When you hire your employer, please make sure the opportunity and experience will help you achieve your goals. The best organizations understand that employment is a partnership with both of you winning. Organizational and individual goals align with the right employer.
Some organizations are career-builders. They invest in your success. They mentor and develop you. They want to retain you. They don’t want you to just have a job but they seek for you to have a career with them. You will get to participate in professional development activities and leadership academies. You will have the opportunity to take on new and different challenges and learn from various leaders. They realize that success is a partnership and the better you do, the more the company will achieve. They will not fear your growth. Instead, they will encourage and ensure it. They will have successful leaders who pour everything they know and can do into you. They aim to bring out the best in their team. They love it when you win. These organizations excel. They generate best practices and model policies. They succeed with employee retention. They are market leaders. They are magnets for gifted individuals of integrity.
Other organizations don’t see growing you as their responsibility. They will not go beyond the minimum training even though they definitely should. There will be no real onboarding or professional or leadership development programs. Those in leadership roles don’t think they should have to mentor. “Let them figure it out like I did” is their mindset. Your success is not their focus. This is always the result of longtime weak leadership and a culture of mediocrity at work. This hurts productivity, performance, recruitment, retention, innovation, and customer satisfaction. These organizations underperform.
The last type of organization is the career graveyard. The leadership and culture fear employees learning and growing. “They might take my job” or “they might bring up new ideas” typifies their thinking. They have level one authority-based leaders who protect the failing status quo. Their onboarding might take five minutes. They offer zero chances to grow as a professional or leader. Their leaders are never hired by any successful organization to ever lead there. Their key performance metrics are predictably poor. The talented individual of integrity will never be promoted, and they leave after making the mistake of accepting employment here. They will teach a lot of bad thinking and dysfunctional behaviors. They may even manage to sink the ship while you are still on it.
Employers who genuinely care about you and your career are guaranteeing their own long-term success. Join the team who wants you to win and win with them.
Sources: Abrashoff, 2002; Blanchard, 2011; Collins, 2001; Drucker, 2001; Grant, 2017; Kotter, 2012; Lencioni, 2012; Maxwell, 1998; Welch, 2005
