#2 JooBee's newsletter

TL;DR

🗺️ Career framework: Cultivating hierarchy or empowerment?

📝 Struggling to ‘sell’ to your SLT? Here’s your winning S.A.L.E.S. guide

❓ Your views on effectively managing upwards

Career framework: Cultivating hierarchy or empowerment?

A simple writing tool such as a sharp pencil possesses the potential of a magic wand! It can bring ideas to life or - when wielded by the wrong hands - become a weapon.

Similarly, a hierarchical culture is not an inevitable result of developing a career framework. It’s all about how you use it.

A career framework (when implemented well) is a powerful tool that benefits not only employees but managers and the entire business. Let’s break it down:

🧭 Employees - empowered to excel

A career framework offers the gift of clarity. It enables employees to understand the expectations of what their roles are, how to do them well, and what success looks like. This empowers them to take charge of their career journeys, allowing them to excel in their current positions and plan for their desired future roles.

🌱 Managers - equipped to drive growth

A well-defined career framework allows managers to uphold consistent performance expectations. It equips them with clarity to set clear expectations, facilitate employee performance, and support development—all aligned with a unified understanding of your company's expectations. This stands in stark contrast to relying on individual interpretations based on personal experiences or external benchmarks (#UnconsciousBiases).

⏳ Business - focussed energy

Without a clear career framework, confusion and dissatisfaction amongst team members run rampant. Implementing one reduces the time and energy diverted to managing inconsistent performance expectations and recognition practices throughout the company. Instead, people can focus and channel their energy into moving forward, achieving both individual and business goals.

It’s all in your actions: the distinction between hierarchical or empowerment culture

The benefits are clear. It is your company’s decision how to bring the career framework to life - whether through 🪜hierarchical directives or 🤝collaborative transparency. The way you nurture your culture depends on this choice.

While I trust that none of you prefer a hierarchical approach in which managers employ the career framework to 'tell' people what to do and how to do it, I'd like to bring something to your attention👀:

Alternatively, you can choose a more collaborative path, fostering a culture where expectations are transparent and managers engage in 2-way conversations to support employees. In this scenario, employees are not just passive recipients but are actively accountable for their own development.

This isn’t an HR concern. It is a fundamental business concern.

If your start-up has achieved product-market fit and aims to expand market share and revenue, your start-up is evolving from creative chaos to a need to establish repeatability to operate at scale. This applies not only to customer-centric processes like sales, customer onboarding, or feature delivery but also to employee-focused aspects, including recruitment, employee onboarding, performance management, and development. The foundation for consistency in these areas lies in having a clear career framework in place.

Struggling to ‘sell’ to your SLT? Here’s your winning S.A.L.E.S. guide

In one of our conversations, Kristian James (Hawkwood), who works closely with HR leaders, highlighted a common challenge: many People Leaders often find it a challenge to make an impact at the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) level. They struggle to sell People-related ideas or convince senior stakeholders of their benefits.

Let’s face it. Nobody likes to be sold to. It feels like someone's trying to get one over on you in order to get what they want. So, when you meet a "salesperson," it's fair to wonder if they genuinely care about your needs.

I'm a big fan of The Futur podcast, which covers creative industry topics. They've taught me that selling isn't about convincing people to buy your ideas. No, m’am! It's about something much more meaningful:

S - Serving others

A - Asking insightful questions

L - Learning to listen without biases

E - Empathising with others

S - Summarising what you've learned

In my early leadership roles, my focus was all about presenting solutions to the Senior SLT or execs. But guess what? More often than not, those solutions faced challenges, got battered around, and more than 50% of the time were flat-out rejected. So, there I was, scratching my head, wondering…

"I've got the answers to our problems, so why is SLT saying no?"

It got me thinking. Had I really taken the time to grasp the core of the problem? Were we all on the same page? Had I perhaps rushed to conclusions?

I began to change my approach. Instead of leaping into ‘solutions mode’ the instant SLT demanded we tackle an issue, I started asking more questions. I listen actively, trying to see things from their perspective, and then summarise the problem in a way that resonates with everyone. Lo and behold, that's when we started achieving some real alignment on the problems we needed to solve.

So, remember this: When you find yourself "selling" your ideas, pause. Have you truly understood the problem? Are you on the same page about the solution? It could make all the difference.

🔗 LinkedIn | 🌎 JooBee’s blog | 🤝 Work with me