visibility is crucial to developing star employees

Visibility Is Crucial to Developing Star Employees

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Visibility Is Crucial to Developing Star Employees

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visibility is crucial to developing star employees

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Research consistently finds that employees across the generational spectrum believe that one of a manager’s fundamental roles is to support the development of his or her employees. And yet, in most organizations, the level of satisfaction with that development remains relatively low.

Leaders—aware of this expectation and, in most cases, wanting to deliver on it—make a valiant effort. They send people to training and try to commit themselves to mentoring. Yet, many simply don’t have the know-how, and even more don’t have the time to offer such hands-on support. Given the pace and complexity of today’s workplace, leaders are being tasked with more than ever before. Unfortunately, this means that their ability to proactively and robustly provide meaningful mentoring is suffering (along with the engagement, growth and performance of their employees).

But being overworked shouldn’t prevent you from continuing to mentor others. Instead, it might offer a chance to increase a leader’s ability to support others’ development while embracing the important reality that workers are ultimately responsible for their own careers and professional growth. This potential entails using employee visibility as a form of DIY mentoring.

Visibility refers to “the state of being able to see or be seen.” Traditionally in organizations, this means offering employees the opportunity to attend events, showcase talents, represent the team, meet key leaders, or otherwise see or be seen. This sort of visibility provides the recognition that people crave, but generally falls short in terms of fostering growth because it’s neither set up nor mined for learning.

Leaders can’t simply shove employees out into the spotlight and hope for the best. For visibility to serve as a legitimate tool for development, it requires intentionality. Here are four high-impact actions leaders can take to set others up for do-it-yourself mentoring success and, in the process, empower employees to leverage their visibility for learning.

Understand the Individual’s Goals and Desires

Any sort of development begins with an understanding of strengths, skills, interests, opportunities for improvement, values and an eye toward the future. This becomes context for development in general and offers a focus for a visibility opportunity.

Identify an Opportunity

Taking into account what you already know about the person, choose some visibility options that could support his or her unique ambitions. It might be as easy as coming to a meeting with you. or making a presentation to management. also running a workshop or giving a speech at a gathering. The important thing is that the opportunity provides the worker with the chance for targeted growth in a field of interest.

Facilitate Intention-Setting

Help employees establish a focus, intention or goal for the visibility opportunity. Be available to brainstorm how he or she can make the most of this opportunity, but resist the natural temptation to help manage the process. Action plans, next steps and the like rest squarely with employees as they embrace DIY development.

Explore What Was Gained

At an appropriate time (ideally initiated by the employee – but you may need to take the lead here) revisit the visibility opportunity. Facilitate a brief conversation during which you ask questions to help the person reflect on the experience, insights gained, actions taken and how they might leverage all of this toward next developmental steps. Acknowledge effort, progress and successes. Building confidence in the ability to develop through visibility may prompt employees to take more initiative to do the same in the future, removing even more of the burden from the shoulders of managers.

Leaders will always have a responsibility for developing others. Yet, given escalating workloads, tightening time constraints and virtual nature of business, managers must find creative and time-effective ways to support others in their development. Visibility—intelligently conceived and implemented—can be a powerful DIY form of mentorship and a way to grow people, grow capacity and grow the business.


This post was originally published at the Economist Career blog here. Its author, Julie Winkle Giulioni, has spent the past 25 years working with organizations worldwide to improve performance through learning. Named one of Inc. Magazine’s top 100 leadership speakers, Julie is the co-author of the Amazon and Washington Post bestseller, Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want, a respected speaker on a variety of topics, and a regular contributor to many business publications.

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