Becoming a manager used to be the primary goal in most organizations, but today, many employees want to make a significant impact without managing people. This shift is challenging traditional organizational structures in which gaining direct reports was once the only way for tenured employees to have influence.
Becoming a manager used to be the primary goal in most organizations, but today, many employees want to make a significant impact without managing people. This shift is challenging traditional organizational structures in which gaining direct reports was once the only way for tenured employees to have influence.
From my experience, the best way to create career paths that include visibility, value, influence, and leadership without incorporating management responsibilities is through a strategy called career mapping. This process involves writing job descriptions for every role, organizing those roles into job families, assigning each one of those families preferred competencies, and developing role-based learning plans. In the case of our company, we also identified common transitional and promotional jobs for every job description.
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Because we went through this process, employees can now log into a proprietary career map application to see available positions based on job requirements, skills, and competencies. As they move through their careers, they may choose to stay in the same job, advance through two or three levels within the same job family (i.e. sales associate 1, sales associate 2). Or, by exploring the career map, they may see if transitional opportunities, like moving from a sales associate to a project manager or sales account manager, exist in other parts of the company.
This level of transparency encourages employees to master their current roles and continue their development so they can prepare for other roles within the company.
Here are the best practices we learned in the process of creating our career map:
Although our career mapping journey has been a huge undertaking, of which we’re still only about 85% complete, it was necessary to attract and retain valuable employees. Has there been more career movement between departments? Sure. But we believe that has a positive impact, because employees who understand several segments of the business deliver more value to the company and are faster to adapt to new roles.
Mary Vales is an organizational development manager at the information management software company Hyland.
