Elissa Sangster, CEO of the Forté Foundation, always remembers seeing an executive recruiter tell a business audience how they steal people in leadership roles.
By asking a key question: Has your manager cared enough to sit down and talk to you about a career roadmap?
If the answer is no, that’s who the recruiter goes after, recalls Sangster, whose nonprofit works with the Fortune 500 and other leading companies, business schools, and universities to give women access to business education and opportunities. The recruiter can easily lure that person away by showing them three other employers that will offer a roadmap.
But when it comes to supporting employee performance, such a map is often sketchy at best. When Forté surveyed almost 1,500 female and male MBA alumni, their average level of agreement that they had a “documented career plan” was lukewarm—about three out of five.
For an employee, a written plan can build trust by creating transparency around career goals.
“It doesn’t have to be a legal document,” Sangster tells me from San Antonio, Texas. “But if you’re going to retain those people, telling them and having conversations around why they belong, what their value is to the company, what is it they need to do in order to take the next step in their career path, these are all important things.”
Some employers are highly transparent about timelines and outcomes. For example, waste disposal company Republic Services has a General Manager Accelerated Program designed to put MBAs with previous leadership experience in a GM role within two years.
When companies evaluate performance, Sangster believes they can also build trust by flipping the script—moving away from manager-led, top-down reviews. To that end, Forté does 360-degree reviews that see team members seek feedback from peers and previous employers, too.
Getting those different perspectives tends to yield a more holistic view, with an emphasis on leadership qualities rather than things like meeting deadlines, Sangster observes.
The 360-degree review also takes pressure off the relationship between manager and employee, who no longer has one person deciding their fate. “And yeah, you do trust because you had a hand in selecting who gave you that feedback.”
To help employees improve their performance via training and development, Sangster recommends looking to outside sources. “If everything is done under that cloche of what’s going on within an organization, the lens is going to be about, ‘How do you succeed at my company?’” she says. “It’s not going to be about your personalized development plan.”
Forté employees have free access to an online FranklinCovey hub with more than 40 professional development micro-courses. “Based on a 360, you can actually go in and curate a learning journey for your gaps,” Sangster says. Similarly, General Mills lets its people choose from a pre-vetted online “bank” of development programs.
That autonomy fosters trust, Sangster explains. “The company is saying, ‘We trust you to make wise decisions about how you spend your time in professional development.’”
People also need to trust that their employer isn’t out to get them. Here, Sangster suggests that managers consider using AI to eliminate biased language from performance reviews before sharing them with employees. Only one in three companies has a mechanism for surfacing biased evaluations or comments during reviews, McKinsey notes.
A recent report on language bias in performance feedback shows why such a tool is needed. High-performing women are much more likely than their male counterparts to get feedback that’s negative and about their personality—think “unlikable” and “difficult.”
Meanwhile, white and Asian men have a far greater chance of being positively stereotyped with terms such as “brilliant” and “genius.” As for Black and Hispanic/Latino employees, they’re significantly more likely to be called “emotional.” Sheesh.
“Do managers even really know that they do it?” asks Sangster, who thinks unconscious bias could play a role. In AI, she sees a chance to banish irrelevant and unhelpful feedback.
Sounds like the kind of thing that could be its forte.
Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com
