Many HR Heads
are struggling with the answer to providing career paths to employees.
Employees who are hi—pos (sorry for the terminology with which many may
disagree) want to see clear direction and something they can look forward to
stay in the company. Most of them behave like mercenaries, extremely good in
performance and showing a lot of potential but for their wares they demand
promotions and nothing less. Promotion for everyone I n corporate world
automatically means better designation, bigger car, higher bonus and more money,
lastly the respect they get from their colleagues and sub-ordinates. If you do
not provide the path or promotions, they are very happy to knock on the next
door where a higher designation is available. This round robin continues and puts
us in a big dilemma of buying or building talent. Depending on the organization
hunger, need and the phase most managers take call suiting the situation. Most
of us generally agree that we would like to build our own talent but give
opportunities to employees from outside to take on higher positions paying lip
service to building Talent.
In case we
want to build talent we have to take a slightly organized and longer path, this
pays in the long term, we all know that from our own experience. Most of the HR
Heads struggle to build a great career path for the employees, we build great
presentation(s) on the number of years taken for one to move designations but
few would map out the experience we should gain to move to the job role. If we
have personal mentors they normally guide through the games of snakes and
ladders for us to know the right path to our ultimate destination. It is a
known fact now that to build competencies we have to have particular kind of
skills, knowledge and behavior but these have not been mapped out for various
job roles in a company.
Would it
not be wonderful if some of those paths are simply put together by the organization
and shared with larger audience so that they can know what they can do to get the
next job, having gone through particular kind of experiences. Let us take an
example of Director – HR, if one was to know that to become Director – HR in a
FMCG company, she must have managed IR experiences at the manufacturing
location, should have experienced one Long Term Settlement, one full year of experienced
manufacturing cycles, been a part of new initiatives of TPM, Lean management or
other production techniques, run the welfare and other programs for workmen, experienced
participation in Union – Management committees and taken tough decisions of
convincing Union Leaders on an item of contention then a lot of resistance from
Management Trainees to go to a plant would be overcome . A clear experience map
will ensure that management sees the person in various kind of situations to
make up their mind on which edges of this diamond need more polishing to decide
on the development journey. I am sure we can all draw out similar maps for our
functions, it is not a difficult task. Marc from Talent Management Group and
self have been talking and working on these for a while. It takes time and
thinking through, it is a lot of hard work, alignment and agreements on future
capabilities but in the end it is worth it.
The
experience maps can make our job a lot easier as managers. We can have easy dialogues
around next job and promotions, a clear indicative path with experience map laid
out can determine for us the next set of experience our subordinates must take
to vie for our job.
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