Your Employees Invested in You. What Are You Doing With That Investment?
Your best employees came to work for you because they thought you were the best investment in their future.
How are you leading them?
When we take a job, we’re typically doing it because we believe it will advance our lives in some way. We want to grow. We want to learn. We want to become more successful. What success looks like is different for every person.
But here’s something leaders don’t always stop to consider:
When someone chooses to work for your organization, they aren’t only accepting a job. They’re investing a portion of their future in you.
They are giving you their time, their abilities, their ideas, and a significant part of their lives because they believe what you’re building can somehow help them build something, too.
That’s an incredible honor and an incredible responsibility.
Do You Know What They’re Working Toward?
As leaders, we spend a lot of time thinking about what we need from our employees.
What are their goals? Are they performing? Are they committed? Can they take on more responsibility?
But how often do we ask what they are trying to accomplish?
A good leader should know what the people on their team aspire toward. Not because every employee’s dream has to fit neatly inside the organization, but because understanding where someone wants to go gives us insight into how we can help them grow while they’re here.
It also helps us better understand their motivation, their desire for independence, and what success means to them.
Leadership Carries More Weight Than We Sometimes Realize
Think about what your employees are actually doing.
They are getting up five days out of seven and giving a significant portion of their waking hours to help accomplish a vision that started with someone else. Wow.
Other human beings believe enough in your ideas, abilities, mission, vision, and values to invest part of their lives helping make them a reality.
That shouldn’t create pressure to have all the answers. It should create a sense of stewardship.
So what does that look like?
1. Know Their Why
Learn what your employees want from their lives and careers.
What are they working toward? What do they want to learn? What kind of responsibility do they eventually want? What would make their time with your organization meaningful?
When we understand an employee’s why, it becomes much easier to explain our how.
2. Create Pathways for Growth
Once you know where someone wants to go, look for opportunities to help them move in that direction.
That might mean developing a new skill, giving them greater responsibility, introducing them to a mentor, allowing them to lead something, or helping them see abilities in themselves they haven’t recognized yet.
Development doesn’t always require a promotion.
Sometimes it simply requires someone willing to invest in them.
3. Encourage Them to Outgrow You
This may be one of the hardest parts of leadership.
Sometimes developing someone well means preparing them for an opportunity that won’t ultimately be with you. That’s okay.
If we’ve genuinely invested in another person’s growth, their success doesn’t diminish ours.
It becomes part of our impact.
4. Remember What They’ve Entrusted to You
People aren’t resources to be consumed in pursuit of organizational goals.
They are people with ambitions, responsibilities, families, talents, and futures of their own.
Leadership gives us an opportunity to accomplish something bigger together, but it also gives us the opportunity to leave people better than we found them.
What Are You Doing With Their Investment?
Your employees have invested something extraordinarily valuable in your organization:
a portion of their lives.
What are you doing with it?
Get curious about the people who work for you. Learn what they’re trying to accomplish. Look for opportunities to connect their growth with the work you’re asking them to do.
And don’t be afraid to help someone become capable of something beyond the position they’re in today.
Because one of the greatest measures of leadership isn’t simply what people accomplish for us. It’s what they become because we took the responsibility of leading them seriously.
Start with one conversation.
Ask someone on your team:
“What are you hoping this season of your career prepares you for next?”
Then listen. Their answer might change the way you lead them.
Partner & Director of Innovation
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