Your Future Starts Here: How Investing in Employee Growth Strengthens Your Organization

Elizabeth Eldridge
21 hours ago
16 min read

Imagine starting a new job full of enthusiasm. You’re eager to learn, ready to prove yourself and excited about what might lie ahead. You master the basics, become increasingly confident in your role and start wondering what could come next.

Then a year passes. Maybe two. You’re still doing essentially the same work. No one has asked where you’d like your career to go or what else you might be interested in learning. You see positions posted elsewhere in the organization, but you have no idea what it would take to qualify for them. Interesting projects seem to go to the same handful of people and when more senior positions become available, they’re routinely filled from outside.

Eventually, you stop wondering when your next opportunity will come and start wondering whether it ever will. Maybe you begin browsing job postings. Updating your LinkedIn profile and C.V. Not necessarily because you dislike your workplace but because you’ve started to realize that if you want to grow, you might have to go somewhere else to do it.

That’s an employee retention problem, certainly. But it’s also a psychological health and safety issue.

This is the sixth instalment in my 'How Do You Eat an Elephant?' series, where I’m breaking down the National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace (Z1003) into manageable, bite-sized pieces. Rather than looking at psychological health and safety as one enormous undertaking, we’re exploring the psychosocial factors one at a time and considering what each one actually looks like in the everyday workplace.

The 6th psychosocial factor is Growth and Development and it’s one that can easily be misunderstood. When we hear “professional development,” our minds tend to jump immediately to training courses, conferences, certifications and continuing education. Those can all be valuable, but Growth and Development is much bigger than a training budget.

It’s about creating a workplace where people are encouraged and supported to continue learning, developing and using their full range of skills and abilities. It’s about opportunities to take on new challenges, explore interests, build confidence, discover strengths, contribute in new ways and continue evolving throughout a career. Most importantly, it’s about whether employees believe there are still possibilities ahead of them and can imagine a future for themselves within their organization.

People Need to See Somewhere to Go

This is particularly important for people in entry-level positions. Imagine joining an organization at the beginning of your career and looking around at the people who have been there for five, ten or twenty years. Naturally, you’re going to wonder what your own path might look like. How did that supervisor get there? What does it take to move into that department? Could you eventually specialize in something that interests you? Are there opportunities to lead projects, develop expertise or take on greater responsibility?

If you've heard me speak or attended one of my training sessions before, you've likely heard me talk about the importance of social health when it comes to engagement. Humans are biologically geared to derive meaning from what we invest our time in; and for better or worse, the average Canadian spends more waking hours at work than anywhere else! So of course, we want people to feel a genuine sense of purpose and to believe in what their organization is trying to accomplish. Ideally, there's some alignment between an employee's own values and the mission and values of the organization, and the person understands how the work they do contributes to something that matters. It's much easier to feel engaged when you believe your work has an impact.

But think about how challenging that can be in some entry-level positions. Imagine someone working on an assembly line performing the same repetitive task hundreds of times a day. Repetitive, monotonous work can make it especially difficult to experience that genuine sense of contribution. If that employee understands how their particular task fits into the bigger picture, that's a start. If they understand what the organization produces, who benefits from it and why their work matters to the finished product, we've helped create a stronger connection between their task and the organization's purpose.

Now add another layer: that employee can also see themselves growing with the organization. Their supervisor recognizes their strengths, encourages them to learn, talks openly about opportunities and makes it clear that where they are today doesn't have to be where they remain forever. Maybe the supervisor even shares their own story: “I started on this exact line twelve years ago.”

Suddenly, an entry-level position isn't necessarily the end destination. It's the starting place for an exciting journey.

In some ways, those first months or years with an organization are a little like the first handful of dates in a relationship. You're getting to know each other. The employee is learning what the organization really stands for, whether its stated values show up in practice and whether this is somewhere they might want to build a future. Give people enough positive experiences, meaningful connections and reasons to believe there are possibilities ahead and they may just start to “fall in love” with the organization and imagine themselves sticking around for the long haul.

Employees don’t need to be promised promotions, and organizations certainly can’t guarantee that everyone who wants to advance will be able to do so. What people do need is some sense of possibility.

If an employee cannot see any path between the job they have today and the career they might want tomorrow, another organization’s job posting can suddenly look very appealing. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re unhappy. They may like their manager, enjoy their coworkers and feel fairly compensated. They simply can’t see where they go from here.

That distinction matters. We often talk about retention as though people leave exclusively because something is wrong. Sometimes they leave because somewhere else offers something that feels possible.

And sometimes they don't leave at all. They stay physically while mentally checking out.

We have plenty of terms for what that can look like: disengagement, presenteeism, boredom at work and, more recently, “quiet quitting.” Whatever terminology we use, an employee who feels they've reached the end of the road can gradually stop investing the same energy, curiosity and discretionary effort they once did. Why keep reaching when there's nowhere to reach toward?

Helping employees see a future with your organization gives them something to work toward. It creates hope, motivation and a sense that the effort they’re putting in today is contributing to something larger in their own lives.

We Don't Actually Want Work to Be Too Easy

There's a common assumption that everyone wants an easy job. No stress. No pressure. Nothing particularly difficult to figure out.

But there's an important difference between work that is manageable and work that never challenges us.

In actuality, if your job became a breeze overnight you’d almost surely be surprised how quickly you’d becoming disengaged. Most of us need some degree of challenge to feel fulfilled. We want opportunities to use our abilities, solve problems, improve at something and occasionally surprise ourselves with what we're capable of doing. When work consistently asks too little of us, boredom can become its own source of dissatisfaction.

Of course, the answer isn't to overwhelm people. Chronic excessive demands are hardly a recipe for psychological health. The sweet spot is healthy challenge: work that stretches us enough to keep us interested and growing without consistently exceeding our resources and capacity.

There's something incredibly motivating about realizing, “I didn't know if I could do that, but I did.”

That's another reason exposing employees to different experiences matters. We don't always know what we're going to enjoy until we try it. Someone may reluctantly agree to facilitate a meeting and discover they're actually great at it. An employee who has never considered leadership may love mentoring a new hire. Someone may join a project team and discover an interest in process improvement, communications, safety or training that they never knew they had.

Sometimes growth isn't about following a career path we've already identified. It's about being given enough opportunities to discover paths we didn't know existed.

Growth Doesn’t Always Mean “Up”

Of course, career growth doesn’t have to mean climbing an organizational ladder. That traditional idea of career progression doesn’t fit everyone, nor does it fit every workplace.

Not everyone wants to manage people. An exceptional technician may have absolutely no interest in becoming a supervisor. A highly skilled nurse may want to deepen their clinical expertise rather than move into administration. An employee may love the work they do and simply want opportunities to become better at it, broaden their knowledge or take on more interesting challenges.

Growth can be vertical, but it can also be lateral. It can mean becoming a subject matter expert, developing a completely new skill, gaining greater autonomy, participating in decision-making, mentoring others or becoming the person colleagues turn to for a particular area of expertise.

And development shouldn't focus exclusively on technical skills. If someone tells you they'd eventually like to move into a supervisory position, perhaps the most valuable development opportunity isn't another course related to the technical aspects of their current job. Maybe it's training in emotional intelligence, communication, conflict resolution, facilitation or coaching. We should be developing people for where they want to go, not simply making them increasingly proficient at where they already are.

This is why meaningful development starts with curiosity rather than assumptions. Leaders need to know their people well enough to understand what growth means to them.

A conversation as simple as, “What would you love to learn more about?” can uncover interests and aspirations a manager might never have known existed. So can asking what parts of someone’s job they enjoy most, what they would like to be doing more of or where they hope to be a few years from now.

Those conversations send an important message: I’m interested in more than what you can do for us today. I’m interested in who you might become.

Development Is About Much More Than Training

Formal training absolutely has a place in employee development. (Remember, a corporate training specialist is writing this post!) The right learning experience, delivered at the right time, can build knowledge, confidence and capability in incredibly valuable ways.

However, sending someone to a course is only one tool in a very large toolbox.

Some of the most significant development opportunities happen right in the workplace, often without a registration fee or travel budget attached.

Mentorship is a great example. Pairing someone with a more experienced colleague gives them access to knowledge that can’t always be captured in a manual or classroom. A mentor can share lessons learned, provide perspective, help someone navigate unfamiliar situations and offer the kind of informal guidance that accelerates both confidence and competence.

Job shadowing can expose employees to parts of the organization they may know very little about. Spending even a few hours alongside someone in another role can help an employee understand how different pieces of the organization fit together while introducing them to career possibilities they may never have considered.

Cross-training offers similar benefits. Learning another role doesn’t just make the organization more resilient when someone is absent; it broadens an employee’s understanding, develops new skills and can create variety in work that might otherwise become repetitive.

Then there are stretch assignments: opportunities that are just far enough outside someone’s comfort zone to require growth. Ask an employee to lead a meeting for the first time. Give them responsibility for a small project. Invite them to present an idea to senior leadership, facilitate a discussion, train a new employee or represent the department on a committee. None of those opportunities requires a classroom, but every one of them can build skills that last.

Employees can also grow through special projects and working groups, particularly when those opportunities expose them to people and perspectives outside their usual role. Someone who spends most of their day performing a highly specific task may discover completely different strengths when invited to participate in a process-improvement project, wellness committee, safety initiative or strategic planning session.

Teaching someone else can be developmental. Asking an experienced employee to mentor a new hire, deliver a lunch-and-learn or demonstrate a process gives them an opportunity to develop communication, leadership and facilitation skills while reinforcing their own knowledge.

And development doesn’t always have to flow from the most senior person to the least experienced. I recently learned about reverse mentoring, which is such a cool concept. Reverse mentoring is when a newer or younger employee shares knowledge and perspective with someone more senior, perhaps around emerging technology, changing consumer expectations, generational perspectives or new ways of working. Creating opportunities for knowledge to move in both directions reinforces an important cultural message: everyone has something to learn and everyone has something to teach. And what a great message to send that new team member about their value!

There are countless other possibilities. Employees can attend networking events, temporarily cover responsibilities while a colleague is away, visit another location, sit in on meetings they wouldn’t ordinarily attend, contribute to onboarding new employees or be given time to explore an idea they believe could improve the organization. Professional associations can also offer development opportunities beyond simply holding a membership: an employee might volunteer on a committee, serve on a board, participate in their union, help organize an event or become involved in an industry initiative. Community and volunteer roles can similarly give people opportunities to practise leadership, public speaking, collaboration and decision-making in completely different environments.

The point isn’t to do all of these things. It’s to stop thinking of development as something that happens only when someone leaves the workplace to attend a course.

Development can (and should!) be happening all around us, every day.

Don’t Wait Until Someone Looks “Ready”

There’s another trap organizations can fall into: investing heavily in the people they’ve already decided have potential.

The “high potentials” receive mentorship, leadership training, special projects and exposure to senior leaders. Everyone else continues doing their regular job.

The problem is that potential doesn’t always announce itself loudly, and our judgments about who has potential aren't nearly as objective as we might like to believe. Unconscious bias can influence who we notice, who we feel comfortable with and who we instinctively picture in a more senior role. We're often drawn toward people who feel familiar to us or who remind us in some way of ourselves, including characteristics that may have absolutely nothing to do with their actual ability or potential.

That's one more reason leaders need to be intentional about making development opportunities accessible rather than relying solely on gut instinct about who seems “promising.”

The employee who rarely speaks in meetings may have extraordinary leadership ability that hasn’t had an opportunity to emerge. The person who seems hesitant to take on new responsibilities may simply lack confidence. Someone who isn’t currently your strongest performer may flourish when given work that better aligns with their strengths.

Sometimes people demonstrate potential because someone invested in them, not the other way around.

Think back over your own career. There’s a good chance you can identify at least one person who gave you an opportunity before you were completely certain you were ready for it. Someone trusted you with something important, encouraged you to apply, introduced you to the right person, invited you into a room you hadn’t been in before or simply told you, “I think you’d be good at this.”

Those moments matter.

Good leaders don’t just manage the capabilities people already have. They help uncover the ones that are still developing.

Growth Requires Room to Get It Wrong

There’s another important connection here to psychological health and safety: learning requires vulnerability.

To learn, we have to admit we don’t know something. To try something new, we have to accept that we might not get it right the first time. To take on a stretch assignment, we have to step into territory where we’re less confident than usual.

That becomes very difficult in a workplace where mistakes are met with embarrassment, blame or ridicule.

If employees believe they’re expected to know everything already, they’ll become very good at hiding what they don’t know. If mistakes damage reputations, people will stick to what feels safe. If asking a question is interpreted as incompetence, curiosity disappears pretty quickly.

This is where growth and development becomes directly connected to organizational culture and psychological safety. When people regularly see colleagues trying new things, stretching slightly outside their comfort zones and occasionally getting something wrong without being humiliated for it, it sends a powerful cultural message: It's safe to put yourself out there here.

Leaders help set that tone by how they respond when someone is learning. If an employee volunteers to lead a presentation for the first time and stumbles over part of it, does their manager focus on what went wrong or recognize the courage it took to try? If someone takes on a new responsibility and makes an understandable mistake, is the response blame or coaching?

Working slightly outside our comfort zones should be normal in a culture that values development. It gives people permission to experiment, ask questions, discover strengths and take reasonable interpersonal risks without constantly worrying that an imperfect attempt will be held against them.

This is one of the reasons the psychosocial factors in the National Standard are so interconnected. Growth and Development doesn’t exist in isolation. It both depends on and helps reinforce psychological protection, supportive leadership, organizational culture, civility and respect and clear expectations.

A workplace that genuinely values growth has to make room for learning, and learning is rarely perfect.

Development Should Be a Conversation, Not an Annual Event

One of the simplest things leaders can do is talk to people about their future more often.

Too often, conversations about development are squeezed into an annual performance review, somewhere between discussing last year’s objectives and completing the required paperwork. By the time the conversation gets to career aspirations, both people may already be watching the clock.

Development deserves more than that. Conversations about growth, goals and the future should be ongoing and evolving; part of the cultural fabric of the organization rather than an annual HR exercise. People's ambitions change. Their lives change. They discover new interests, develop new strengths and sometimes realize that something they once thought they wanted isn't actually what they want at all. We can't meaningfully support someone's growth if we only check in on it once a year.

And I don't think leaders need to be afraid to let those conversations extend beyond someone's professional goals.

What does life look like for you five years from now?

What are you working toward outside of work?

What matters to you right now?

Those questions aren't about prying into someone's personal life, and employees should always decide how much they want to share. They're about recognizing that the person sitting across from you is more than an employee. They're a whole human being who wears many different hats and whose motivations don't magically begin and end at the workplace door.

Those personal goals can also help leaders understand what motivates people. Maybe an employee has been picking up every overtime shift they can because they're saving for the down payment on their first home. Knowing that doesn't mean the leader suddenly needs to become their financial adviser. It means that when that employee finally signs the mortgage paperwork, their leader gets to genuinely celebrate with them because they understand what that moment represents and how hard they've worked toward it.

Those moments build meaningful connections between leaders and employees. They communicate: I see you as a person. I understand what's important to you. I'm rooting for you.

Managers don’t need elaborate career-development programs to start having these conversations. They can ask employees what they’re curious about, what they would like more exposure to, which skills they’d like to strengthen and whether there are parts of the organization they’d like to understand better. They can ask what kind of work employees hope to be doing in a few years and then help identify experiences that might move them in that direction.

Those conversations are especially valuable when leaders can connect aspirations with concrete opportunities. If an employee says they’re interested in leadership, perhaps they can lead the next team meeting or take a course on emotional intelligence. If they’re curious about another department, arrange a job shadow. If they want to become more comfortable presenting, give them a small, supportive opportunity to practise before asking them to address a room full of executives.

Development becomes much more meaningful when employees can see the bridge between where they are and where they hope to go. And when they know their leader cares about the person crossing that bridge, not simply the skills they'll bring back to the organization when they reach the other side.

When People Grow, Organizations Grow Too

Investing in employee development is sometimes treated as a benefit we provide to employees, but organizations have an enormous amount to gain from it too.

Employees who continue learning bring new skills, ideas and perspectives back into the workplace. Cross-training creates greater flexibility. Mentorship transfers institutional knowledge before experienced employees retire or move on. Stretch assignments help identify future leaders. Internal development strengthens succession planning and reduces the need to continually search outside the organization for talent.

Growth also supports engagement. When people are challenged in healthy ways, feel that their abilities are being put to good use and can see themselves progressing, work is less likely to feel stagnant. They have reasons to remain curious, contribute ideas and imagine what might come next.

There is also something deeply motivating about knowing an organization is willing to invest in you. Whether that investment is a professional development opportunity, the chance to try something completely new or an hour of a mentor’s time each month, the underlying message is the same: We see something in you that is worth developing.

Organizations sometimes worry that investing in employees will simply make them more marketable and therefore more likely to leave. And yes, sometimes you will invest in someone who eventually takes those skills somewhere else. There are no guarantees in employment relationships.

But refusing to develop people because they might leave creates a much bigger problem: what happens if you don’t develop them and they stay?

More importantly, what kind of workplace do you create when employees believe the only way to grow is to leave?

Can Your Team Members See Their Future Here?

Growth and Development doesn't require every organization to create an elaborate leadership academy or offer unlimited professional development budgets. It requires something much more fundamental: an ongoing commitment to helping people develop.

It means noticing potential. Creating opportunities. Sharing knowledge. Encouraging curiosity. Having conversations about the future. Letting people stretch beyond the boundaries of their current job description and giving them enough psychological safety to occasionally stumble while they do it.

Most importantly, it means helping employees see possibilities.

So, as you consider the sixth psychosocial factor, here’s a question I think is worth asking: If you asked the people in your organization whether they can see a future for themselves there, what would they say?

Their answer may tell you more about Growth and Development in your workplace than your training budget ever could.

When people can see a future with your organization, they have a reason to invest themselves in helping build it.

Next week, we'll move on to the 7th psychosocial factor in the National Standard: Recognition and Reward. Helping people see where they can go matters, but so does making sure they know the contributions they're making along the way are seen, valued and appreciated. It goes beyond a simple “thank you”, a promotion or a gift card. Meaningful recognition is a lot more multifaceted than traditional employee appreciation programs might suggest. Join me next time!

Elizabeth Eldridge is a Psychological Health & Safety Consultant based in southern New Brunswick, Canada. In addition to keynote speaking, event emceeing, consulting services and corporate training on mental health in the workplace, she supports organizations across the country on the adoption of Canada’s best practice guidelines on psychological health and safety management. She is also the Founder & President of Arpeggio Health Services which provides standardized education programs like Mental Health First Aid, The Working Mind, QPR Suicide Prevention and more.