Episode 14 - Career Intelligence®

In today’s workplace, a positive manager-employee relationship is essential. A poor relationship with one’s manager is the number one reason employees leave their jobs. This highlights the importance of effective communication and support.

In todays conversation on People Matters at Realising Potential Ltd, Fiona Brookwell and Michael Jones are joined by an inspiring guest, Anita Rolls, a trusted Business Partner at RPX2 and a passionate user of The Predictive Index.

Anita is also the founder of the Career Intelligence Academy, where she works with organisations to build frameworks for proactive career management—frameworks driven by individuals, supported by managers, and reinforced by company-wide support.

Tune in as Anita shares the story behind Career Intelligence®, a model she developed to help individuals take ownership of their careers with intention and strategy. She explains how employees can take on four key roles - COO, CFO, CMO, and CIO - much like leaders in a business, to manage their own career paths. By balancing these roles, employees can align personal growth with organisational goals, ensuring sustainable success.

Fiona and Michael dig into the challenges of modern career navigation and explore how Career Intelligence bridges the gap between employee ambitions and organisational needs. 

You’ll hear about the common pitfalls both managers and employees face in career conversations, and how Anita’s approach equips both sides with practical tools to create meaningful and mutually beneficial dialogues.

Anita addresses questions around untapped potential, empowering HR, reframing 'career', and the effects on employee turnover. How does The Predictive Index enriches the Career Intelligence® offer? And so much more...

We were so impressed by the Career Intelligence® approach that we have dedicated an entire webpage to it. 

So, whether you’re an HR leader, a manager, or someone interested in taking charge of your own career, this episode is packed with insights on fostering collaboration, enhancing employee engagement, and nurturing long-term career success. 

If you'd like to find out more about how we can help your people, teams and businesses realise their potential, please visit our website.

Transcript

Neale James: In this episode of our conversations on people matters at Realising Potential, Fiona and Michael are joined by Anita Rolls. Anita is a trusted business partner at RPX2 and a seasoned practitioner of The Predictive Index.  

As the founder of the Career Intelligence Academy, she helps organisations implement a career management framework that's led by individuals, supported by managers, and organisationally enabled. 

Michael Jones: Hello, Anita. Thank you joining us.  

You're quite new to us, aren't you? Would you like to tell us about how you came to us and how you found us and how it works for you?  

Anita Rolls: Thanks, Michael. Yes, exactly. So, I, uh, I am very new and I came to you because I was pitching Career Intelligence to an organisation who I won't name, but who already use PI very happily. 

And they loved Career Intelligence, but what they were concerned about was they already use PI, and they didn't want to introduce a contradictory framework that maybe was, would confuse people, you know, they, they're just trying to embed PI. So, I've not heard of PI before then, and I was very intrigued. 

And so, I decided to take your PI training to see for myself how the two could sit together. And, um, I attended the five-day training that I think people do at the beginning, and I was blown away actually at how complimentary they are. Because they're very distinct, but PI really helps people in organisations to understand their behaviours, and then Career Intelligence helps them to take that understanding and lead them into practical action around their career and what they do with that.  

Michael Jones: Which leads very naturally into the next question is ‘what the heck is Career Intelligence?’ 

Anita Rolls: So, Career Intelligence is a framework that I created to help people be more strategic about their own career management. 

And that's really needed in today's world of work because it used to be quite easy, career management, as long as you had a high IQ and good emotional intelligence and did all the right things, you pretty much tot along.  

But nowadays, you know, you see many bright people, ambitious with a high IQ, good emotional intelligence, and yet they're still struggling when it comes to navigating their own career path within their organisation, and managers are also struggling to have meaningful conversations with each member of their team in a way which is motivating for that individual and good for the business. 

Michael Jones: Obviously, Career Intelligence is a product that you've developed. Could you tell us a little bit about why you developed it in the first instance?  

Anita Rolls: That's a great question. Thanks, Michael. So, like many entrepreneurs, I created the product that I wished I'd had at the start of my career.  

So, I have a 30-year career now. Gosh, that makes me sound old, but my own career spans law, banking, marketing, learning, and development. And in all of those roles, as an individual contributor, as a manager, as an L & D professional before I then became an executive coach and set up my own business in all of those roles, I realised that there were challenges, which I couldn't find a solution to meet. 

And Career Intelligence, um, helps address these challenges in a systemic way, which helps individuals, helps managers and helps HR learning development. So that's kind of why I created it. I realised it was a systemic challenge, and I wanted to create a systemic solution.  

Anita Rolls: Can you tell us about the solution, the shape of the solution? 

Michael Jones: I know it's difficult because you're very visual and you're going to have to just do it with words, but could you help us to understand what Career Intelligence looks like?  

Anita Rolls: So I'll, I'll start with a model for individuals. So, for individuals, if you think about an individual, organisations are telling them, you've got to drive your own growth. 

And they're like, okay, but where do I even start? So, the model at its most basic starts at helping an individual to break down that slightly nebulous task of owning their career into manageable chunks, they can do something about.  

So how does it do that? Well, very simply by helping individuals to apply business thinking to their career as an employee.  

So, what do I mean by that? How does that work? Well, if you think about it, if you run a business in order for that business to stay successful, you have to work in the business and on the business.  

So, if you're managing your career as an employee, it's the same thing. You have to work in your career and on your career. So, in your career is, if you're an employee, is doing your job, delivering value to the organisation every day, but doing that in a way which is sustainable and enjoyable for you.  

Working on your career, if you're an employee, is everything else that you also need to be doing at the same time as that in order to ensure that you grow your career in a way that's good for you and good for the organisation over the long term. 

So, all of that very quickly boils down into wearing four hats. And each of those hats has a distinct role, but the four hats together, if an individual is able to wear all the hats, it ensures they're not yo-yoing. Um, it ensures that they're managing their career in an intentional, strategic way, which is good for them and good for the organisation. 

Michael Jones: And what are those hats?  

Anita Rolls: So, those hats are, as it relates to running a business, the COO hat. The operations hat is all about delivering value in the current role in a way that is sustainable and enjoyable for you.  

The CFO, the chief finance officer hat for your career, just like the CFO of a business is responsible for targets and KPIs for your career. The CFO hat is responsible for your own personal career and life priorities overall.  

So, do you have desired outcomes for your own career and your own personal measures of success? Are they being met? So, the reason that hat is important is because somebody could be knocking it out the park with a COO hat, delivering great value for the organisation, but if they're not meeting their own career and life priorities overall, then they may at best start to feel a little bit not motivated or not fulfilled, but at worst they could end up having burnout or leaving the organisation. So, it's very important that they're able to do that and only they can do it.  

This is the difficulty because nobody else can help an individual to do that. They have to, well, they can help, but they can't do it for them.  

Then the CMO hat is the chief marketing officer hat for your career. So again, just as a business, you could have the best business in the world, but nobody knows it's there. It's not going to be in business for very long. And it's the same for your career.

 If you're employed, many employees really get frustrated because they're doing a good job with their performance, but they don't feel they're getting the recognition they deserve. And quite often they have negative thoughts about what that means. They think of it as showing off, but really it's about showing up in an authentic way and helping people to wear that hat in a way which helps them to collaborate with others in the organisation. 

And the final hat is the CIO hat. So that's the chief innovation officer hat, not the chief investment officer hat. And again, just like a business is, needs to keep scanning the environment for changes, um, so that it can adapt and stay relevant. Individuals in their career need to be able to wear this hat for two reasons. 

First, so that they can keep developing their potential and grow. But second, involuntary changes that happen around them in their life or in the world, they need to be able to notice these and adapt accordingly.  

Fiona Brookwell: So, Anita, can I just share with you an interesting conversation I had with a client yesterday. 

They were asking about the Employee Experience Survey, which is part of the Predictive Index offering. And, uh, this is more than a pulse check, and it's, it's more than an attitude survey. It's actually looking at what we call the four forces of disengagement. So, somebody's level of engagement with their job, with their boss, with the team that they're part of, and with the organisational culture as a whole.  

And as I was presenting it to the client yesterday, the couple of areas that we actually focused in on was around sort of the job and the manager piece. And some of the questions that we ask is around, you know, how engaged are you with your job? Um, does your manager provide you with the right opportunities to be the best version of yourself? 

And, you know, is your manager invested in you for the future? So, listening to what you're saying, I'm thinking, you know, there's, there's career aspects going on here. So, if we were to do, an organisation was to do a survey and find that they're getting feedback that says, well, like, I love my job, but I don't know what my future is in this organisation. And I don't know that my manager's actually skilled to help me with this, or I'm skilled to help myself, where does your solution come in to help me with that?  

So, if I'm head of HR or HRD and I want something to help this process, what would it look like?  

Anita Rols: Lovely. Thank you, Fiona. So that's a great question. 

And what you're describing is actually very common, um, I find in organisations, and that's exactly the sort of situation that Career Intelligence is designed to address. And how we do that is our first training is Career Intelligence Conversations training, because we recognise that both individuals and managers have a role to play in this. 

What organisations need to do is to foster an ongoing partnership approach between employees and managers so that the conversations are adult-to-adult rather than, they tend to be a bit parent-child and that are focused on generating what I call mutually beneficial outcomes. Good for the individual and good for the organisation. 

Now that sounds really simple and at one level it is. But it just doesn't happen. And it doesn't happen for many reasons. Part of the reason it doesn't happen is the individual doesn't know what they want and is not able to articulate that. So, Career Intelligence addresses that.  

But the other problem is the manager doesn't know how to prepare for and structure a conversation and personalise it to each person's needs. 

So quite often I find, Fiona, managers are very well intentioned. They do actually want to help, but they might sit down, and they might say to the individual, okay, so ‘What do you want?’ And the person will go, uh, you know, it just doesn't go anywhere. Quite often the manager has been on a coaching course and has been taught to ask open, powerful questions, but that doesn't really work if the individual doesn't know. 

But the other thing is equally true. The manager might say, what do you want? And the individual absolutely knows what they want and it's their job or to get promoted. And that's not available. And that's equally challenging for managers. So, I think many managers are in the mindset of having to, somehow it's their responsibility, they have to fix this, and they've got to do it. 

But that doesn't work in today's world of work. So, either what I find is, managers either give up and they say over to you employee, and they can't fix it on their own, or they're trying to fix it themselves. And neither approach works.  

So, what the organisation needs is this partnership approach. Career Intelligence Conversations comes in, it's a 90-minute webinar for managers, 60-minute webinar for employees. 

You're training simultaneously both sides of the conversation with the same framework, the same language. Both parties get a scorecard to assess where they are vis-a-vis the model. Both parties get tools to help them prepare for and structure a meaningful conversation. They also get given HelloFresh style, all the tools and fillable PDFs immediately. 

So, at the end of that, managers and employees immediately have all they need to start having a four hats conversation immediately after the webinar. And then later on, if more training is needed, there's a deep dive on the four hats, there's more training for managers, and there's a really interesting HR proposition, which I hope we’ll get to talk about, which is about building HR capability to support all of that in a really innovative way. 

Fiona Brookwell: I was just going to ask that question, because if you know, a manager gets to the stage and says, ‘Oh, this is too difficult for me, right? Okay. HR over to you.’ Where does HR fit into the equation?  

Anita Rolls: So, a big part of Career Intelligence is about leveraging internal HR capability. This is a, this is so important to me because I used to work in L& D at Barclays and I, I am an executive coach. 

I'm a coach trainer. I'm a coach supervisor. So, I've trained a lot of coaches and a lot of them come from L& D departments. They go back and then they're all trained but they're not using it internally because they kind of lack the structure or they lack the confidence. And I think internal HR, or L& D or talent professionals are a huge untapped resource. 

And what happens is they want to be thoughtful strategic partners to the business, but they get weighed down in admin and bureaucracy and processes. And actually, where Career Intelligence has been really successful is partnering with the internal HR function so that that combination of external/internal can go in and really, you know, shift the needle internally. 

So, what would that look like? So many ways, so what we do is we train a group of HR. So ideally up to 20, but it can be a smaller number. And what we do is we put them through the Career Intelligence training for their own career. And that's because there's a well-known syndrome, cobbler's children's have no shoes. And that's very common, yeah, very common in HR and a lot of HR are just a bit weary at the moment. They're always giving out, developing everybody else.  

So, what this does is, we start with them, and we give them the full program. So, they go through with us in a very energising cohort way. They um, learn how to wear the hats. They do that driving test with us so that they get their, their own driver certificate for their career, and then we train them to support the business. 

So, they then become the ones that support managers that support individuals. And they can actually even now, as of this summer, administer the driving certificates internally. So, it's a really nice way of leveraging and using the HR capability within the organisation.  

Fiona Brookwell: Just another question for you. If as an employee, I actually say, okay, this is all lovely, but actually, I don't want a career, I just want a job. I just want a job. I just want to earn enough money to look after my own way of life or to look after my family. And I don't want any additional responsibility. I just want a job, and I want a job for many years to come. How does that fit into the equation? 

Anita Rolls: I love that question because I hate the word career. I really do. At the beginning, I tried not to use it, but then nobody knew what I was talking about. So, I have to use the word career. But I use it with a big health warning and the reason I don't like it is because number one, it's exclusive and it tends to exclude people who don't perceive themselves as having a career. 

So, when I talk about career, I just mean a person's working life. So, it's more broad than that. And what happened once I was in, um, in a company delivering a Career Intelligence training session to managers and the executive assistant was there helping set up. And I said to her, why don't you sit in? She said, ‘Oh no, no, no, this isn't for me. I don't have a career. I just have a job.’ 

And I said to her, ‘That's, that's what I'm trying to counteract here. You do have a career.’ And I explained to her what this was all about. She said, ‘Oh, that sounds really interesting.’ She sat in at the back and she did all the scorecard and everything. She came up to me at the end. She said, ‘I've never thought about my career in that way. That is so useful.’ So, this is for everyone.  

Michael Jones: Anita, do you come across any reluctance perhaps on the behalf of senior managers or HR, head of people that you might be talking to about Career Intelligence? A certain nervousness about allowing people access to the ability to manage their own career on the basis that they might leave? 

Anita Rolls: All the time. Often from the execs, that's the first thing they say. ‘Well, it's all well and good, Anita’, but you know, quite often the CEO says, ‘I'm the CEO of this company, I don't want everybody else being the CEO of their career.’ But no, quite often it does happen with the exec team, where they're like, ‘Well this is great, Anita, but if we give this to people, won't they all just leave?’ 

And, it's a very understandable question, and I have a very clear answer that is, you know what, in my experience, and this is from working with many employees and managers across many organisations and industries, most employees do not want to leave. In fact, most employees put up with a huge amount before they actually leave. 

What employees want is to work somewhere where they feel valued and recognised, where they can make a contribution, where they feel they get on with their manager, that they're helped to grow or develop and they have nice colleagues. That's what most people want in today's world of work. 

And, so people leave because for some reason they don't feel they can get that where they are, or because the relationship with their manager has broken down. All things that Career Intelligence is designed to address.  

So, what in fact happens when Career Intelligence is rolled out in organisations is people who might have left don't leave because they see opportunities that they hadn't noticed before. 

They also start to partner more effectively with their manager and a whole new energy comes into the place. Now, having said that, people of course will still leave and that's right because you need, there is a natural life cycle. But what happens is the people who do leave, leave well. And that ultimately is what an organisation should be aiming for. 

What isn't helpful is, um, when you don't have open, honest and direct conversations going on, because everyone's playing a charade. You know, the employee isn't honest about what they want, because they think they won't be perceived as committed. And then there's just not an honest conversation happening. 

If an employee is encouraged to be open about their long-term aspirations, and a manager can help them prepare for that now, the employee is much more likely to give more energy and effort, discretionary effort today, because they feel trusted, they feel listened to, they feel that that That relationship is there. 

So that's been my, my experience is actually the opposite of that.  

Fiona Brookwell: It's interesting what you say about, um, leaving well, because I do, I do recall a number of instances of people who have had successful careers within one organisation, had adult-to-adult conversations with their bosses, have left well, gone off and done something else, and then a few years later actually come back to the organisation in a, in a more senior position. 

So, Anita, thank you for sharing that with us. Um, something I would be interested to know is, uh, any success stories that you can share with us. So, you can, there's a lot of theory of the, um, the outline of the program, uh, but, uh, actual success stories from any clients that you've been working with recently? 

Anita Rolls: So, I think the first example I'd like to share is actually around manager training, because I think for an organisation looking at where to invest their training budget, I think if they invest it in managers, they're going to get a greater return on investment, because when they're investing in the manager population, the managers get something for their own career as well as to use with their team. 

And a good example of this I can, I can share is a global financial services organisation. The global CFO came to us. She actually wanted to do something for all of her managers globally. And, so we had two time zones. We had like a North America time zone and an Asia Pac time zone, and they were in cohorts of 20. 

And what we did for them was we put them through the, you know, the employee, the individual training first for their own career. And then at the end, we showed them how to then apply those concepts to their team.  

And what worked really well was these middle managers had never received anything for their own career. They were always being told to support their team or deliver results. And the impact was really quite tangible. Even in the first session, people were quite moved by the fact that they were given this opportunity.  

So, several benefits. First of all, by the end of that, these managers had really thought about their own career in a new way, which gave them a new sense of energy. They'd also started to bond as a cohort. 

 So, they were all working from different countries, but some of the conversations are quite deep that people go into because they're talking about their career and life priorities. So, the quality that the bonding within that team kind of really grew. And then at the end of it, they had a nice toolkit that they could take away and use with their direct reports. 

Um, and they all said at the end how much more confident they felt about that and almost how excited and looking forward they were to having those conversations as opposed to kind of dreading them. And then I checked back in with the, the global CFO at the end to see what, what the impact was for her. 

And she said what she was delighted about was before the training, she wanted them to all have development plans, but it wasn't happening. It was either lip service or tick box. And she said afterwards, what she noticed was a real measurable difference in the quality of conversations and the ideas for development that were coming through, she could just feel a measurable difference. 

It wasn't just the, the, you know, the action plans coming in, in the format, which, which was great, she just felt people were actually having meaningful development conversations and not just ticking boxes.  

Fiona Brookwell: So, there was no more sort of dreaded appraisal and, and dreaded career conversation pieces that needed to happen at the end of the appraisal process.  

Michael Jones: Anita, I've got one perhaps final question. You've obviously developed a wonderful program. Um, it excites me and I'm not on it, but, um, it's not dependent upon, of course, The Predictive Index, but what value does The Predictive Index bring to your program?

Anita Rolls: The Predictive Index reports add an extra layer of power to Career Intelligence and vice versa. So, I'll give you one, one example would be, you have a report, Predictive Index has a report about how you like to be managed. And that, that feeds really nicely into all of the data that's coming through for employees and managers on the Career Intelligence inquiry. 

You know, so I just find that all of the reports map quite nicely, if not to specific hats, but to specific areas that people are preparing.  

So, in a way, PI a psychometric, Career Intelligence is a self-awareness, it's a coaching type framework. So, they work really nicely together because I think together they reach, they reach the parts that the other framework doesn't fully reach on their own, so they're very complementary. 

Neale James: Realising Potential with Fiona Brookwell and Michael Jones. For more information about our services and organisation, visit www.rpx2.com.