What drives the need for career development?

Do all people have the same needs?

Maslow: Yes!

The only difference is that at a specific moment in life some people set their focus and energy to fulfill a specific class of needs while others are focused on another class.

What determines some people to focus on money and what determines some others to desire more knowledge or esteem? Do all the employees have a career development need or does everybody want just more money? Those are only some of the topics that I would like to clarify in this article.

The intention of the article is to help companies retain their employees by explaining what are their employees’ needs and how they can use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to design a road map for their employees’ development. Meeting the needs of the employees increases their satisfaction and by this their performance.

The hierarchy of needs

There is a well-known hierarchy of human needs created by Maslow that I would like to talk about and explain how it works in order to understand how employee career development is influenced by it. The theory has its controversy, like the vaccine nowadays, but maybe not that controversial. At this point, I can only recommend informing yourself about the other point of view and deciding what works best for you and your employees.

Maslow stated that we have 5 levels of needs and we satisfy them in the order of their importance. He used as a graphical representation, a pyramid, showing by this also the importance and by this the order in which people follow their needs. He draws attention to the following:

– those levels/layers shall not give us “the false impression that a need must be satisfied 100 percent before the next need emerges” (Maslow 1987)

– not everyone will move through the hierarchy in a uni-directional manner: from bottom to top but may move back and forth between the different types of needs

– this back movement in the hierarchy is given by unhappy life experiences, like divorce, loss of a job, health, family reasons etc.

1. Physiological needs

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has at the base the physiological needs. Those are the basic needs for survival: air, food, drink, shelter, clothing. Those are the most important needs because as long as those needs are not satisfied the human body does not function properly. As long as those are not satisfied all the other needs can wait.

What does these mean for a company? It means that the first need of their employees is to have enough income to pay for the needed food and drinks, clothes, and shelter. In other words, this means money. For any company this is not an issue at all, they have well-paid employees so they will focus on higher needs in the hierarchy. But this doesn’t mean that once reviewed you can forget about this need. Cyclic revisions of employees’ financial needs/desires, or let’s call them evaluations, shall be carried out. The competence is high and many employees leave the company for their competitor, and only for just a few more money. Satisfying these needs shouldn’t be a problem for most of the companies, they are already investing time and personnel in yearly evaluations discussions with the employees. The challenges arise after meeting this level, as Maslow formulated it:

“It is quite true that man lives by bread alone — when there is no bread. But what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled?” (Maslow, 1943)

He will target the next level of needs!

2. Safety needs

The second level needs are safety. After having the body fed, warm and functioning, humans need security. In our developed society we don’t fear the sudden attacks of conquerors as some hundreds of years ago. But we still need the protection services of the police or justice service. The types of services that protect people having high needs in the hierarchy from the people having the physiological needs, who think they have no other choice than to steal for existence.

The safety needs, in general, are mostly provided by the society: medical care system, property, law, and order. This is a very important “safety service” because if it is fair and trustable it offers people freedom from fear. But there are some safety needs that companies could meet for their employees.

For companies, the safety needs of the employees are translated with good working conditions. In order to offer employees the chance for career development, you start with a safe and stable working environment, where they can create or solve problems, being freed from their fears. And because health is appreciated, not only by the employees, but it hurts also the company if the employee isn’t able to work due to health conditions, companies could include medical benefits on the employees’ benefit list. When those benefits extend also to their family is even more appreciated.

The next milestone to cover for a safe work environment would be psychological safety. This is a major topic in employees’ development path and a more delicate subject, even more, because those needs are harder to meet than the physical ones and it takes time to build through mutual trust and respect. But what is actually psychological safety?

“Psychological safety is being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career” (Kahn 1990, p. 708)

Kahn in his paper, Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work started from the premise that people bring different varying degrees of their self at work: physical, cognitive, and emotional and those levels affected their experiences of work and by this their performance (the link to his article).

3. Love and belonging

The third level of needs involves feelings of belongingness. Humans have the need for interpersonal relationships, the need to belong to a group, to interconnect, to affiliate. And because some smart guys have understood this crucial need of human beings and that we live in a society where for many all other needs are met, they have created the social media platforms for people to interconnect outside their spatial boundaries and the affiliate programs.

Belongingness needs include receiving and giving affection or love, friendship, trust, acceptance. Of course that your employees do not expect to be loved or to have friendship relation with the boss or the CEO of the company! But they need to be trusted, to be accepted, to be understood in their problems, or in their mistakes (nobody is perfect).

At work, those needs for belongingness translates into work relationships. People need to have a good relationship with their colleagues but also with their leaders or subordinates. Is there something that companies can do to improve the relationship between their employees at any level and between the levels?

Yes, it is.

Dr. David Rock has developed 2008 the SCARF Model. SCARF is an acronym and each letter comes from one domain that influences our behavior in social situations.

1. Status – our relative importance to others

2. Certainty – our ability to predict the future.

3. Autonomy – our sense of control over events

4. Relatedness – how safe we feel with others

5. Fairness – how fair we perceive the exchanges between people to be

Dr. Rock holds a professional doctorate in the Neuroscience of Leadership from Middlesex University in the UK. His SCARF Model is neuroscience research that implies that these five social domains activate the same threat and reward responses in our brain that we rely on also for physical survival.

Those apply also at the workplace. You can threaten or reward your team members by pressing positive or negative “the buttons”. Let’s take an example: when we are excluded from an activity or a project, we might perceive it as a threat to our status and relatedness. This activates the same area of the brain as physical pain. In this case, the brain signalizes danger and we feel and act accordingly.

Because the topic is so vast I wrote a dedicated article on this subject.

4. Esteem

This need includes self-worth, accomplishment, and respect. Maslow classified these needs into 2 subcategories: the respect for oneself and the desire for respect from others.

Your employees want to contribute to the organization in a meaningful way and to be appreciated for their contribution. What do they consider signs of appreciation? Well, titles, status, position advancement, bonuses (also in form of money). And the more recognition is shown the higher gets the employee’s confidence. The higher the confidence, the better the performance and competence.

This is called the confidence-competence loop because one triggers the other: if the employee is confident he gets more competent because he works more accurately and with more dedication. And the other way around a competent employee will want to stay competitive or get more competent and become better and he will learn more or will engage in different types of tasks, which will increase his confidence in himself. Use this confidence-competence loop principle and support your employees to follow the career development they desire.

5. Self-actualization needs

Grow is the highest need in the pyramid and it refers to someone reaching his highest potential. It does not mean only learning and career growth. Self-actualization means accomplishing everything it can be accomplished in a specific domain.

Each individual may perceive this need very specifically since the growth needs are different. One man may have the desire to become the ideal father while the other the best athlete or the employee of the year. The growth may be expressed economically, academically, or athletically. Self-actualization differs from the other needs also from the point of view of motivation: while for the other four needs the motivation decreases as needs are met, for growth the motivation increases as needs are met.

These are the needs that, in my opinion, many companies fail to meet for their employees. The employees’ career development ends after the onboarding training. If the employee gets a few more trainings on the road related to his area he is lucky. Many companies provide just the minimum possible training and education that the employees need to be able to do the assigned tasks. It is considered normal that after a number of years the employees leave one after another. They just wanted something else! The question is do you really know what was that something else that he was looking for?

Let’s change perspective and view this process of employees’ career stagnation from their point of view. Doing day by day some years in a raw the same job or the same type of tasks, without having any growth possibilities in the area or the learning possibilities to be able to change the tasks, he desperately looks for a change in another place. When the human feels limited and hold in place, he follows decisions that bring a change in his life only for the sake of the change. So any other company seems more suitable for him at that moment as the one where he does the same tasks for many years in a row. This new company is better only because satisfy his need to change something. Maybe a change could have been done in his former company … !

Humans need changes in their life, even more nowadays when all the social media posts and videos urge you to: "become the best of you!", "make the change in your life!", "be bold, burn your past and your bridges and do something new!", "develop your leadership skills!" and "become a leader no matter what!". There are so many invitations to leadership that even the cleaning lady would want to become a leader if she would see all those posts and videos. I only ask myself who would do the cleaning then?  

Your employees are bombarded with such messages and invitations to CHANGE. And there are only a few places where they can do make major changes in life. We cannot exchange our parents, nor our kids, and those we would not exchange even if it would be possible. We can exchange the life partner but usually, this is a hard and financial pain (after the marriage). So, the big changes that people afford take place in their careers.

This cannot be generalized either. There are characters that need the stability, or that have great expertise in their domain and wouldn't like to lose it but would be happy to enlarge it. And on the other side, there are characters that have the need to make changes in their careers. Either they discovered a new skill and want to use it, or the actual career position doesn't satisfy them, it was decided by somebody else (like parents forcing their kids to follow a specific career).

If companies would put in place a flexible and low-cost training method for all the activities that are performed there, those trainings would return the invested money twice because they will serve as onboarding trainings for the new employees and growth possibilities for the employees that want to change the current position.

Allow people to learn in a flexible and effective way a new skill or a new domain in your company. In the end, we all know that an expert sick and tired of his job does not perform better work than a novice that works full motivated and with pleasure in is his dream job. Those video trainings could be used also to speed up the learning phase of an employee that has to replace his colleague who is already sick at home. And finally, those video trainings will remain in the company's archive with the purpose of knowledge preservation.