Young Professional Leadership and Career Development in North ...

involves a rigorous process of assessment, feedback, and mentoring.
Reading leadership theory and biographies, hearing from other leaders,
and even having a mentor are necessary. But they’re insufficient.
Career development networks will be most successful when they
partner with organizations that can offer their members chances to
actually lead.
Finally, I urge those developing career development networks to
become as clear as possible about their answer to the “what’s in it for
me” (WIFM) question. Even if you get support from credit union
management, failure to have a clear answer for employees who wonder
what’s in it for them will cause you to flounder. Weidler’s brief
notes that in one of the programs, only one qualified supervisor signed
up in the first year, which suggests that the WIFM question hadn’t
been sufficiently addressed. In my experience, the simple reality is
that the people whom organizations most want to develop are those
who are already the busiest. And organizations often add responsibilities
without taking any away. So, if you’re already a busy supervisor
and you’re not incredibly clear on what you might gain—personally
or professionally—from a new career development network, it’s not
surprising that what has to get done will trump what might be useful
for your future. This brings us back to where I started—the importance
of senior credit union leaders understanding the value of talent
development and being willing to put some real skin into the game.
After all they are the ones who can decide this is important enough
to do on company time.
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