By Jill Bilich
It’s a busy day at the office, as usual, with plenty of clients to serve and projects to work on when I hear a cheerful uproar coming from the morning tech standup meeting. I peek in to see a room full of elated faces and that’s when I know that I’ll be getting my favorite kind of interruption today. Shortly after the meeting, I receive a Slack message from the source of the excitement herself, “Hey Jill, it’s time to add my star! I kinda owned that test!” She’s been eager for this moment of glory all morning where she’ll place the little magnetized yellow star on our Certificate Brag Wall, publicly displaying her success. I set my To-Do list on hold and meet her in the break area where we have our brag walls permanently displayed.
“There is nothing “little” about this star for her”
I know that people say “It’s the little things in life that count,” but there is nothing “little” about this star for her. A star on our Cert Brag Wall represents a desire to grow your skills for the good of your team and the clients you serve, a commitment to your future goals, and of course, the hours of personal time you spent studying. We know not to make light of this almost-ceremonial star placement activity because we’ve worked hard to get our team to this level of excitement around seeking growth and getting certifications.
Are you looking to ramp up your training program or wanting to see growth in your team members? We’ve got some simple tips to help make continual growth a part of your organization’s culture.
Chart the Path: Growth Plans for all
- Create unique paths that are relevant to your team members’ roles and equip them to do amazing work. Take it a step further and create different majors/minors to diversify within each track.
- Make sure the growth paths are challenging and will track well with their experiential growth
- As your organization grows, revisit your growth plans. Do you need a new track, is anything outdated? Referencing growth plans from other industry leaders can help guide you.
Track and Incentivize Growth: Brag Walls and Benjamins
Create a way to display the success that your team is having. Making their individual successes public to the team can spark motivation and of course give bragging rights. A little healthy competition never hurt anyone.- Celebrate successes by keeping the display up to date and making them a part of the process.
- Create an incentive program and present it to the team with energy and excitement.
Keep up with demand: Get on it! Don’t wait!
- As your team’s excitement grows, you may find that you need someone on your team to be in charge of purchasing study materials and scheduling exams in order the capture their excitement and get them committed immediately.
- Find a testing center that will provide the best opportunity for success. Environment and organization is very important.
- Scale to the demand of your team. We became a private testing center because our team members were testing so frequently. We knew that we could provide a great testing environment and that by becoming a testing center we would streamline the process for exam scheduling and save money in the process.
We truly value professional and personal growth at Clever Ducks and we’ve learned the importance of being intentional in our encouragement of growth in our team members. We hope these tips help you get started on creating a growth culture in your organization. Keep an eye out for my upcoming blog post where I’ll tell you all about the Financial Peace University training that we’re providing for our team so that they have the tools to manage their personal finances well.