Mistakes we sometimes make as bosses (not encouraging our workers growth)

This is the eight post I make on this series of posts I have been writing about mistakes bosses make. Among these mistakes I have mentioned mistaken ways to correct employees, not being able to delegate, having essential people in our team, not listening to our workers, not promoting a good work environment, not leading by example and being unable to decide. This time I will talk about a mistake I think is linked to egos and I will name it not encouraging our workers growth.

I want to talk about this subject from two points of view. First is everything related with education and training of people working for us. As bosses we must be the first ones to be interested in that our people are fully trained and capable of performing their work, including better practices and updates. Sometimes bosses –as I mentioned earlier- don’t care about this subject, or even worst are afraid that their workers know more about a subject than them. For me, it is nonsense because there are more benefits than risks – in case they exist-. An employee that is correctly trained and brings new knowledge to the company has a better performance and can propose improvements. If risks such as going to a better job in other company or that he tries to get our job exist, it can happen even if he is not better trained or educated.

The other point of view, less academic is when bosses try to block their professional growth because they don’t want their people to move to another department of the company. This is a very common situation, but a selfish one. Obviously when we loose a worker, we must adjust in order to comply with all the area’s responsibilities. This might be uncomfortable but is a risk we must know it is present even if our worker doesn’t have an opportunity inside the company; he might go to another one. My take on this subject is that it is better to have an employee that is happy with us because he knows he will be able to grow in the company that a unhappy worker who knows he wont be able to grow. We just have to understand that leaving his job is always a risk. What it is very important for us is not having essential people in our team – a subject I already mentioned in another post of this series-, so we don’t need to block our workers growth in order to maintain the productivity of our department.

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