Recognizing and Nurturing Potential
As a manager, you have the obligation to help employees identify their potential (put on your coach or your mentor hat). The first step is to ask the employee what he or she wants to achieve, and what route appears likely to travel in that direction. What obstacles exist? How can the employee overcome them? Are the employee's perceptions of ability and potential the same as yours? If not, why?
Cultivate the talents and abilities of people who already work for your company whenever possible. Your company already has a considerable investment in its employees, and statistics show that employees promoted from within are more likely to succeed than are new hires brought into management positions.
Opportunity is a significant element of equity. This means opportunity for growth as well as recognition. How can this person best contribute, now and in the future, as an individual? Opportunities come alive for people when you, as a manager, take the time and interest to assess their interests and work with them to realize them. Such opportunities are not always obvious or what they seem. To help cultivate an employee's potential, you could do the following:
Send the employee to several work-related seminars and conferences each year.
Invite the employee to accompany you to a meeting or event that he or she otherwise wouldn't be able to attend.
Incorporate a discussion of future goals and objectives into every formal performance evaluation, including follow-up from the previous evaluation.
Ask each employee several times a year what you can do to support his or her career aspirations. Pay attention to goals that change; goals
should change if the employee is making any progress toward meeting them.
Ongoing training or continuing education is often required for many technical and professional staff, though could be easy to overlook when it comes to support staff. While a course in computer code might hold little appeal for an administrative assistant, a class in creating PowerPoint presentations might. Every now and then, if your budget allows, let employees attend workshops that aren't directly related to their jobs but that interest them for some reason. A technician might enjoy a class in graphic design, or a sales representative might like to go to a seminar on construction methods. Some choices might seem a bit far afield, but most people will choose options that appeal to their longer-term goals.
Take time to thank the person in the mailroom, your secretary, or the department coordinator. It's easy to praise the people who do the most obvious tasks, but don't forget about all the others who work to make those tasks possible.
