Tune into our podcast every other week for more episodes on what's happening

in the culture and leadership space.

What's on the minds of the leaders committed to change in our

community and other future of work.

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