Non-managerial Career Paths: Creating Plans to Retain and Nurture "Followers"

Any company serious about its future is constantly looking to identify and develop managers and leaders, laying out their career paths to senior roles. Those efforts could be leaving a lot of valuable employees on the outs, though: the ones who like their companies and would love to continue working there but find themselves frustrated by a lack of learning and development options for people who don’t want to be in charge of other people, or simply aren't suited for it.

Those people make up the majority of the workforce, by the way: Recent Gallup research indicates that only 30 percent of people possess natural managerial ability or can manage well with sufficient training.

The numbers don’t look great for those who prefer “followership” – a career path where there’s growth, but not into management or company leadership -- especially as the concept requires cultural and HR philosophy changes, and those changes aren’t always easy to make.

The numbers back up the need for change, though.

Recent research by the Josh Bersin Company found that only 15 percent of companies surveyed felt that their training departments had a good handle on laying out new career paths for workers. What makes that number even more glaring – and concerning, for the 85 percent of companies without solid plans to widen their career path options – is Bersin’s finding that such plans represent the highest rate of return for employee retention.

The causes vary, but the end result is the same: Companies who don’t provide adequate professional development and training are hamstringing themselves at both ends – recruitment and retention. If your company can’t promise L&D up front, you might find yourself struggling to hire good employees in the first place.

For more on winning employee retention strategies, check out Inspiring Loyalty: the Secrets of Employee Retention

If your company is among that 85 percent without a solid L&D plan across the board, what can you do to fix that? How you go about doing it will vary according to your company’s circumstances, resources and staffing, but the principles remain the same:

• First, commit to developing a solid L&D plan. Be prepared to invest time as well as money; your workers can't learn if there's no room for it in their schedules. Remember the payback when you're budgeting: Bersin's research found, according to a company statement, that “Advanced L&D teams … are delivering a 260% increase in financial results and four-fold+ improvements in growth, innovation, and market leadership through smarter matching of strategic hiring challenges with existing employee ambitions.”
• Conduct employee surveys and "stay interviews" to find out what your employees want to learn, where they want to go in your company, and what it will take to keep them with you. Remember, do this for every employee -- not simply the ones you've identified as having managerial or leadership potential. You'll likely find out all sorts of things you wouldn't have known without asking.
• During these surveys and interviews, make it clear that followership is a valid and valuable path. If you have workers who enjoy what they do, are good at it, and are committed to getting better, why would you try to shoehorn them into a managerial or leadership track? Let people do what they do best, give them the tools to keep improving, and make it clear that their work is valued.
• As you're laying out individualized career paths for your employees, be sure to find out how best they learn. For example, someone with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder will respond better to training that's engaging, noncompetitive and not overly theoretical. There's a twofold reason for doing this: Providing personalized L&D paths allows you to spend your training budget as wisely as possible, and taking individual differences into account will generate more goodwill -- therefore boosting retention efforts -- because your employees will feel both listened to and heard (there's a difference).

Keeping good employees is tough enough already. Not having a solid strategy to retain your talented “followers” just might be tantamount to showing them the door – without knowing it until it’s too late.

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