From check-ins to growth: Empowering people leaders to elevate careers

In our recent Roundtable, we explored this issue with Adrianna Davis, Director of Learning and Leadership Development, Global Talent Management at Charles River. With more than 20,000 employees across 130 facilities in 20 countries—and supporting over 80% of FDA-approved drugs—consistency in leadership experience is critical. For Charles River, that means ensuring every employee feels supported in growing their career.

GPS: Clarity Through Simplicity

Managers everywhere face increasing pressures around wellbeing, engagement, and performance. Career conversations shouldn’t feel like an extra burden—they should be a strategic driver of clarity and growth. Charles River’s approach centres on GPS: Grow, Perform, Succeed, a simple, scalable framework that makes career conversations part of everyday work:

• Grow: Build capability, strengthen professional identity, and expand experiences.
• Perform: Align work, set expectations, and clarify impact.
• Succeed: Recognize progress, celebrate achievements, and identify next steps.

By keeping conversations simple and continuous, GPS removes the pressure for managers to have all the answers. Development becomes integrated—not separate—from daily activity.

A Broader Leadership Journey

This reflects a broader shift in leadership development that many organisations are navigating. Just a few years ago, efforts were often fragmented and inconsistent. Today, leading organisations are moving toward clearly defined leadership behaviours and global programs that create a shared foundation of capability and language. In Charles River’s case, initiatives such as Leading the Frontline laid the groundwork for a unified approach, followed by a formal people leader strategy. Leadership development now spans the globe—embedding values and positioning leadership as a critical driver of the employee experience.

Embedding Leadership Behaviours

At the heart of this journey is CRL DNA, a set of leadership behaviours that guide how career conversations happen:

• Care: Prioritize wellbeing and psychological safety.
• Lead: Help employees articulate interests, explore skills, and plan next steps.
• Own: Reinforce shared responsibility—leaders provide clarity, employees own aspirations.
• Collaborate: Expand networks through cross-functional exposure and peer learning.

These behaviours provide practical guidance—not abstract ideals—supported by tools, templates, and resources to ensure consistency across teams and regions.

Scaling Career Conversations Globally

Career conversations influence wellbeing, belonging, trust, and purpose. To scale this globally, Charles River introduced People Leader Power Hours—monthly 60-minute sessions that build confidence, reinforce behaviours, and create a shared language. This rhythm helps leaders embed career and wellbeing conversations consistently across the organisation.

Our view

Charles River’s experiences demonstrate powerfully how positive career conversations are shaped by everyday conversations. Its focus on simple frameworks, shared language and repeatable leadership rhythms reflects the insights that we at The Career Innovation Company have seen through our own research and client work.

We also observe that while the world is changing quickly, some things don’t change that much. One of our research reports, The Conversation Gap: Using dialogue to build trust and inspire performance is over 20 years old. While organisational structures, technology and ways of working have changed significantly, the findings suggest that some fundamentals have not.

The research identified the missing topics from manager-employee conversations that should be discussed but often are not. These included future career opportunities, building a career plan and support network, clarity about expectations, day-to-day feedback, and conversations about pay, progression and reward. Employees who wanted to raise these issues but felt unable to do so were 3 x more likely to be planning to leave their organisation within the following year.

Then, as now, time pressure and competing priorities form a barrier to these conversations, alongside deeper issues such as limited trust, previous experience of unproductive conversations, lack of managerial confidence and insufficient support or resources. Removing these barriers requires more than tools or training. Career conversations must sit, as they do at Charles River, within a wider system. And when they are, managers are better supported to begin meaningful career conversations, rather than carry the responsibility alone.