A Manager’s Dilemma – Part II

Being creative in supporting employees’ professional development

In Part I we discussed Anna’s dilemma. She needed to find creative ways to help her employees develop their skills and continue to grow personally and professionally.

Here are some ideas for Anna that will help her to develop her employees’ skills and keep them engaged in the job and the workplace:

• Enable employees to lead process improvement projects within the department/workgroup.
• Host mini training sessinos where the employees who have been there longer share their knowledge with newer employees.
• Assign business-related reading to empoyees and have brown bag sessions where empoyees can discuss the readings.
• Arrange for quarterly all-team meetings with a variety of team building activities and where managers from other departments are invited to talk about what’s going on in their areas.
• Work with other managers to “trade staff,” enabling for staff to work in other departments to learn more about those departments and work on special projects.
• Ask around the company. Does anyone need some support on their projects? Your employees can build new skills working on projects within the organization.
• Delegate assignments and special projects to staff.

What other ideas can you come up with?