Don’t Promote Them. Talk to Them.
Photo Credit: Paisan Limratanamongkol | Adobe Stock
Alaska has a workforce shortage across almost every sector. We pour energy into recruiting to our industries and to the state, which matters. But without equal effort in retention, we’ll simply churn through employees. To reach our potential, Alaska companies must keep the people they already have so they build their career here.
Most executives assume the way to do that is to pay and promote. Pay matters, but it’s the floor. If people don’t feel fairly compensated, they’ll leave. But once that bar is met, money stops being a lever.
Advancement is similar. It matters, but it isn’t what people are really after. When employees are asked what they want, moving up the ladder is dead last. Instead, they want contribution, skills, confidence, and autonomy. This is true across every age group, every level, and every industry studied.
So how do you uncover what actually drives someone? It starts with a conversation.
Current Conversations Don’t Deliver
If I ask managers about discussions with employees, they usually tell me about the annual review process. Some are doing stay interviews, and many reference discussions around promotions.
Each of these has its place. But those discussions don’t drive engagement, because they aren’t focused directly on the employee and what the employee wants.
The annual review is built around the company’s agenda. It evaluates past performance and sets goals for what’s next. The best annual reviews are honest and two-directional, but such reviews are still anchored in the current role and the company’s needs.
The stay interview is a proactive discussion and can help with retention. It gives the manager feedback about what the employee wants so company leaders can make adjustments and address concerns. Although valuable, it isn’t focused on the employee’s goals and ambitions.
Current Issue
September 2026
The one that seems like it’d be the best opportunity for conversation, the promotion discussion, is the one most likely to backfire. It’s hard to say no to more money and a bigger title, especially when it’s clear the company wants you to take it, but this leads to employees accepting roles that don’t fit. The employees end up doing a poor job in a role they never really wanted.
Instead, what’s needed are career conversations.
When employees are asked what they want, moving up the ladder is dead last. Instead, they want contribution, skills, confidence, and autonomy. This is true across every age group, every level, and every industry studied.
What is a Career Conversation?
A career conversation isn’t about the company’s goals, the current role, or the next opening. It’s about the person.
The idea isn’t new. Russ Laraway, who built career development practices at Google and Qualtrics, structures it as understanding someone’s story, their vision, and a plan to connect the two. Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni describe it as understanding where someone has been (hindsight) and where things are headed (foresight) to produce insight.
A career conversation is a manager-led discussion designed to understand an employee as a whole person and help them find direction. People rarely make time to do this for themselves, which is why it is so valuable when a manager does it for them.
The format I use is lightweight, and the output is what I call a Career Compass. It provides a direction to aim for and a way to keep moving toward your goals. That’s what employees want, and it’s what will help keep them contributing here in Alaska.
How to Have a Career Conversation
Following patterns set by Laraway, Kaye, and Giulioni, there are three areas to review. The questions are designed to be open-ended, and it should be clear to the employee that there isn’t an agenda. It is a conversation based on trust and openness.
Start by looking back. Where has the employee felt most engaged? What kind of work do they get lost in? What are they consistently good at? What have they done that drained them, even though they did it well? Go beyond a résumé review and listen for patterns across positions, experiences, and decisions.
Next, look around. What’s working in the employee’s role right now, and what isn’t? What do people keep coming to them for? What are they avoiding? Don’t diagnose or try to fix feedback that comes up. Just listen. The point is to learn about what they like, don’t like, and are good at, independent of their role and responsibilities.
Now, it’s time to look ahead. This is when the employee imagines “blue sky” and unlimited options. If time and money weren’t a constraint, what would they be doing? You want them to get past “just add value,” or “get promoted,” which are conditioned responses. What direction would they choose? Is it a bigger stage, deeper expertise, more impact, a career designed around their life, or something else?
From this conversation, reflect back to them what you’ve heard, and ask what they noticed. You want to summarize the conversation by articulating a few things:
- What they value
- What they’re genuinely good at
- A step they’d like their career to take over the next year or two
- What they are willing to give up to get there
Put together, the summary might read, “I do my best work when I’m building something from scratch with a small, trusted team. I’m strongest at turning ambiguity into a plan. Over the next two years I want to lead a project from start to finish, and I’d trade some day-to-day predictability to get there.”
That becomes their Career Compass. It’s short enough to read regularly, and it’s easy to revisit if things change and the overall direction needs to be adjusted.
A career conversation isn’t about the company’s goals, the current role, or the next opening. It’s about the person… A career conversation is a manager-led discussion designed to understand an employee as a whole person and help them find direction.
Who to Have Conversations With
You might think this is a tool best suited for your star performers, the ones you can’t afford to lose. But you’d be wrong. This is a conversation for everyone, not just the people you’re grooming for something more.
Your reliable, low-maintenance, solid performers need this conversation. It can be easy to overlook them, but just because they are quiet doesn’t mean they are content. They may not be asking for more, but they want it.
Your underperformers are the ones managers most want to skip, yet they are often the ones who need a conversation most. I once worked with a struggling project manager. Through a career conversation, he realized he loved analyzing problems and figuring out what was really going on, but he did not enjoy or excel at developing solutions or managing a team. He moved into an analyst role, and what could have been a demotion instead became a correction that made him happier and his team stronger. An underperformer’s aspirations may point elsewhere in the business, creating an opportunity to redeploy talent rather than lose it. Or, if you find they’re entirely in the wrong place, helping them see that is better for both of you.
Of course, the most important person to have the conversation with is yourself.
Many managers didn’t choose the management track. They were promoted into it because they were good at their job, and they were asked to take on more. Business research firm Gartner found that nearly half of managers lack confidence in their ability to help their employees develop. As the saying goes, organizations spend years developing an individual contributor and forty-five minutes promoting them to manager. Many wonder if they’re cut out for it, but they never asked themselves if they wanted it.
Therefore, before you run this conversation exercise with your team, run it with yourself. Look back, look around, look ahead, and write your own Career Compass. You’ll feel more confident and assured in your work, and you’ll be better at guiding conversations with your employees.
Retention is the Key to Growth
When it comes to workforce development, more effort needs to be put into retention. It is the most powerful lever a business leader has because a kept employee is worth far more than one filled seat. Engaged employees recruit their friends, build community, and become the people the next generation learns from. Adding a single development conversation to a regular one-on-one has been shown to increase the odds of an employee being highly engaged by more than four times and cut burnout by more than half. That effort compounds in a way no recruiting budget can match.
Alaska doesn’t just need new workers. We need to keep the ones we have and give them a reason to build a career here rather than elsewhere. That starts with a conversation your managers can have this week, beginning with themselves.
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