In the latest solo episode of the Happier at Work podcast, I talk about the 3 C’s, a highly requested topic by you for a long time. 

In this episode, I introduce my 3 C's of Thriving Talent framework, designed to foster more engagement, higher retention, greater happiness, and overall success within organisations. 

I discuss each of the 3 C’s in turn, focusing on the very essence of each in their own right, and how they are interdependent on each other. A positive culture and strong career development can't thrive without the right capabilities. Similarly, having the skills and tools without a supportive culture or clear career path doesn't lead to thriving talent.

The main points throughout this podcast include:

• The foundation of an organisation: Culture.
• The importance of personal responsibility in managing your career.
• The value in equipping employees with the right skills and tools to strive.
• Emphasis on investing in continuous learning, mentoring and professional growth opportunities.

Curious about where you or your organisation stands? I've developed an assessment to identify which areas require focus to create an environment of thriving talent. Click the link below to take the assessment.

https://thrivingtalent.scoreapp.com 

Do you have any feedback or thoughts on this discussion? If so, please connect with Aoife via the links below and let her know. Aoife would love to hear from you!

Connect with Happier at Work host Aoife O’Brien:

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Previous Episodes:

Episode 184: A Framework for Building Happier Work Cultures with Aoife O’Brien

Hello, and welcome to this week's solo episode of the Happier at Work podcast. I'm your host, Aoife O'Brien. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Today's episode is very personal to me. If you like, it was inspired by a framework that I devised based on all of questions I get from organizations. So it's all about my 3 c's of thriving talent framework. And those 3 c's are culture, career, and capability. Now I'll dive into each one of those in isolation, you know, each one of those individually in a second, but I suppose all of this is driving towards more engagement, more retention, more happiness at work, more joy at work, and overall more success for the organization.

And I put together this framework because because of so many questions that I was getting from organizations, I could see links and patterns between everything that I was talking about. And I will go into a little bit more detail at the end about the interdependency of each of those different elements because I think it's important to highlight that that you cannot have a really strong career if you're in an environment that doesn't really work for you. And, again, I have firsthand experience of that, so I know exactly what I'm talking about. But to take each one of these in isolation then so first of all, culture. And, I mean, if you're listening to this podcast for a while, I don't really need to explain what culture is. Culture is the foundation of the organization. It's the behaviors. It's the the values.

It's not something that is on the wall, in an email. It's not something that's on the website. It's someone's experience. It's not something that is necessarily tangible. It's something that you can sense when you join an organization. You get a sense for whether it is somewhere that you want to be, that you feel like you belong, or somewhere that maybe you feel like you don't necessarily belong there. You might think about whether an organization has a culture of inclusion, of belonging, a sense that you feel like you can speak up so that it's psychologically safe as well, and really about embedding the culture in an organization. It's about continuously talking about it, keeping to you know, it's not something that you do once and then it's done and it's finished and you don't ever talk about it again.

It's something that you need to continuously remind people of of what the values are, what the expected behaviors are. In addition to that, you need to really focus on the decisions that you make and communicating how those decisions are made. Because when people know how decisions are made, when they know how how they're being rewarded or what they're being rewarded for, then it makes them it makes them much easier to know the guardrails, to know the rules around how they should behave at work and what is expected of them, especially when it comes to the culture, so how they're actually showing up at work. The second one is around career, and this is something that I have been asked so much about in the last year. And it's really interesting for me because we're not taught how to manage our careers. It's not something that they teach us in school, in university. I think it's something that we're sort of expected to get on with ourselves. Or from an individual perspective, maybe we expect our organizations to be the ones who are responsible for our careers.

However, you are responsible for your own career, and you need to take that responsibility into your own hands. And, as I mentioned, career can't really exist or it can't really flourish and thrive in the way that it should in an environment that is toxic. So if you've ever been in a toxic culture, you will know that you cannot have a thriving career in a toxic culture. So it's so so important to get at least those two fundamental things right. So coming back to this idea of career and the fact that we are we're not told how to manage our careers. And organizations are putting into place, and I can see them doing this, they're putting into place all of these really fancy tools that people can use to be able to manage their careers. So, internal job boards, skills lists, training, all sorts of things in relation to okay. So we're providing you with all of these opportunities, all of these tools to be able to use to manage your career, and still they're not taught how to actually strategically manage their career.

So I think this is one of the reasons that organizations are calling on me to explain to people, you need to take ownership for your own career, and this is how you do it. So I have a framework that I use with organizations called the no, show, grow. So no is all about knowing yourself. Show is then, well, what what can other people see of you? So it's around personal brand. And then grow is around confidence. It's about learning what are what are the gaps that you need to fill to go from where you are now to where you want to be. Within the no then it's also really important to identify where is that that you want to be? Where do you want to end up? Because I think, dare I say, most of us don't actually know where we want to be. We don't know where we want to end up and therefore we end up going kind of all over the place.

We might take a detour. I wanted to touch on this notion of squiggly careers as well because, again, this is something that comes up quite a lot. The idea that, you know, the perception that our career path should be linear and that we should we think it just goes in a straight line like this. But the reality is that we take many detours. We have setbacks. Something happens. And it's maybe we take a completely different direction. We're not happy where we are.

We change roles or we change organizations or we change industries completely. So just, you know, wanted to kinda highlight that and bear that in mind. The other thing worth noting is that while I say that it is up to us to take personal responsibility for our careers, organizations are doing a fabulous job of providing all the tools, but they're not equipping managers to be able to have those conversations. So managers typically, from a performance perspective, are having quarterly check ins to talk about performance. They should also be talking about career and career aspirations and career goals and where do you want to end up in your career, what's the next step, and how do we build a bridge from where you are now to where you want to get to. But this isn't necessarily happening and it's not the manager's fault. Maybe they don't know what to say. Maybe they haven't had that themselves.

They haven't been privy to having those conversations. Maybe they just don't have the time. They're not making the time to have those conversations. So it's really important, if you are a manager, to start having those conversations. I do have a list of questions that I can share. If you feel a bit cringey about you, you know, you don't really know where to start. I do have a list of questions that you could potentially use, when it comes to having those career conversations. So do let me know if you want to get your hands on that.

The last one then is about capability. And the reason I included this is without the other 2, we need to have capability as well. So we need to have the capability to be able to manage our career. We need to have the capability to be able to create a positive work culture as well. So capability is really around equipping equipping employees with the skills and the tools that they need to do their job and to develop their careers and to to grow in their professional roles as well. So do employees currently feel resourced? Do they, does the company invest in its people? So are you actually investing in people? Do you provide mentoring opportunities and an opportunity for continuous learning, be that learning on the job, having access to to courses, having access to real world experiences where you can learn what it is that you need to do in order to create the environment that you want to be in and in order to excel in your career as well. So as I mentioned, the 3 of those areas are so interdependent. So if you imagine a career, again, as I mentioned this, having a career that in an environment that is toxic, it's just it's just not something that is viable.

When you are in an environment that's toxic, all you want to do is get out. You're not thinking of your career in a very strategic way. Equally, if you have a positive culture, you don't have that opportunity to develop your career, that's also not conducive to having a thriving talent environment either. And then the the link between those two is having that capability. So do you have the capability to achieve what it is that you want to achieve, whether that is creating that culture that you want, the really strong culture around the behaviors, the values, the attitudes within the organization? And, also, do you have the capability, the tools, and the resources that you need in order to develop and grow and manage your career? So some food for thought around my three c's framework today. I'd really love to know what you think of the framework, any questions that you have around it. I do have an assessment to go with this as well with the framework to see which area specifically that you as an individual or your organization needs to focus on to close that gap to create that environment of thriving talent from the 3 c's of thriving talent framework. So do let me know if you want that, and I will put a link to that in the show notes as well.

Do let me know what you thought of today's episode. I always love hearing from listeners. And don't forget to leave a rating or review on your favorite platform. Thank you so much for tuning in today.