Change Career Development Mindsets to Engage and Retain Top Talent
If you want to attract, engage, and retain top performers, it’s time to rethink how you approach career development. The most effective leaders today embrace a new set of career development mindsets — ones that move beyond check-the-box conversations and instead create meaningful growth opportunities that drive both engagement and performance.
Every day, business leaders juggle competing demands — meeting financial goals, satisfying customers, responding to market shifts, and managing change. With so many pressures, it’s easy to see why career development often slips to the bottom of the list. Yet, the data is clear: investing in career development delivers measurable business returns. Research from Gallup and LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report both confirm that employees who see clear growth opportunities are over twice as likely to stay with their organization and perform at higher levels.
A Missed Opportunity for Many Leaders
Despite this well-established connection between career development and business performance, too few managers make it a real priority. In a recent LSA Global pulse survey, 50% of respondents said their managers seemed disinterested in their career growth. That means half of the workforce feels unsupported in one of the areas that matters most — their future.
Ask yourself:
- How would your employees rate your commitment to their development?
- How confident are they that you care about their career success?
The same survey revealed a bright spot. 25 percent of employees reported that their managers actively support and champion their career development. These managers see themselves not just as performance reviewers, but as talent builders. They take an ongoing interest in helping their people grow, expand their skills, and achieve their career aspirations.
Top 8 Career Development Mindsets
The leaders who prioritize career development today will be the ones who retain top talent, drive sustainable results, and create workplaces where people truly want to stay and grow.
- Assume Everyone Has The Potential to Learn and Grow
Leaders who drive career development live by an abiding belief that every individual is valuable and capable of developing their skills and abilities further. This belief plays out in countless ways every day, conveying and inspiring greater confidence in others. Under these conditions, employees are willing to commit to learning, take risks, entertain instructive failure, and make enormous development strides in the process.
- Focus On An Opportunity-Filled Future
Leaders who prioritize career development know how to generate enthusiasm, energy, and a sense of hope by helping others envision the possibilities that might lie ahead. For employees, the future feels bright in the presence of these leaders because they consistently anticipate ways to connect what employees need to learn or experience with ever-changing workplace conditions.
Because these leaders coach their employees to always be pursuing multiple, flexible scenarios, plenty of chances to learn and advance will always be available along some of the possible paths being pursued.
- Cultivate Peripheral Vision
Leaders committed to employee development are able to enjoy this confidence in the future in part because they are constantly scanning the environment. They keep their eyes on the big picture. They remain hypervigilant to the factors that affect the business, and they teach those around them to do the same.
This focus forward and toward the future allows employees to make smart decisions today that will serve them well in the uncertainty of tomorrow.
- Generously Share Information
Managers who withhold information rarely inspire trust — and almost never develop people effectively. The leaders who accelerate growth and engagement are those who believe that knowledge should flow freely. Think about the managers under whom you’ve grown the most. Chances are, they communicated openly and often. They practiced transparency not as a buzzword, but as a leadership philosophy — one grounded in the belief that well-informed employees make smarter, faster, and better decisions for both the business and their own careers.
Employees crave straight talk. They want honesty about what’s happening, why decisions are made, and how those decisions affect them. They don’t need sugarcoating — they need clarity. When leaders share information candidly, even when it’s uncomfortable or uncertain, they build credibility and trust. That trust, in turn, fuels engagement and accountability.
- Dwell on Strengths, Talents, and Capabilities
Powerful developers of people don’t frame the effort in terms of fixing problems, shoring up weaknesses or unraveling vulnerabilities. They know that the shortest and surest way forward and toward one’s career goals is through their strengths and talents. Employees who are fortunate enough to report to these leaders quickly learn to focus on what they do well and find ways to further magnify those capabilities.
This approach is energizing and quickly establishes a positive context for development that infuses itself into all dimensions of work life, triggering an upward spiral of enthusiasm, engagement, and results.
- Treat Career Development as a Daily Part of the Leadership Role
Managers who prioritize career development understand that it’s not a human resources function — it’s a leadership function. They don’t see it as the annual exercise of checking boxes but rather as the daily exercise of checking in with others. Research has shown that the more frequently managers meet with those who report to them, the more engaged team members will be.
In customer service, it’s long been understood that that every customer contact is an opportunity to build the emotional connection between the customer and service provider. The same holds true for managers and their employees. More positive points of contact build rapport, trust, engagement, and commitment.
Formal, scheduled connections like one-on-ones, performance appraisals, and individual development planning sessions are just a small part of the conversational repertoire. These leaders recognize and seize small moments within the context of daily work to connect, offer feedback, acknowledge effort, praise results, explore learning, or just ask how things are going. These conversations are spontaneous, ad-hoc, unplanned, and tremendously powerful in terms of institutionalizing career development.
- View Talent as an Enterprise-wide Resource
Our field research suggests that one of the key factors keeping managers from engaging in career development is that they are concerned about developing people only to see them leave for a better opportunity. A recent CEB survey backs this up. Nearly 60 percent of the human resources executives who responded paint a dismal snapshot of managerial generosity, indicating that managers in their organizations don’t share talent.
Leaders who prioritize career development see things differently. They recognize that as skills and experience increase, employees might need challenges that are no longer available in their current roles. As a result, these leaders help find other opportunities — even if it means losing a key player. They realize that developing individuals raises the bar for the entire group. They also realize that the reputation they develop for helping others grow makes them a talent magnet, able to attract a steady stream of capable individuals.
- Use the Value of Peer-to-Peer Support
Leaders know that they can’t — and shouldn’t — do it all. Especially those leaders who must be a player-coach realize that each of their own direct reports has not only the skills and abilities to apply to their jobs but also the coaching and counsel to offer each another. They take advantage of this.
Others’ input benefits personal and professional growth in most areas. As a result, employees who can seek and offer feedback freely and effectively experience accelerated development. In the process, they also master a core supervisory skill that may prepare them for a future role.
The Bottom Line
Leaders with career development mindsets prioritize career growth and mobility because it creates the conditions for people and organizations to thrive. How would the employees in your organization rate their managers?
To learn more about creating better career development mindsets to engage and retain top talent, download A Better Way: How Organizations and Managers Must Reassess Career Development
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