How to Let Your Employees Grow and Go
Good employees make your workdays run smooth and help you anticipate the unexpected. But what happens when your good employees outgrow their roles? Or when their goals lead them on another path? 

When you face this intersection, make the difficult decision to help them grow toward their goals, even if it means they leave their current role. 

Here are three suggestions to help you build an environment where your employees can grow and eventually leave to pursue their career goals.
 
1. Provide the Tools Your Employees Require to Grow

This might seem like common sense, but to build an environment to help your employees grow, you must provide them with the tools to do their job. 

Give them ample opportunities to learn and grow. Encourage them to attend trainings and webinars to help develop their skill set. 

I send my employees to outside training, as well as to the Leadership Institute’s more than 47 types of training (online, on-demand, and in-person). Many of these trainings are great ways to continue employee education.

Don’t forget to ask your employees about what they think will help them grow too! Open communication lines help.

2. Open Communications About Career Goals

Communication is a key to success. That’s why you should know your employees’ career goals beyond their current job goals. 
This knowledge will help you build an environment to help your employees grow.

When you invest in your employees and help them pursue their goals, there is a greater chance they will invest in your organization. Here are a couple of examples you can use to pair your employees’ personal goals with their current job goals:
  1. If you have staff who want to be writers, but their main jobs are organizing events, let them become creative in marketing those events through email, blog, and social media content creation.
  2. If you have staff who want to work on Capitol Hill, put them in charge of projects that interact with people who work on the Hill. That way they can network and develop their own contacts. 

3. Plan for Employees’ Future Departure

While it may seem strange to plan for your employees’ departure, it is important to be prepared for when they outgrow their role. 

In their last couple weeks, make sure you have your outgoing employees draft a Standard Operating Procedure Manual for the functions of their current role. Have them include all tasks, projects, and resources required for someone to pick up where they left off.

To make it easy for your employees to put together their manuals, ask them to draft directions for different tasks as they perform those tasks. This will make their last few weeks as productive as possible.