Every professional is looking for ways to grow faster in an organization to get a better role and compensation. All organizations have employee appraisals to decide on your career growth and development, with the majority of them doing it annually with the reporting manager’s decision having the highest weightage usually more than 90%.
As an employee you are better off if the frequency of appraisal is shorter, maybe monthly and others like peers, customers, partners, dotted line managers and others referred to as your professional ecosystem have some say also in your appraisal.
Most organizations follow a bell curve structure as shown below for appraisals. As you can see about 80% of them fall in the middle category with only 10% falling into the high performance category. Employees falling into this high performance section are the ones getting the highest raise and promotion. Given this background, how do you prepare yourself to fall into the high performance category?.
The key to preparing yourself to be a high performer is to continuously get feedback and improve on that. While it may not be possible for you to change your organization’s appraisal and feedback system for all employees, you can drive your growth by understanding and adopting the following
Key Factors affecting career growth
- Types of Career Growth
- Career Growth Levers
- Challenges with Current System
- How can you equip yourself?
- What’s your investment to grow faster?
Types of Career Growth
There are two types of career growth, Status Quo or Passive and Active career growth. In the passive career growth option employees follow orders or instructions from management while in active career growth employees pro-actively think and perform activities towards organizational growth without waiting for instructions.- Status Quo or Passive - Status quo simply means that you are content with the way that things are, and you postpone the possibility of your career progression to a later stage. These individuals become loyal to the company, and may hope for gradually increasing the scope for stability. They may or may not be forward thinking, but they are happy with where they are and do not want to climb out of their comfort zone. They use their creativity and skills to retain their position rather than aiming for better career stands or pay scales.
- Active Career Growth - Individuals who choose an active career growth path want to drive better results with their career and do not want to stick with where they are. Reasons for demanding such a shift may be a better status, job satisfaction, pay or position. They are forward thinking, and focussed on achieving long-term goals and utilize their creativity and skills to facilitate cracking their goals.
Factors impacting Career Growth
Employee’s performance is an important factor that is known to everyone. Well, what does career growth mean to you in a broad sense? While we acknowledge that there are several other factors that play an important role in deciding your growth, a lot of times the weightage is underrated resulting in less optimal outcomes in your appraisal process. The following are these additional factors
1. Your relationship with your managerTrust and relationship you have with your hiring manager is an important one. It becomes even more important if your manager is a people centric and emotional person and not a data centric and detailed oriented person.
2. Emotions & Egos
Emotions and egos not just between the manager and employee but also between manager and others with whom he or she is interacting with very close to the appraisal meeting can play a very important role.
3. Impact of events very close to appraisal meeting
Some events related to the organization involving your manager’s responsibility like external audit or quality issue that your manager is responsible for can impact your appraisal even though it is outside your control.
4. Visibility into your skills and business impact
Most employees believe that their skills and contribution to the organization is well understood and visible, however the actual visibility would be low and even lower in cases where a manager has more than 8 reporting employees.
5. Customers (internal and external) perception and opinion on your performance
The value of a service provided by an employee to a customer (internal or external) is the most valuable to an organization. Most managers do not reach out to customers to get regular feedback but instead react only to issues. In this case lot of positive feedback would be lost which is critical to positive appraisal.
The techniques mentioned in the blog will directly help to resolve points 4 and 5 while reducing the negative impacts of points 1, 2 and 3.Challenges with Current System
Most organizations have HR or Employee management systems that are designed to capture appraisal data annually only. Even some new Software as a Service HR products do a great job on employee benefits management, however when it comes to managing employee performance there has not been much of change. The current process followed by most organizations are
- Goal setting and acceptance at the beginning of the year
- Employee self-appraisal at end of the year
- Manager’s performance review and feedback
These steps are very time consuming and structured giving very little room for employees to document and report their contributions to changing business conditions that happens all the time. On your manager’s defense it is impossible to visualize the changes that a business encounters during the course of the year.
Due to the above constraints, it is almost impossible to have a monthly performance discussion with your manager that includes non-planned changes and have it documented for end of the year review across the organization.
While changing the organization system is beyond your control, you can follow these techniques to improve your chances for career growth
How can you equip yourself?
getCREDIBLE platform designed to establish a professional’s credibility will help you to engage different stakeholders from your professional ecosystem to publish your achievements (milestones) and get feedback in continuous manner with a frequency that is suitable for your professions. For most professions monthly frequency is most suited. getCREDIBLE platform allows you perform the following
- Define your professional ecosystem that includes manager, 2nd level manager, dotted line manager, peers, customers, partners, employees reporting to you and others specific to your job function
- Publish your monthly milestones of your accomplishments in free form text
- Your professional ecosystem can provide anonymous feedback on your accomplishments using free form text
- getCREDIBLE platform rates your skill based on feedback using an AI and ML engine
- Generate dashboard of your performance for the entire year
What are career growth opportunities without an effective rating system to review and direct your workplace performance and productivity. The ratings and dashboards are generated automatically without any human involvement making it very objective and unbiased, representing your true contribution to your organization making it irrefutable in your appraisal conversations.
This information can also be used to generate a digital version of your resume called SLATE, that is easy to view and share to your manager or anyone else involved in your appraisal process.
What’s your investment to grow faster?
Having heard about the activities you have to do along with the features of getCREDIBLE platform, you are probably wondering how much time and money you have to spend in order to give yourself a good career growth. They are explained below
- Time – 15 mins per week or 1 hour per month
- Cost – Free, getCREDBIBLE platform is free to use for all the features described above. They do have a premium subscription with some additional features to design your own SLATE, but that is optional