*Meet Regularly.  You should have developmental conversations with this employee – and every employee – twice a year.

*Show Them the Path.  Once you get the inkling that you have a future “star” on your hands, tell them this.  Outline the knowledge and skills that they will need to develop to ascend to the next level.  Support their development.  Make sure your bosses know early on that you have a developing star.

*Be Proactive.  As the development process moves forward, be proactive with your bosses.  If there are not going to be any promotions available in due time with the current org chart, are there roles you can create that provide additional responsibility, compensation, and a new title?

*Be Honest with Your Star.  Tell your star what you are able to do and what you cannot do.  Try to maximize additional compensation, training, and job responsibility – even if you cannot provide a title change.

*Support Them If They Decide to Leave.  Encourage them to be honest with you.  If they decide they need to look around, encourage them and offer to support them in every way possible.

*The Door Swings Both Ways.  If they leave, make sure that it is on the best of terms.  Keep them in mind when you have future job openings.  If they are a real hotshot, this person could end up being your future boss!

There is no substitute for treating people right.  If you build the kind of culture in which you treat your star this way, word will spread.  Future stars will be attracted to your organization.  You can’t keep them all, but if you attract enough of them – it won’t matter.

“What criteria will you be using to judge my performance?”

“What are your most important priorities for me for the next three months and why?”

As time goes by, here are some other good questions to ask your boss during your one:one meetings – which are inspired from a much longer list from a recent article from Harvard Business Review:

“What are the organization’s top strategic priorities at this time?”

“How does my work contribute to our strategic priorities?”

“Am I meeting your expectations?  Do you have any feedback on how I can improve?”

“What strengths do you see that I have and how can I more effectively deploy them for the organization?”

“What professional development activities do you suggest that I consider participating in during the next six-twelve months?”

“Are there particular people with whom I should be networking – internally and externally – that would support our work and also be good for my career advancement?”

“Is there anything else I should be doing to prepare myself for advancement within our organization?”

“Are there things I can do to better support you with your priorities?

Obviously, you don’t want to ask all of these questions in every meeting.  Pick the ones that seem to make sense with everything else that you and your boss have going on.

You can actually support your boss in being a more effective manager with these questions, while you are also becoming more successful and fulfilled in your own role.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Rogelberg, S, Kreamer, L., and Meredith, C.  “28 Questions to Ask Your Boss in Your One:Ones,”  Harvard Business Review online, June 23, 2023.

According to research reported in a recent Harvard Business Review article, here is what our work force wants NOW and moving forward.  The research included more than 2,000 knowledge workers at large and mid-sized companies.  I don’t know about you, but my reaction to this is “Oh My” (or something like that):

1.  Complete Flexibility in Hours & Location.  In the study, 88% of workers said that when looking for their next job, they will look for one that offers complete flexibility in their hours and location.  Also, 76% believe that most employees will prioritize lifestyle opportunities when they move, even if it means taking a pay cut.

2.  Organizations that Prioritize Outcomes vs Outputs.  Employees – 86% of them – are more interested in working for companies that care more about the holistic impact they make on the company rather than specific outputs.  They don’t want managers looking over their shoulders regarding daily progress.

3.  A Diverse Workforce.  A company that has a work force that is diverse and that has honest, accessible metrics around diversity progress is desired by 86% of employees.

4.  Continuous Learning.  Upskilling and reskilling opportunities are desired by 82% of employees so they remain competitive in the job market.  Providing these opportunities (such as certificates) will help with retention and recruitment.

There will be winner and losers in our new world – and you may be both.  While you might lose people, this opens up a whole new set of possible employees if you can leverage remote work.

The research was conducted during COVID when many people were working remotely.  Does this cloud the results?  Maybe.  But remember the line from the old song “How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Pari’?”  Now that people know they can work productively from remote locations, it will be challenging to convince them they need to be in the office every day.

The future work force may not want to come to your farm anymore – or at least not as often.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Minahan, T.  “What Your Future Employees Most Want Most,” Harvard Business Review online, May 31, 2021.

Recent research reported in California Management Review* gives us hope!  It encourages us to beef up our feeling skills.

That’s right:  “All the feels” may soon pay off at work.

The Feeling Economy is on the horizon.  The new research explains that as computational power and artificial intelligence (AI) implementation across all fields increases, we are entering a new economy “in which the feeling tasks of jobs, such as communicating / coordinating with others and establishing / maintaining interpersonal relationships, are becoming more important for human workers than the thinking tasks of jobs.”*

Using a US Department of Labor database, the authors examined 41 tasks that have been used by economists to track the nature of work for several decades.  This research categorized each task as either a mechanical, thinking or feeling task and then looked at how the importance of those tasks to the various jobs had changed from 2006 to 2016.

What they found was that (not surprisingly) the importance of mechanical tasks decreased over that time and the importance of thinking tasks had increased a little.  But the surprise to many of us is that the importance of feeling tasks grew substantially.  Specifically, as firms turn over more and more of the thinking tasks to AI systems, the need for humans to do the feeling tasks is increased.

What’s a feeling task?  Here’s an example of a few:

• Developing and building teams
• Guiding, directing, and motivating subordinates.
• Establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships.
• Assisting and caring for others.

These are tasks that will take decades to train machines to do.   So for now, firms are relying more heavily on humans to do these things, and leaving the thinking to the bots.

What are the implications for you, as a human (we’re assuming), an employee, and a manager?

• Your next co-worker may be a computer – embrace that and learn to work with it as you would any teammate. Help it do the right thinking while you focus on posing the right questions and communicating the outcomes to others in your organization.
• Look for ways to optimize job and task allocation across people and your firm’s artificial intelligence capabilities, based on what they’re each good at: Feeling and thinking, respectively.
• As your organization’s AI capabilities scale up, be sure you’re hiring for people skills (feeling) more and thinking (or at least, hard quant skills) less.
• Emotions have been a key element of strong brands for some time; this will continue to grow as the thinking aspect of value creation becomes more commoditized. Revisit your brand strategy to make sure you’re creating and appealing to the feelings that customers will increasingly value.

Want to increase your Feeling Economy readiness?  Consider exploring some of Daniel Goleman’s work on Emotional Intelligence.  Or to develop higher-level interpersonal and leadership skills, enroll in a course on Leadership & Influence.  Here’s one developed by faculty at the Robert H. Smith School of Business.  Leverage your natural, human, feeling talents!

*Huang, M., Rust, R., and Maksimovic, V.  “The Feeling Economy:  Managing in the Next Generation of Artificial Intelligence,” California Management Review, August 2019, pp. 43-65.

*As you work to identify high potentials, keep in mind that today’s high performers are not necessarily tomorrow’s.

*Consider the most important needs you will have in the future and the talents needed in those positions.  Focus special leadership development activities for those people.

*All staff should have individual development plans.  Make sure that your high potentials have some “stretch” assignments that will challenge them.  Don’t be afraid to give them risky assignments.

*In one:one development meetings be sure to show your high potentials that there are roles they can be aspiring to in your organization.  Don’t assume they see this.

*Make sure that high potentials have excellent managers or risk losing them.

*Be sure that your talent pool reflects the diversity of talent you want for the future – in every way.

*Reevaluate your high potentials regularly to see how they are growing and if the pipeline is still robust enough.

You will never keep all of your top talent and giving them a positive sendoff to a new organization is the right thing to do – and the smart thing to do. Remind them that the door works both ways and you may welcome them back some day.  Vigilant attention to your talent pipeline will give you the best opportunity for being prepared for unexpected turnover and keeping your organization soaring.

#Most ideas from this blog are from:  Martin, J. & Schmidt, C. “How to Keep Top Talent,” Harvard Business Review, May 2010, pp. 54 – 61.

With the best of intentions, we often engage young staff in conversations about their career future.

One one hand, this is a good thing because we want to support their professional development. On the other, it is probably unrealistic for staff who are just a couple years out of college to have a clear career path. Or if they do, it may turn out to be inaccurate.

Authors of a recent article in Harvard Business Review* suggest that we need to do mentoring of young staff in an entirely different way than we have done in the past.  Here are some key take-aways:

*Dispel the Career Myth.  Long gone are the days when you decide what you want to do, join a company, and spend your career there.  In those days, perhaps a “career path” made more sense.  We need to affirm with young people that it is actually preferable for them to be curious about future jobs and not get “trapped” into thinking there is just one road ahead.

*Focus on Transferrable Skills.  The professional development focus, then, should not necessarily be on what specific jobs you are looking for next – but what skills you want to develop.  This will increase their employability and productivity.  I recently interviewed a young woman (whom we ended up hiring) and asked her the “future career” question.  She wisely responded that, in fact, she was interested in developing new skills every year – she also added that she might be ready for my job one day (Welcome Jazz!).

*Create Milestones.  As with any project, it is ideal to set measurable goals and milestones for skill development activities.   This can allow both staff and supervisors to visibly see the progress they are making.  For specific suggestions on creating effective goals, check out this article.

*Encourage Small Experiments.  Young staff might not know what kinds of new skills would interest them or assist them with their development.  Encourage cross-training within other departments or even shadowing others to give them a taste of what is done elsewhere in the organization.

It is crucial that we devote time to supporting our young staffers with their professional development.  But doing it in the context of skill development rather than pure career advancement is a positive shift in mindset for all of us to make.

*Luna, T. & Cohen, J.  “How to Mentor Someone Who Doesn’t Know What Their Career Goals Should Be,” Harvard Business Review, July 10, 2018.

A recent article in Harvard Business Review* identifies three types of “C” players.  Here are some highlights on how to handle them.

Type #1: Don’t have competence to perform job.  If you suspect this problem, try giving these people challenging assignments while also making sure to give them the support and resources they need.  If they do not perform, then it may be a sign that you need to move them to a job with different responsibilities either within your team or elsewhere in the organization or they need to leave.  Don’t stew about this – take action!

Type #2: Don’t have motivation.  There are a lot of potential reasons for this.  Ask about their long term goals – do these job responsibilities build toward their desired future?  Ask about their connection to the mission – maybe they need to work somewhere else and you can assist them with the move.  Maybe your attentiveness will inspire them.  If not, you need to move them out.

Type #3: High performers with poor people skills.  It is tempting to overlook this group because of their performance.  But they can end up upsetting other valued staff both inside and outside the team.  You need to be very assertive with this group.  HBR article authors Conger and Church suggest:

“These C players need very actionable, clear feedback from you if you want to reform them. . . You have to illustrate precisely what the appropriate interpersonal behaviors are that they need to demonstrate and which are the inappropriate ones they need to stop. .  . Tell them that their job or next promotion is at risk if they continue with their current behavior.”

Like the other types, if your actions do not produce change then you need to move these people out – and not to a different part of the organization as that just transfers the infection.

Moving people out of their jobs is one of the toughest, but important tasks for a leader/manager.  And of course you want to do it appropriately and humanely.  But ignoring the responsibility simply sets a standard of mediocrity, which you definitely do not want.

*“The 3 Types of C Players and What to Do About Them,” Jay Conger and Allan Church, Harvard Business Review, Digital Article, February 1, 2018.

Once you have accepted that fact of life – now it is time to prepare for it.  Here are some things you can do to be prepared to successfully navigate the departure of key staff:

*Identify possible successors – internally and externally.  Even if your organization is not large enough to groom successors within your organization, you can keep your eye out for people outside it.  This could include sharp people you get to know within your community who are working elsewhere as well as networking at industry conferences.

*Utilize cross-training within your organization.  In all too many organizations, only one person knows how to do certain tasks or processes.  This is a bad idea for many reasons.  If it takes a long time to replace a staff person you will be pleased that others can pitch in and take over some of those responsibilities.

*Provide professional development opportunities for staff at all levels.  This helps build more resilience within the organization and allows potential successors for top staff to develop themselves.

It’s a bummer to lose top staff, but it is a fact of life.  And, in a lot of ways, it is a complement to the organization when they can grow and fly on to more responsibilities in other places.  The more prepared you are the better you can successfully transition to a new staff lineup and continue making an effective Mission Impact.

This is one of the helpful themes of the book Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (even when it is off base, unfair, poorly delivered, and, frankly, you’re not in the mood).  What a great, though long, title!  This really captures part of the challenge of acting on feedback.

I recommend the book and here are a couple of quick takeaways you can start using today, if you want feedback for improvement:

*Ask people (coworkers, supervisor, direct reports) “What’s just one thing I could work on to improve.  Please make it as practical as you can.”  Ask enough people that you find a theme.  Don’t try to work on everything that people suggest!  Pick just one thing.

*Sometimes people have a hard time identifying something for you to work on.  As a twist on the first suggestion, ask instead “What’s one thing you see me doing that gets in my way?”  Again, look for themes and pick just one thing to work on.

*Finally, when you start to implement a change in behavior according to the feedback, remember that change is hard and give yourself time to change.  Try small experiments with the change and do not expect to be newly perfect all of a sudden.

We can all improve and continuous improvement is a hallmark of a great leader.  Put take it one thing at a time and build on your improvements.  And make sure to thank people for their feedback – even though, you know, it may not be delivered perfectly.

While this is a healthy thing to think about, I suggest that you need “succession preparation” more than you need “succession planning.”  In large corporations, succession planning is about identifying, developing, and evaluating potential CEOs over a period of years.  This is usually not possible or even ideal in a nonprofit.  But you should do “succession preparation.”

Three key elements of succession preparation are:

1. An Emergency Transition Plan in the event that the CEO is incapacitated for a significant period of time.  Which person or persons would take on the CEO’s responsibilities during this interim period?  Have they been trained on what to do?  Do they have at least some relationship with key stakeholders so they could take on these responsibilities?  All too often, CEOs hold a lot of information only in their heads.  You need to get this written down.  And you might want emergency plans for other key staff.

2. Cross Training for all staff.  Here is the test.  Every person on your staff should be able to take a two week vacation to Bora Bora with no email or phone access.  While they are gone, someone else should have been cross-trained to be able to perform their essential functions.

3. Professional Development Plans for all staff.  An organization can be more resilient through staff transitions when all staff are continually improving their skills and talents.

For more great information on staff transitions, check out resources available through Transition Guides – now a part of Raffa.  Proper "succession preparation" can help your organization “prepare, pivot, & thrive” through transitions and continue making an important Mission Impact.