Too much attention is being paid to systems and work in process flows with little to the feelings and concerns of those involved.  Personal success and development opportunities for individuals are not being commingled with business enterprise success.  These are the very issues that often undermine such change programs.
 Employees are now expected to act as if they are self-employed in order to preserve their employability.  They need to analyze what they want, what they can contribute and provide career action step proposals regularly to their manager that suit altered circumstances.  Neglect of this threatens their job security.
 What role has their manager in this?  Where can career coaching by mangers help?  Worklife has been providing career coaching training to managers for ten years.  Some of our learning follows.
 Effective career coaching begins with an understanding of the factors that affect an employee´s career.  These factors influence not only their current job attitudes, but also play a major role in the plans employees make for the future, plans they may not share with others without a supportive career coaching process.
 When employees feel more secure about managing their own careers, they cooperate and contribute better to the needs of the work unit.
 Among the key responsibilities of a manager is to motivate and develop employees to meet the organization´s changing needs for skills, knowledge and competencies.  As the subject of ´my career´ is so sensitive to staff, career coaching is essential.  It involves teaching employees how to manage their own careers and develop an understanding of and commitment to career self-reliance.  Then supporting them as they integrate their goals and plans with the needs of the organization and their work unit.
Desirable outputs
Before expecting their active involvement in career coaching, we need
to educate line managers first, reason with them about the beneficial outputs
and reduce their reaction that this is another imposition on their busy
schedule from the HRM function.
Some of the outputs from career coaching are:
Manager´s role in career support
As a manager, the main role is to be available for both informal and formal discussion with employees about their careers. Â Figure 1 indicates what it isn´t.
Figure 1 - ´Is and Isn´ts´ of Career Coaching
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| Manager''s Role is: | Manager''s Role isn''t: |
| Guiding and coaching | Dictating |
| Supplying resources | Being critical |
| Â Listening | Taking responsibility for employee´s decisions |
| Giving honest feedback on objectives and behaviors | About giving guarantees |
| Providing a reality check | Supplying unlimited resources |
| Sponsoring employee´s career development | Being en expert in career and life management counseling |
| Helping with balancing employee´s and organization´s needs |
Other aspects include:
Career coaching requires an understanding of the self-reliant career development process. Â This process is the lifelong activity of assessing where you are in your career, deciding where you want to go and developing the plans necessary to achieve your goals.
 Career planning undertaken by an employee is the management of surprise.  In other works, their readiness to adjust to often rapid and unexpected changing organizational circumstances by maintaining an inventory of preferred skills, needs, values, primary wants and desired new learning.
 Self-reliant career behavior is essentially a self-assessment discovery-based concept.  Staff initiate their own exploration of career options by applying detective, communication and research skills.  It requires self-sufficiency in the employee, but does not preclude the need for, in fact, requires help from others during the career planning journey.
 One output is that staff produce and create their own approaches according to the distinctive features of their own situations.  They pragmatically develop or select whatever will help them get where they want to be.  When circumstances change, they have the flexibility to try something else.
 Many staff experience difficulties with self-management through a process of this nature.  They may want a speedy resolution to their career issues, a ´quick fix´.  Some will not experiment adequately with the activities required before concluding that they do not need to follow it or that this effort is unappealing.  Reluctance to share personal thoughts, concerns and aspirations with their manager in discussion or in writing will deter some.  Some need to be propelled to undertake this effort by a recent setback in their career or personal life.
 Promoting career self-resiliency in employees by managers is no easy task.  Often with superior knowledge of the organization, the manager´s inclination is to tell the person what they need or should seek.  A skilled career coach avoids this and facilitates the knowledge search by the employee.
Figure 2 - Coaching Roles
Self-Assessment Facilitator
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Our training experiences
Our experiences training line managers in career coaching are:
Coaching effectiveness
Career coaching emphasizes the importance of current job performance
being satisfactory or better, in order to earn support for career progress
intentions. Â It encourages employees to think beyond promotion as
the only path to success. Â Worklife teaches that every employee has
10 career action options, only one of which is promotion. Â It is our
view that this generation of employees has a wider range of choice, not
that a framework has evolved for many new ways for working. Â Career
ladders and job titles have been replaced by options to develop competencies
by planned moves through a succession of roles.
 Career coaching also teaches employees how to manage change by helping them to be more adaptable to unforeseen events that happen in their worklife.  It is moving employees towards the implementation of their plans, providing they also meet the employer´s wants.
Career action step proposal
A key focus of a manager´s career coaching is to motivate the employee
to undertake sufficient self-review and exploration so that they can confidently
complete a Career Action Step Proposal. Â This is a written proposal
for what career enhancement the person wishes to accomplish in the short-term.
 The important factor is that as the employee conveys clearly what they are seeking approval for they also specify what they are prepared to contribute to its realization.
 A manager´s career coaching provides assessment of the stated development needs; the pragmatism of the proposed support needs; the level of agreement and support to the proposed development requests; whether the employee has developed a sufficiently flexible strategy that incorporates more than one career action option.
Bottom up succession planning works better
In the current intensely dynamic work environment, employers feel the
pressure to identify the levels of essential skills, knowledge and career
aspirations required of everyone they employ, i.e. an inventory of talent
and deficiencies.
 What succession planning is really about is ensuring teams of people are in readiness for contingencies, organizational expansion or contraction, for entering new markets, for handling changes in the nature of technology with which the business operates.
 If a manager does not find out the real, rather than the assumed, career expectations of their staff, the manager may not have a reliable inventory or staffing succession plan.  How will you, as their manager, know them unless you ask them?  And ask them again at regular intervals.  Just as organizations change, employees also change as they journey through their lives.
 When an employee has implemented a career option, time goes by, and they reflect on their work and life events and may find their primary wants have shifted.  Most likely, a different next step option will be chosen than the one previously selected.  Knowing the direction in which a good performing employee is inclining is critical to retaining their services and achieving succession planning as a workable practice.  Consequently, career coaching is an ongoing activity.
 When employees submit their Career Action Step Proposals, management has a better idea of who wants what.  By assisting employees to communicate their career direction support needs - what they seek and why they believe they merit it - the hazards of assigning staff to tasks and projects and also of succession planning are substantially reduced.
 Managers are the pivotal link between the employee, the organization
and the employer´s career support program. Â Their role in career coaching
is not easy, quick or always comfortable, but the more a manager can educate
and support their employees to take responsibility for their own careers,
the more likely they are to develop productive and motivated work teams. Â
This should be the goal of every manager. Â It also provides a very
special type of personal reward - helping another human grow.
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