Career (summit)

Career development is closely tied to motivation, but many people don't know what motivates them. To help them understand their motivation, you can use a simple exercise. Create three columns on a sheet of paper: present state, ideal state, and what they love, like, and dislike about their current job. Then, ask them where they want to be in the future and what they would love, like, and dislike about that. This exercise helps them visualize their goals and makes them more committed to achieving them. Asking these questions and actively helping them move towards their career goals will make you a valued leader. Much like the motivator, career development really goes hand-in-hand with what motivates somebody, and a lot of times people don't know what motivates them. So again, we're going to go through a very simple exercise that will streamline the process of understanding what motivates, and there's some really cool depictions of how this goes about working, and let me explain what I mean. Take a sheet of paper if you could right now and write down two vertical lines and create three columns on a sheet of paper. Column one, column two, and column three. Now in column one, you're going to title that the present state. The present state is where they're currently at, what they're currently doing. Column three, you're going to title the ideal state. That's their destination. That's where they potentially want to be. So let's go back to column one. Now the questions can be much more elaborate than what I'm about to provide as an example. Typically, we encourage you to start off with, currently in your job, what do you think your strengths are, and where do you feel like you have opportunities to grow? That gets the conversation going and gives you really good context to not only their self-awareness, but also their motivator. Number two, ask the love, like, and dislike questions. What do you love about what you're doing? What do you like about what you're doing? What do you dislike about what you're doing? Those five questions will give you a synopsis of how they typically feel about their current state. Instead of going to column two, you're going to jump all the way over to column three, and you're going to write down the responses to the following. Ideally, where do you want to end up? What does that look like? What would you be doing? It may not just be a job. It may not be a promotion. That's why the questions are critical. What does that look like? What would you be doing? Once you get that understanding, you can ask the same questions. As it relates to where you want to end up, what do you feel like your strengths are? Where do you feel like you have opportunities to grow to position yourself, and what would you love about getting this? What would you like? What would you dislike that, you know, potentially you don't want to do as it relates to a destination like that? Now, what you're doing is you're writing down their responses, typically on a whiteboard. If you can do it in person, it's great. You can do this digitally. Here's the hidden secret. When you're coaching someone to career development, instead of looking at you as an employee, where we typically get lulled into, I better answer these questions the way my boss wants, they're now looking at the whiteboard. What they're looking at is themselves, and they start to get stimulated through visualization of where they want to go and what's possible. That's the secret sauce. So once you're done with Column 1, you go to Column 3, then you go back to Column 2 and ask, what do you think we need to do to position you to move in the direction of your ideal state? Here's the amazing thing. Your employee or employees will love you for doing this. You know why? Because you are giving them a visualization of what's possible. People will change if they can visualize on how to get there. The other thing is, you're asking. Most people don't ask. Then when you become an active participant to help them move in the direction of their career goals, you as a leader just became very tough to quit on, and they tend to be more patient in terms of when their opportunity of their ideal state becomes a reality.