The career conversation that never quite happens

Hi Nik,

Every week I share one thing I have observed in the field of commercial leadership. This week it is about what happens when development becomes a once-a-year event rather than an ongoing conversation.

There is a pattern I keep coming back to in commercial leadership conversations: managers who are genuinely committed to their teams but cannot find the time to develop them. What I have noticed is that the reason is rarely what people assume.

This week in the field

What I tend to see is a layer of reporting activity that has become habitual rather than intentional. Dashboards that get updated because they always have been. Summaries that get produced because someone once asked for them. Internal outputs that consume real time, without anyone stopping to ask who reads them, what decisions they inform, or whether there is a better way to produce them.

The reporting is not the problem in isolation. What I observe is that it crowds out something specific: the time a manager could be spending with their team on development. Career conversations. Role coaching. The consistent one-to-one investment that helps someone understand not just where they are, but where they could go and what they need to do to get there.

That work does not have a deadline. It does not have a dashboard. And so it gets parked. Saved for the end of the year. Turned into an appraisal that summarises twelve months the employee has already lived, with a score attached. The person sitting in that conversation already knows whether they have grown. What they do not know is what is next, what is possible, or what they would need to do to get there.

What it means in practice

What seems to shift things is treating development conversations as a core management responsibility rather than an end-of-year obligation. When these conversations only happen at appraisal time, they stop being development conversations at all. In my experience, the employees who leave are rarely the ones who were unhappy with their role. They are the ones who could not see a path forward inside it. When progression feels invisible, the natural response is to look somewhere it is not. That search tends to start quietly, long before anyone notices.

The question to sit with this week

If you asked each person in your team today what they need to do to reach the next stage of their career, and what your organisation is doing to help them get there, how many of them could answer with confidence?

Curious where you'd score on this? Take the free CODE Leadership Scorecard, five minutes, free.