Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, where we help

leaders activate performance and engagement without burning out. Whether it's a boot camp, a keynote,

or a pulse check, we help teams achieve meaningful change. If that's what your organization needs,

send me a note, Rachel at Lead Above Noise.com. So a lot of the work I do with

clients begins with an employee engagement survey. Well, technically, it begins when the client gets

their survey results and then calls me instead of banging their head against the wall,

though I suspect sometimes they do some head-banging before they call me, but

either way. For some companies, actually for many of them, that survey is an important data point,

but also it's a big source of frustration. Because what is so common is that certain questions

generate a negative response year over year, things that feel outside of a

manager's ability to control. And this creates a cycle of a lot of frustration, like take career

development and progression, consistently an area in which employees are unhappy at so many

companies year over year. From my vantage point, here's what it looks like.

Employees feel stuck, like they're working their bleeps off, they're ready for the promotion

they think they deserve, and it's not coming. Managers feel that disappointment directed at them,

but they're like, what am I supposed to do? I can't promote everyone on my team.

And frankly, I can't promote anyone into a role that doesn't exist. And organizations or

senior leadership, they're feeling tired of what they perceive as a sense of entitlement.

I hear things like, who is managing these expectations that leave people thinking that hard work will get you promoted every two to three years? Where do they all think they're going? It's a tough cycle. And whether or not we can solve it completely, who knows? But without a doubt, we can improve things significantly. For me, it begins with how we conceptualize career growth and development, how we frame it,

how we talk about it.

If we shift and expand our minds, it becomes a more solvable problem, unless you prefer the

headbeating approach, if it's working.

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