Q. How else do milestones benefit employees?
People usually leave for one of
two reasons. They feel like they
weren’t developing in their
career: … The other reason is
they weren’t communicating
well with their manager: ‘I don’t
see eye to eye with my manager.
My manager was critical. My
manager wasn’t supportive.’
Often, both of those things can be resolved by having better
alignment of what the goals of
the employee are and the goals
of the manager are. If both the
employee and the manager
understand what the goals are
and have clear expectations on
success and failure, No. 1, you’ll
automatically have better communication because you’re talking about the same thing. No. 2,
to the extent you are performing, you’ll often get more responsibility and more direction and
more support, which also leads
to better career development.
Q. Are those milestones only
meant to track performance?
Often, you can have a high-potential employee that’s simply
in the wrong position. If they
were either moved or developed
— in other words, they got more
training for what they’re doing
— they would be a top performer.
Tracking potential is at least as
important as tracking performance. A good manager … is best
at figuring out who’s performing
well but also who has high
potential and how to extract
that potential from that employee, which also helps the
employee because it means the
employee is getting more
responsibility in a job they tend
to like more.
Q. How do you identify
potential?
One way is to consider that
employee relative to other
employees at similar levels in
the company and also relative
to what you think the career
progression might be. For
example, could you picture that
employee being a manager in a
year, two years, five years?
There is some overlap
between performance and
potential. You can imagine
almost a tic-tac-toe board. On
one axis, there’s performance.
On the other axis there’s potential. You take your team and you
plot them in the graph. High-performance, high-potential in
the top right; low-performance,
low-potential in the bottom left;
and everybody else is in
between. That often tells you
exactly what you need to do.
[If you fail to identify potential,] those are the employees
that leave that you didn’t want
to leave. It goes back to that
lack of communication between
the employee and manager.
HOW TO REACH: Cornerstone OnDemand Inc., (888) 365-2763 or www.cornerstoneondemand.com
