Career Pathing Starts with Exemplary Leadership

A direct report asks their manager, “Where do you see me in two years?”

It’s a fair question. People want to know that their work is leading somewhere, that there’s room to grow, opportunities ahead, and a future they can picture for themselves.

Yet for many employees, that future is becoming harder to see. Nearly half say their career path stayed flat or slipped backward this past year. And when people can’t see a path forward, engagement and retention can suffer with it.

New research from Wiley Workplace Intelligence surveyed 1,459 employees and managers about career pathing, and the findings point to a clear connection between growth, engagement, and the everyday leadership practices that help people see what’s possible.

Career development isn’t just about preparing people for their next role. It’s about giving them a reason to stay engaged in the role they have today and confidence that there’s somewhere meaningful to go next.

Making Time is Crucial

Career pathing conversations tend to get filed under HR strategy, but the data says otherwise. We found that whether a manager has time to develop their people is the strongest predictor of both retention and engagement in the entire study.

The difference is striking. Employees whose manager always has time to invest in their growth are highly likely to stay, at a rate of 84%, compared to 41% of employees whose manager never has that time. Engagement follows the same pattern: 76% are excited about their organization’s culture when their manager makes time for them, versus 23% when they don’t.

84% report they are likely to stay when managers invest in their growth.

Manager time to develop people predicts retention and engagement better than anything else we measured.

It’s easy to read that as a time-management concern, but it’s really a leadership issue. Giving someone room to grow isn’t a perk layered on top of the job. It’s part of what makes the job worth staying for.

This is Enable Others to Act in its plainest form. When time for development disappears, so does one of the clearest signals that a leader is invested in someone’s future.

Leaders Can Model the Way

That raises a natural question: Where does the time investment come from?

The research offers an important clue. Managers with a clear career path of their own report increased investment in their team’s growth 54% of the time. Managers without one report it just 19% of the time.

Managers with their own clear path invest in their team’s growth 3x as often.

That reframes the usual fix. The instinct is often to train managers to become better developers of people. But the more direct move may be to give managers a visible path of their own first.

Think about the manager who is asked, “What could my next role be?” while they’re still trying to figure out their own answer to the same question. It’s difficult to create a sense of possibility for someone else when your own future feels unclear.

That’s Model the Way at the leadership level. Managers don’t need to have every step of their career figured out. But they do need enough clarity to talk authentically about growth, possibility, and what comes next.

Frequent Career Conversations Matter

Once managers have time and the clarity, what actually makes a difference isn’t a new system or a better framework. It’s frequency.

Employees who have regular growth conversations with their manager report something concrete (like action steps, goal setting, new skills) coming out of them 94% of the time. Among employees who rarely have those conversations, that number drops to 39%, meaning more ambiguity around paths to career growth.

94% report concrete career growth with frequent manager conversations.

The simplest intervention may also be the most overlooked: have the conversation more often.

That’s Enable Others to Act in practice. People become more capable and confident when leaders create the space for ongoing conversation, reflection, and trust. A manager doesn’t need a curriculum to talk with someone about where they want to go. They need to make the conversation part of how they lead.

Leaders Report More Stress

There’s a catch, though, and it may explain why that manager went quiet when asked about their own future.

Stress climbs steadily with seniority, from 5.0 out of 10 for individual contributors to 6.2 out of 10 for executives. The leaders expected to model growth and resilience for everyone below them are often carrying the most strain themselves.

That’s worth sitting with.

Every practice above asks something of managers: Find the time. Get clearer about your own path. Show up for more conversations. All of that becomes harder when you’re already stretched thinner than the people you’re leading.

If organizations want managers to make career development a leadership practice, they also have to recognize the conditions under which managers are being asked to practice it.

1. Give managers a path

• Make sure every manager has a documented, current view of their own next step, not just their team’s.

• Treat a manager’s career clarity as a retention lever for their whole team, not just for the manager.

• Revisit that path at the same cadence you ask managers to revisit their reports’ paths.

2. Protect the conversation

• Set a minimum cadence for growth conversations and hold to it, even when the week gets busy.

• Keep the bar low. These conversations don’t need a formal review structure to produce results.

• Watch for managers who are too stretched to sustain the cadence. That’s a capacity problem, not necessarily a willingness problem.

Career pathing is a leadership practice, built on a leader's own clarity, the time they make for their people, and how often they show up for the conversation. Model the Way and Enable Others to Act aren't separate from career development. They're the mechanism behind it. So, before a manager answers, "Where do you see me in two years?", the better question might be one they ask themselves first: Where do you see yourself?

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Wiley Workplace Intelligence conducts in-depth research on key workplace issues by gathering insights from individual contributors, managers, and leaders. Wiley Workplace Intelligence then analyzes these findings to provide actionable solutions that are shared in our blog.