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While “breadcrumbing”—being strung along by small reinforcements without true commitment—has been around in the dating world for a while, the idea can apply in professional contexts as well. An August 2019 BBC report says bosses may be guilty of leading employees on, rather than genuinely committing to their development. In a tight labor market, this can be the kiss of death for employee engagement and retention.
Forty-four percent of employees don’t feel they have sufficient opportunities for professional growth in their current positions, according to TINYPulse’s “2019 Employee Engagement Report: The End of Loyalty.” The company’s research has also found that people who don’t feel supported in their professional development are three times more likely to be job hunting.
But it’s not always nefarious, says Tania Luna, co-CEO of LifeLabs Learning. Employers and supervisors may have good intentions, but inexperience, work demands, or lack of resources may get in the way, she says. “It’s not like there’s someone who has this devious plan to give you just enough development that you stick around, but not enough that you’re actually productive,” she says.
But employees have a real need to feel like they’re developing their skillset, and if companies aren’t fulfilling that obligation, they will look elsewhere. Are you dealing with a boss who’s leading you on when it comes to professional development? Here’s a four-step action plan.
Assess the environment
To get an understanding of how seriously your supervisor takes employee development overall, watch how they treat their own career development, says Helen McPherson, principal consultant at management consulting firm McPherson Consulting Group. “If leaders aren’t curious about developing themselves, it’s a real indication that they don’t have a growth or learning mindset,” she says. If your supervisor isn’t learning, taking on stretch assignments, and finding other ways to grow, it’s a good sign that they either don’t know how to help your career or aren’t interested in doing so.
Understand your supervisor’s development style
Among leaders who actually carry out development activities, Rachel Cooke, founder and CEO of leadership consulting firm Lead Above Noise makes the distinction between a “compliant” and an “engaged” leader. “Broadly speaking, a performance management conversation with a compliant leader will be more one-directional with them speaking and you listening whereas, with an engaged leader, it will be more of a dialogue,” she says.
A compliant manager is checking boxes: They may tell you what they think you need and will be overly focused on process, such as ensuring forms are filled out and correspondence is formalized. An engaged manager will be more focused on what your goals are and work with you to find an individualized approach to development that will benefit both you and the company, Cooke says.
Create your plan
Before you get too upset about your company’s lack of development opportunities, you need to have an idea of how you want to grow in your profession. “I’ve had a lot of experiences where employees will complain about the lack of opportunity. And yet when you push them and say, ‘Well, what have you asked for? What have you told your leader you’re aspiring to [do]?’ You kind of get a blank stare,” Cooke says. You don’t have to have a five-year plan, but you should have a clear idea of where you want to go and what you need to develop to get there, she says.
How you proceed here depends on your manager and organization. In some cases, development is part of the culture, and both organizational leadership and managers take responsibility for it. In others, the employee may need to take matters into their own hands. Either way, you can’t be passive, Luna says. “You’ve got to be constantly thinking of yourself as almost like this entrepreneur,” she says. “[Ask yourself] ‘What’s the way for me to keep expanding my own employability?’”
Communicate
Successful professional development requires regular communication between employers and employees, McPherson says. If your supervisor is only interested in speaking to you about your goals and performance around the time of your annual performance review, you are likely in an environment that doesn’t prioritize your growth.
If you’re in a situation where professional development is scarce, you need to be willing to make your plans clear and ask for what you need, whether that’s training, new assignments, or even feedback, Cooke says. Doing so requires saying, “Hey, leader, I want to get to this role in the next three years, and you have a better vantage point than I do as far as what it takes. Can you help me to understand what I need to do?” she says. Being passive will simply cause your own opportunities to languish.
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You may not think your hastily scrawled to-do list has “an irresistible magic,” but Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco would have disagreed.
Eco held up this simple practice, which humans have conducted for generations, as a paradigm of cultural significance. In an interview with Der Spiegel headlined “‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die,’” Eco explained, “The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists.”
Whether you subscribe to Eco’s erudite explanation or just enjoy the process of writing down an account of tasks and goals to be met, the to-do list has become a de facto measure of productivity. Although its origins remain obscured by time, some notable examples of the to-do list illustrate exactly how common this productivity tool has been throughout history.
Leonardo da Vinci is often credited with creating the first résumé (or at least commissioning a professional writer to do so for him). He was also a fan of the humble to-do list. One such list includes lofty tasks that would put many modern lists to shame:
- [Calculate] the measurement of Milan and Suburbs
- Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.
- Get Messer Fazio (a professor of medicine and law in Pavia) to show you about proportion.
- Draw Milan
- Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions by day or night.
- Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner
- [Ask about] the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese
Flash forward a couple of centuries and you’ll find one of early America’s own Renaissance men busying himself with ambitious goals and list making to achieve them. Benjamin Franklin put forth a to-do list in 1791 with such mundane tasks as wash, work, read, work, put things in their places. But rather than simply check off the items and call it a day, Franklin employed a higher level of assessing his overall productivity. His measure was to start the day by asking what good he could do and at the end of the day evaluate based on what was accomplished.
Along the way, there have been other notable to-do list makers.
It’s fascinating, for instance, to juxtapose a list created by a 30-year old Woody Guthrie in 1942 with da Vinci’s above at the same age. The tasks on Guthrie’s list include “work more and better, wash teeth if any, write a song a day, learn people better, stay glad, and help win war—beat fascism.”
And for all John Lennon’s lyrics about imagining a better world, his to-do list from May 22, 1980—about seven months before his death—paints a vignette of quotidian concerns. The 11 points include directives to his personal valet: “H.B.O. guy coming between 3-5. BE THERE. (the other guy didn’t know what was wrong.), Photos in Books (do it while you wait for H.B.O.),” and books he wanted to read such as Susanne Patch’s book about the Hope Diamond and Margaret Trudeau’s memoir.
Our obsession with productivity has spawned an entire industry around getting our lists more organized, edited, and effectively prioritized. The reason this practice has persisted is that our brains are predisposed to nudge us to complete unfinished tasks—but maybe not the way you think. It’s because of something called the Zeigarnik effect.
Originally it was regarded as the brain function responsible for remembering details about uncompleted tasks. But new research explained by New York Times science writer John Tierney and psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength says that it works when our unconscious mind pushes our conscious mind to make a plan.
Once a plan of action is in place, a feeling of accomplishment can set in, whether or not the goal is ever reached. That feeling may not be quite as satisfying as physically drawing a line through an item or checking a box—or stepping back to survey a completed drawing of a city like da Vinci—but it’s enough gratification to assure we’ll return to making a list that will help us achieve more tomorrow.
