When you take on a role as a supervisor, you often start by thinking about how to motivate your direct reports to achieve the mission of the organization and the goals of your unit. Your aim is often to tie the success of your direct reports to the success of the unit overall.

Certainly, you want to make sure that the people on your team stay focused on ensuring that the functions of your unit are addressed successfully. But, if you want to help the people working for you remain fulfilled, it’s also important to understand what they want to achieve in their careers and to provide them with opportunities to grow in ways that support their success.

BUILD IN TIME TO TALK ABOUT GOALS

It’s natural to assume that other people are motivated by many of the same things that drive you. Yet, people have many different approaches to work. Some want to provide service to a community. Some want to earn good money. Some have ambitions to be a leader. Some want to be seen as successful by others.

In every phase of your life—and particularly in the workplace—the best way to find out what someone else wants is to ask them. I think it’s valuable to include a discussion of individual goals as part of every yearly (or semi-annual, or quarterly) evaluation.

Checking in regularly is important, because those goals may change from one year to the next. A life circumstance—like the birth of a child or illness of a family member—may influence how important work is to a person’s life and well-being. As someone gains confidence, they may change their belief about what they are capable of, which can shift their aspirations. As people get older, they may want to set aside more time for travel, or may be contemplating retirement.

When you make a discussion of individual goals a regular part of your interactions with direct reportss, you also open up chances for people to inform you spontaneously when their own work-related goals change.

SET GROWTH PLANS

Those career goals provide you with an opportunity to help your team members to learn skills they will need to reach their future goals. In order to support team members’ growth, you should start by working with them to identify the skills associated with positions or activities they seek. Many people—particularly early in their careers—may not be aware of some of the core skills that are crucial for success at other levels of an organization.

By identifying those needed skills, you and your team members can then assess their strengths and weaknesses in those skills. For some of those future skills, you may need to create opportunities to observe them in action in order to determine their current level of expertise.

When you find skills that people need to build, work with them on a specific plan to learn more. That might involve participating in professional development programs. It might lead to finding good mentors for members of you team. It might also lead to creating new experiences for team members to expose them to different situations. For example, I frequently encourage managers to bring promising supervisees on “ride-alongs” in which they observe what is happening in a meeting without having a specific role they have to play. Each year, these development plans provide a specific road map to help team members take concrete steps toward their desired future.

THINK LONG-TERM

As a manager, it can tempting to skimp on professional development—particularly in situations in which there are not likely to be new opportunities within your team for that individual to advance. Selfishly, you might want to bias your team members toward skills that benefit you and your team’s goals. That is short-term thinking.

Certainly, you want to make sure that your supervisees are good at their current jobs. But, if you help to develop someone on your team to the point where they ultimately take a job elsewhere in the organization (or even go to work somewhere else), that is not a loss. Indeed, if you take a long-term perspective, it’s a key goal of being a good supervisor.

When people leave your team to work elsewhere in the organization, you have created an ally who will likely feel some degree of gratitude for your help developing their career. You have also strengthened the organization as a whole.

Even when people decide to take a job elsewhere, you are doing good. At the end of the day, work is just one component of people’s lives. If you help someone to satisfy their goals, you have created a little more joy in the world, which is a fine accomplishment. On top of that, people learn a lot about how to be a good colleague from their supervisors. By taking an interest in the advancement of your team members, you are reinforcing the idea that people in the workplace should look out for each other and to work to enable everyone to succeed.