The Employee Life Cycle (part 4 of 4)

Written by: Craig Twombly

Published: February 2011

Over the last several months we have spent time discussing the importance in the training, leading, and supporting functions all leaders have to help their employees’ journey inside the organization. It is also important to remember this is not a linear process that goes from the first part of the cycle to the last. You will often find you need to move between stages inside the development of each individual employee. To review what we discussed over the last several months...

In the first article we briefly touched on hiring and the importance of hiring the correct candidates. If you have ever hired an employee, you might look back at some of those hires and wonder what happened. When interviewing, it is important to keep in mind that you may want to hire for behavior as much as skills. I often struggled when I interviewed a management candidate or a line cook to not hire them because I liked the individual or because they were witty. While interviewing the candidates, it is very important to share with them the reality of the position. Whether that includes the job tasks or the ability to move forward, it is important to ask the right questions and answer them. It is often suggested to have a pre-made interview guide so you can ask all the questions important to the skills and behaviors of the position and to also ensure a fair look at all candidates.

After the initial step to hire, next is the need to train. Training is the first step to lengthen and maintaining an employee in the life cycle. If an employee starts off on a bad foot inside the organization and does not receive the training needed, the outcome will usually be a shortened employee life cycle. The same will hold true for the third phase, which is leadership.

So for the fourth phase, as you look at those that work for you, it is very helpful to employees to encourage them to better understand where they are inside the life cycle and what they need to improve upon for skills and behaviors, especially if they are looking for leadership positions within the organization. When I look back towards my job in the restaurant business, people would move through the cycle in different ways. While writing this I reflect back toward some of the individuals that worked for the organization. Sometimes I would be supporting a new hire as they struggled through adversity in their personal lives or retrained someone years after they started to help them succeed. As you set off and start to look at the employees, it might help to meet and ask where they think they are and go from there. Employees who know they are supported become very loyal workers, learning as much as they can to learn and grow into leadership positions, if they choose to go that route. For those who do not, well they are the ones who get great annual reviews and become the worker bees in the organization, under good leadership, which makes the organization a great place to work.

Good luck and if you would like to discuss this further, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Craig Twombly

Craig is the primary facilitator at Priority Learning, he is responsible for conducting an array of leadership series offered and consulting assignments from communications to team development in organizations ranging from the service industries to finance, manufacturing and more. Having extensive experience at balancing the business needs with the wants and desires of people are Craig's strongest assets.