In preparation for this year, I’ve been doing some reading and synthesis around key ideas that I think are important and want to explore further in 2024.
These ideas are:
- Developing future-ready leaders
- Investing in conditions for connection and effectiveness
- Using career development as a driver of people growth
- Experimenting with new ways of working
1. Developing future-ready leaders
Developing leaders has always been important, but I see three important changes in this area.
- We’re changing how we develop leaders. We’re witnessing a shift in who we develop and how leadership development gets done. While some of this is driven by technology (app-based, in context, virtual, and async delivery), some of it is propelled by a belief that people up and down your organizational chart need leadership skills and that your business will be better when all employees, from the frontline all the way up to the CEO, are exhibiting leadership each and every day.
- We’re changing who we are developing. We’re moving beyond executives and high-potential employees as candidates for leadership development. Both of these populations are important and being invested in, but companies are both looking to bolster bench strength of leaders up and down the org chart and acknowledging they need to focus on leadership for first-time and middle managers. It’s been made clear how much strain we are placing on these roles and we need to invest in them properly.
- As we evolve our models for where we work and how work gets done, we’ve begun to expect and require new ways and behaviors of leadership. For example, during the early days of the pandemic, we saw a need and desire for leaders to focus on empathy and belonging and to foster connection and psychological safety among their teams. Nearly four years later, the desire and need for those behaviors has only increased, whether that is in-person or remote.
2. Investing in conditions that enable connection and effectiveness
Even as technology plays an ever-greater role in our work, people still play a critical role in enabling the success of your organization — and, I suspect, always will. Remember that the thing that binds your employees together is their desire to do a good job. Focusing on measures and conditions of connection and team effectiveness, so that your employees can work effectively, is critical to all business outcomes. Three things to keep in mind:
• Reinforcing the idea that teamwork makes the dream work. While an individual might evaluate the organization and its culture broadly when they are looking for a job, the team is the unit that most people experience work on a day-to-day basis. And as more and more organizations rely on cross-functional work to get things done, leading teams — especially when you don’t have formal authority — becomes even more important. This means organizations need to help employees understand how to lead effective teams, whether they have formal or informal power.
• Helping employees build social capital. Between the pandemic, new work models, and the coming and going of employees (remember the Great Reshuffle?), connection is a critical challenge for many organizations. Finding ways and methods for being able to foster connection, both between employees and employees’ sense of connection to the organization is critical to overall employee engagement as well as productivity.
• Creating conditions for collaboration and effectiveness. Before the pandemic, organizations had many in-person advantages for facilitating connection and collaboration and yet we still weren’t great at it. And, yes, we now have to fight and work harder to do that in our new world of work. Organizations that are leading in this space understand they have to be intentional about creating the conditions and infrastructure for this to happen. The successful ones help work on cross-functional teams, navigate different work modes, and collaborate to generate new solutions to business problems. Building in organizational capabilities around mentoring and apprenticeship can help employees get the exposure and social capital they need to advance in their careers at the same time it improves equity and inclusion efforts inside an organization.
3. Career development as a driver of people growth
Career development is not new, but it’s also not something that mid to large companies have traditionally done well, at least on a consistent basis. There are structural, cultural, and systemic reasons for this. But getting this right finally has some urgency behind it — a Gartner report recently cited career development as the No. 5 priority for HR leaders.
Today, it’s common to hear that employees need to “own their careers.” And it’s absolutely true that each individual is best equipped to drive their career growth. But companies are also acknowledging that their employees can’t do this alone and are putting in place systems and scaffolding to support their workers.
Four tracks are coming together to make career development, especially at mid to large size organizations, align with business goals. Those threads are:
• The skills imperative. As more companies make progress on their “skills” journey, the idea of helping employees understand the skills, paths, and possibilities for their growth starts to enter the conversation. Upskilling and reskilling is often thought of as “top down,” but there is also a need to make it bottoms up: to get employees to proactively sense emerging trends and respond by building the skills to take on new opportunities. Today, upskilling often happens as a reactive measure. So, how can organizations “proactively” upskill their employees to learn and grow on the job and to enable the growth of their business by enabling the growth of their employees?
• Succession planning. Over the past two years, succession planning has also come back into the limelight. Identifying key up-and-coming talent helps make sure you have the talent you need inside your organization, not just for today but for the foreseeable future.
• Employee retention. Career development has always been a reason why employees join and leave a company. With hiring slowed in many industries, retention is critical and clear, attainable career paths can boost it. At this point, some companies have built internal mobility platforms and job boards and others have even developed internal platforms on which people can chart their skills and potential career paths.
• The evolving definition of a career. People are living and working longer — professionals 75 and over are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. workforce, despite some 10,000 Boomers retiring each day. Gen Z and Millennials will soon be the majority in the workforce, and the need for a college diploma as a ticket into the workforce is being seriously scrutinized. So, how we think about a career — and perhaps even the definition of a career — is rapidly changing. If companies want to attract and retain talent, they must start innovating on how they deliver value to their employees in the form of career capital and advancement opportunities.
The net of all of this is that career development is becoming ever more important.
4. Experimenting with new ways of working
While the world of work has changed significantly over the past few decades, many of the mindsets and practices that we have about work have stayed the same. A global pandemic forced many organizations to think and work in new ways, but there’s still a lot more room for experimentation.
• Beyond the “where” of flexibility. Right now, we talk about flexibility mostly in terms of where people work , but there’s also an opportunity to look at when, how, and why people work. Flexibility that goes beyond location could have significant value to prospective and current employees as employers look to attract or retain talent.
• The evolving nature of the employer-employee contract. Employees get hired by employers, but employers also get hired by employees. The pandemic gave everyone a free pass to ask themselves if what they got out of work was worth what they put in. Many chose differently as a result. And as we move forward, people have more agency to ask this question as a standard operating procedure. Companies that find new ways to structure their employee-employer contract may be able to find ways to not only keep talent, but also to diversify how they source and attract it. Organizations that deploy work models that include flexible work, gig and contract work, part-time work, and others — kind of what Canva talent acquisition leader Amy Schultz nicely calls build, buy, borrow, bridge, and boost — may find themselves in a better position to deliver work that truly excites employees.
Final thoughts: Let’s keep this conversation going
There are so many exciting and interesting things to explore at the intersection of talent, culture, and the future of work, but these are the ideas and topics that I’m looking to explore and dig into during 2024. I’d love for you to go to my LinkedIn feed and share your thoughts, examples of what you are doing, and any great examples of companies and leaders tackling these issues effectively.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn as a part of The Edge of Work newsletter.
Al Dea is a LinkedIn Top Voice and a veteran talent and leadership development consultant. He helps organizations build strategies for developing diverse talent, and growing the next generation of leaders inside their organizations. He is also the host of The Edge of Work Podcast, which inspires leaders to create a better world of work for their people.
