Many property managers see property management as a career but for far too long the industry hasn’t supported then in these careers. Team members are wanting to learn and grow to take on more responsibility and earn more money. Career planning is now an essential part of the core business mechanics and the business should be structured to support this.
Do you do career planning in your business and what does this plan look like?
It’s a good question @adam
VG_worksheet_2015.pdf (432.4 KB)
I mentioned in a previous post that as a small business it is hard for us, we do have a glass ceiling we have found that the way around this is to keep great connections with other business owners and when the time comes work to place our good people with other organisations where they still will benefit the industry.
As far as planning goes, for 8 years we have been using the “Lulu Lemon Framework”. A friend of ours is the AU / NZ manager and she kindly shared it with us. It works as a 10 year life plan separated into health, personal & career.
Each year we take our team offsite and go through how to set these goals and visions, then work with them to help them break down the goals to achieve them.
It starts with the team writing a day in their life in 10 years time e.g “I wake up in a beautiful home I own, I drop the kids at school, go to the gym and then go to the office where I work with a team of people I love… etc etc…”
From there we help them devise what goals they would have needed to hit to reach this. In the above example its “own a house” “Have Children” “Run a team” etc.
Then you break down the 10 year goals to 5, 3 & 1 year goals needed to achieve them.
The team then revisit this each year. I have had mixed feedback from other business owners on this process, some say they don’t want to be that involved in their teams lives etc. We have found however that to really have a high performing team, they need to be happy. They need to have a vision, they need to have a plan and feel like they are making progress towards this plan.
This has been a cornerstone of the success for our team retention, happiness which as we know with the Service Profit Chain leads directly to happy clients, and profit for the business owners.
Here is the PDF of the framework if anyone is interested.