Developing a consistent career path is a wish for many people, but not everyone wants the end of this path to be a leadership role. Actually, many employees prefer to work as individual contributors, not as managers. And that’s perfectly fine!

It is still essential to motivate and retain these talents over time. A good career development plan always needs to include what your employees really want, not just what is expected from them.

With that in mind, here are some ideas on how to motivate your employees that don’t want a leadership role.

Encouraging intellectual development

Your top talento is always developing and employing new ways to do their work. Therefore, these people tend to get motivated by the expectation of intellectual development.

By motivating your employee through learning, you ensure that they feel fulfilled. At the same time, this is a way to bring more value to the company through the accumulated knowledge of employees.

So, how to encourage career development through knowledge?

• Encourage the employee to take specialized courses paid for by the company;
• Invite the employees to events tailored to their area of ​​expertise;
• Create a personal development plan;
• Make sure you give them an opportunity to apply this learning on the job!

This is a simple and very effective way of motivating top talent without leadership ambitions.

Giving challenging tasks

If you search the word “motivation” you’ll find the following definition: “The general desire or willingness of someone to do something.” Therefore, to have a motivated employee it is essential to design responsibilities in a way that encourages motivation.

Employees that feel challenged are more engaged within the organization, thus making them more productive.

For that, there’s nothing better than a good challenge.

So, your time has come to help this employee get motivated: look for more challenging tasks that demand greater knowledge and commitment. This is also a way of recognizing that that employee is capable of such a task.

• Here are some characteristics of challenging tasks:
• No employee did it before;
• It takes time to do;
• Requires new insights and knowledge to be done;
• It takes more effort to solve the problem

Having specific events

There are many events that are made for employees in leadership roles. These events are often about leadership and everything involved in that context. So why not have an event for non-leadership roles?

It is important to make it clear to these employees that the company understands that leadership is not their objective. So, creating events focused on these people can be a great alternative to exposing new career paths and showing intentionality in the organization’s acts.

Intentionality is the key word here: your employee must be aware that they are welcome and have chances to grow, even if not as a leader in a particular sector.

Offer up needed resources

Last but not least, regardless of whether your employee wants to be a leader or not, demotivation can arise because of lack of support within the organization. When the company doesn’t provide enough resources for top talent to do a good job, that’s a problem.

These resources can be technology, human resources, support or even more benefits like health insurance, but they all have a big impact on the ultimate motivation of the employee.

So always make sure that top talent has everything they need to do a good job without feeling underappreciated. A good way to do this is to just ask them what they need!

Do you want more information on how to become a better leader to your team? Clubnet can help you!