If you lead people or lead HR, you may have felt a small worry when someone on your team starts talking about where their career could go. Will a big dream carry them out the door? I understand that worry. As an executive, I remember attrition numbers landing on my desk and wondering which conversation we never had.
Those numbers taught me something about the world our people work in now. The 40-year career at one company is over, and your best early- and mid-career people already know it. They want a career they lead themselves. You could read that as a retention risk, and I used to. These days I see it the other way around.
My reason comes from what they tell me. When I ask them what is proving hard about their growth, their answers are about direction far more than about leaving. They want a plan, and they want support from their company to grow where they are. A dream gives that plan somewhere to point.
How far ahead can anyone plan, though? Scientists have a name for how possibility unfolds. They call it the adjacent possible, the set of next moves that open up only because of the move you made before. Your people can probably see one or two roles ahead of where they stand. The role after those does not fully exist yet, and it will grow out of the choices they make in the next two. A dream works the same way, giving a person a direction to grow in while the details fill in as they go.
“That conversation, had early, is where retention lives.”
For an organization, that is good news. Many of those next moves sit inside your walls, in a stretch assignment, a new team, or a role nobody has written yet, and each one can be part of a career of possibilities. When people can see how today's work fits the career they are building, they have a reason to lean in.
What keeps them leaning in is hope, and it plays a bigger part than I once thought. In a Gallup study published in 2025, people in 52 countries described the most positive leader in their life, and hope made up 56% of the qualities they named, well ahead of trust at 33%.[1] Gallup describes hope as a clear picture of the future and your place in it. A manager can offer that picture, one career conversation at a time.
Conversations like that go better with a little structure. In my book, The Career Bridge, coming 2027, I share a tool called Two Roles Ahead for this. It helps a person and their leader talk about growth a couple of moves out, starting from strength in the role they have now.
That conversation, had early, is where retention lives. If you are wondering how to start it across your organization, I would be glad to talk it through. Book a 30-min consult any time.
Sources
Jon Clifton and Benedict Vigers, "What Do People Need Most From Leaders?", Gallup, February 2025.