Helping your team navigate their career path

Disclaimer :This won’t be as long as I wanted it to be because the editor is being slow for some reason.

Hey! I know, I know it’s been a very long time since I’ve updated this blog. While I have been busy and that’s a part of the reason , it’s mostly because I was burned out. These past few months to a year of the pandemic was finally starting to get to me. I actually finally took some time off from work this week and it’s allowed me to catch up on writing. Which leads me to this… it’s been almost 2 years since I “fell into” becoming a manager and while I’m still learning quite a bit, here’s one of the things I’ve done that works for my team and that is helping them navigate their career path. Before I get into how I go about this, I want to clarify that right now my team is small and comprised of 2 mid-levels (1 is more senior than the other) and 1 junior. I will be expanding my team to over 12 people between this year and next year, so my method of how I approach this may change as the team scales.

However, the main factor that I always keep in mind is that as a manager I want to put my team in the best position possible to not only be successful in their current role but also in future roles regardless of the company they work for. In order for me to accomplish this I not only make sure to have valuable 1x1s that focus on what they want to learn but what I also see in them as well. For instance, while all of my team members have expressed eventually wanting to manage a team or be in a leadership role, some have strong skills in strategy and scaling , others in people management and mentorship, and others in overall aesthetic planning. Why is this important? It’s because there are multiple ways that you can reach your career goals and some paths are a better fit for you than others may be. By this I mean, if my team wants to become better in motion graphics because they want to be a creative director in the long term, then I won’t put them on the finance project that requires them to be more of a people manager and focus on strategic scaling.

After I have my first 1x1 and 30, 60, 90 day plan with them, I create a document with their strengths, opportunities for improvement, skills they want to gain, projects that allow for them to use those skills, resources to learn them, who they can learn from, and who they work best with. This allows me to guide them on what their next steps should be, what responsibilities they should be aiming to have, what projects align with it for their portfolio, and what roles would suit them best and how I can prioritize them for certain projects for them to showcase their strengths and how they are growing in meeting their goals. When they meet their goals at the expectation it should be , then it’s time for them to go to the next level .

As an example, here is the document I created and used not only for my team but myself as well.

Hope this helps and I’ll be sharing more lessons I’m learning as a manager in future posts!

Happy wireframing,

Nita