5 Ways to Help Your People Achieve Aspirations Without Burnout

We all know the feeling of wanting to start a new year strong, hitting the ground running with a long list of aspirations to fulfill. In addition to our personal lives, we want our career to reach new heights as well, and as leaders, managers should be aware of this to help their team members reach their goals.
Of course, establishing goals can be an overwhelming thing to do. It’s not just a question of career planning but also being mindful of your team’s mental well-being. While having aspirations is a great start in defining goals, they are not the same as setting goals. That’s where managers and team leaders can step in to provide guidance. Here are a few steps you can take:

Take a Journalistic Approach

Any discussion between you and your employees must have the foundation of simply knowing your team on a genuine level— who they are, and what they want to achieve professionally and personally. It’s important to help your employees distinguish between short-term and long-term goals. Many times, employees will only look so far ahead, saying they want the obvious next level of promotion while not thinking through if it’s going to help them accomplish their true aspirations in the long run.

Set a Concrete Action Plan

Your employees may share their aspirations with you on a broad level, perhaps feeling hesitant to define them because it’s too stressful or it might feel vulnerable– but reassuring them that it’s ok to share and that you’re there to make it easier for them to get where they need to be. Help them discern between their professional goals and personal goals, whether they’re aiming to achieve the next promotion/ pay raise or if they’re wanting to improve their work-life balance, respectively. Once your team knows what they want to achieve in life, you can help them transform these aspirations into more specific, measurable and time-bound goals.

Break Down Big Plans into Small Steps

Whether your employees are working their way up for the next raise or are looking to take on a leadership role themselves, having big goals can be overwhelming, especially with their day-to-day work. It could lead to employee burnout or negatively affect their mental health. This also affects their performance and comfort within a work environment. To ensure you’re helping generate growth for both your team and your company, the best thing to do is to help your team turn their big aspirations into smaller, digestible steps toward success.

Creating these small feasible steps helps you to act more efficiently. The next steps can be including your employees in more projects or pitches, allowing them to showcase their creativity and skillsets. This also empowers your employees to make more effort, gain more experience, and become more confident and assertive in their abilities.

Speaking of which, here are a few factors to keep in mind that increase your employees’ motivation:

• Salary increases and providing benefits
• Opportunities to express creativity and skillset
• Creating better work-life balance
• Gaining positive reinforcement and compliments from managers
• Foreseeable opportunities for promotion

Make it Easier for Employees to do More Work that Matters

Once your employees’ goals have been defined and quantified, all that’s left is providing them with the pathways and tools necessary to achieve them. You can implement specific trainings that could help them create a roadmap for themselves to follow, creating checkmarks for certain accomplishments/milestones to reach within a set timeline. There are plenty of project management and goal-setting tools in the market, and even free to use.

Have an Honest Conversation

Today’s business landscape has changed drastically due to the pandemic, and the reality of it has also changed the way employees think about their careers – and themselves. Recent studies show that 42% of employees around the world have experienced a decline in mental health since the pandemic started. That’s why it’s more important than ever to build a culture of connection within your team, not being afraid to be vulnerable and have a casual, honest conversation with them when discussing their future goals.

Your employees might not necessarily know their goals, or at least don’t want to disclose them for fear that it might be outside the typical career path you had in mind. But you have to be able to reassure them and be open to communication. Guiding them toward their desired goals is essential for them to be better employees who are fulfilled, avoiding their resignation.

To help get a good conversation going, try these tactics:

• Invest in getting to know who they are, in and outside of work
• Show them their career success matters to you
• Build trust by sharing your own goals

So what happens when your employees decide it’s time to pursue a new role elsewhere? Continue to be the great, supportive leader that you are! Provide them with any coaching or advice that can help propel them toward future success, moving onto new aspirations with a positive sense of well-being.