What opportunities do you offer to enhance employee development value?
Because your employees look to you for direction. Towards where they go next. How they grow within your organization.
Do you provide valuable reasons for current and prospective employees to join or remain part of your workforce? Or, is the most viable option to defect or not apply for a position, at all? And, develop their value as employees, working for someone else, somewhere else?
Consider that an overlooked aspect of human capital strategy is tribal storytelling. Often, these stories reside in unknown, undesirable or intimidating corners of the workplace. Yet, by leveraging storytelling, employees discover what they have in common.
Over time, storytelling provides employees with a valuable passport. To traverse pay grades, levels of education, job titles and generations. Storytelling catalyzes employee development, success and retention.
How expansive, or limiting, are the employee development opportunities you offer?
- Does your organization limit, dismiss or minimize the value of the stories you currently tell?
- What is the unrealized value of expanding how you tell stories to current and prospective employees, stakeholders and clients?
- Also, who currently owns these stories? Ponder the value of expanding storytelling responsibilities one millimeter beyond the confines of traditional assignments.
First, developing a storytelling culture, even as a beta or pilot project, invites co-workers and colleagues to become part of something bigger. As a result, the boundaries of departmental silos are expanded; each employee’s professional horizon grows, exponentially.
Next, storytelling catalyzes information sharing. Knowledge and skills gaps are uncovered and addressed, as internal resources and mentors are discovered. Instead of a workforce full of nameless and faceless co-workers, employees now discover their go-to resources.
Consider the unrealized human capital value lying dormant within current employee development opportunities.
In addition to earning advanced certifications within their existing professional disciplines, employees can realize how “what they do” adds value to “what everyone else does.” A storytelling strategy is synergistic, across the workplace.
How might the current stories your organization or association tell become more potent when leveraging a storytelling culture? What is the impact on individual, team and overall organizational performance, impact and innovation?
Move one millimeter forward and take these next valuable steps.
- Planning your next team, corporate or association meeting? Engage me to present one of my Storytelling for STEM Professionals and Left Brain Thinkers speaking programs, workshops or moderated facilitation services. Contact me here.
- Download my new checklist and worksheet: Six Professional Development Targets to Hit each Month.
- Subscribe to my blog. Share your email address in the red box in the right column of this blog. Never miss another insightful post.
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset® Storytelling for STEM Professionals and Left Brain Thinkers speaking programs leverage purpose-driven value differentiation through storytelling, to create and retain successful employees and clients.
Find out more about Babette’s professional story here. Babette is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association. Her playbook of communication hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Babette’s speaker profile is on the espeakers platform. Contact Babette here.
Image source: Adobe Stock
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