Overview
Your agency should be a conduit for talent. If you think of a role as a curriculum, then you can think of your agency as a university. As people attend your university, they are transformed. And it is "doing the work" which transforms them.
This transformation takes place across six different arenas:
- Hiring: finding the right person for the right role
- Onboarding: getting a new hire competent and comfortable in the role
- Developing: mastering one's role
- Promoting: vetting a person for their next role
- Mentoring: guiding others towards mastery
- Exiting: extracting knowledge and developing alumni
We present these arenas in a more or less chronological order. This is how an employee would likely experience them in the course of their career at your agency. But look at them in pairs and you'll see interesting parallels.
- Hiring and Promoting are both about fit: pairing a role with a soul.
- Mentoring and Developing are two sides of the same coin: teaching and learning.
- Onboarding and Exiting are about information exchange: uploading vs downloading.
These arenas aren’t new concepts, obviously. Most of them involve more than learning and development.
But they are inescapable aspects of the workplace, and each one affects the Growth Culture at your agency. Each arena is an opportunity for people to develop themselves at your agency. Frame them as a journey of growth and you'll see things differently.
So let’s explore each arena and how to optimize it for your people development system.