If you’ve been a manager for any length of time, you know some employees are superstars needing very little motivation to excel while others need more support. Wherever employees fall on this spectrum, if there is no clear path for career advancement, you are likely to lose them. You can play an integral role in making your team more productive while simultaneously keeping them engaged. Below we discuss the steps you can take to be an awesome coach and mentor. If you are not a manager and have read this far, stay with us to learn about the considerations for promoting and giving salary bumps to employees. The knowledge may come in handy for your own career advancement.
Make sure you know the rules. Institutions have varying policies regarding promotions, salary bands, interdepartmental transfers, etc. It will result in a poor experience for the employee to be coached to a goal that is not possible as well as the manager who will likely lose the trust of the employee.
Consider your department’s budget, the overall financial health of your institution, and the general economic trends of the day. The recent headlines about changes to student visas, grant funding, and financing options for graduate and professional students are not just news. Each of these situations will have some impact on the financial wellness of your institution. In a time of belt-tightening, coaching for a raise or a promotion may be a wasted effort. That doesn’t mean you should throw staff development out the window, just that the end goal must be something else. The best way to survive a layoff is to have knowledge of/experience with a wide range of campus functions and the adaptability to take on tasks outside of your normal responsibilities. So, the financial aid counselor who can also update the department web pages has added value.
Have a plan for addressing salary inequities within your department and across the institution. In a perfect world, there won’t be any. However, in real life there are periods where an economic downturn results in lower salaries or an open position needs to be filled quickly and offering a higher salary can accomplish that. Internal transfers or promotions may require a higher salary than an external candidate if they have been working at the institution for a while. You may not think they’d want to, but peers often share their salaries with each other and any inequities exposed as a result can create job dissatisfaction.
Learn what salaries and titles are common for similar roles in your area. Don’t leave this up to your human resources team to figure out. Responsibility creep is a real thing for employees who have been in the same position for a while and must be addressed to maintain equity. And more importantly for your office, if you haven’t updated your job descriptions, titles, and salaries over time and your superstar assistant director moves on to another job, you’ll lose all the bonus work and knowledge that person brought to your team if you haven’t formally made it part of the position (and rewarded the incumbent with a new title and maybe a raise!)
If you don’t already, get to know your employees: what interested them about their current role, do they have long-term career goals, what are their interests outside of work? If you ask children what they want to be when they grow up, college administrator is probably not in the top ten answers. They don’t make television shows or movies about us, nor do we become gazillionaires. So, it’s more likely your staff members transitioned from student employee to full-time and/or are taking advantage of your institution’s tuition benefit. As such, they have all kinds of interests and experiences that have nothing to do with daily grind in your office. The first question is, how do you tap these interests and experiences to help your employee become a more productive and engaged team member? The next question is how the experience gained in your office can help employees meet their long-term goals.
Guide your employee through the process of creating a development plan. After the last step, you should know enough to guide your employee through the planning process but let them take the lead. Use your expertise to help create reachable goals in a reasonable timeframe but leave it up to the employee what they hope to accomplish. Identifying the best platform for learning is also critical. For some, using a learn-at-your-own-pace online program (like the FSA Training Center) is preferrable, but others may do better at an off-site program where they are not distracted by other work, and still others may fare better by participating in group activities. Identifying the mode of developing knowledge is equally important to identifying the knowledge and skills they hope to gain.
Identify development resources and provide schedule time for employees to participate. While creating a development plan is challenging, it pales in comparison to executing it. If we leave professional development until all the other work is done, we’ll never get to it. It’s up to you, the manager/coach, to schedule time during the business day for employees to work on their own development.
Be prepared for well-coached, motivated employees to move on. If your position is the next rung on the ladder, you’ll need to be prepared for exceptional employees to move on to other departments or institutions to continue their career path. Although having open positions doesn’t seem to have any upside, you are creating your own pipeline of motivated and engaged employees. Those who benefited from your excellent coaching will tell others about it, and the result should be a number of qualified applicants when a position opens on your team. There are many good managers in higher education, but not all are great coaches too. Who wouldn’t want to work for someone who is willing to spend time getting employees ready for their next role?
The Higher Education Assistance Group has resources to help you when your superstars move on to their next role. Check out our interim staffing solutions online or email info@heag.us for more information.
Inspired by: https://www.nasfaa.org/uploads/documents/Reclassification_Advocacy.pdf
