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  • December 13, 2022
  • Article
  • Harvard Business Review Digital Articles

6 Ways Companies Fail to Help Workers Grow

By: Joseph Fuller, Matthew Sigelman and Nik Dawson
  • Format:Electronic
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Abstract

The authors recently studied Fortune 250 companies and ranked them based on the lived experience of three million of their U.S. workers. One of their key findings was that even top-ranked firms fail to deliver consistently on worker advancement. To understand why this is happening, the authors then grouped underperforming companies based on measures of opportunity creation and were able to identify six archetypes of underperformance. In this article, they describe each of those six archetypes in detail and then recommend three main areas that underperforming companies should focus on to improve the upward mobility of their workers: consistently measuring outcomes, investing more in training, and letting go of archaic business models.

Keywords

Personal Development and Career; Training; Business Model; Outcome or Result; Performance Evaluation; Opportunities

Citation

Fuller, Joseph, Matthew Sigelman, and Nik Dawson. "6 Ways Companies Fail to Help Workers Grow." Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (December 13, 2022).
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About The Author

Joseph B. Fuller

Entrepreneurial Management
→More Publications

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    Governors Reshaping Workforce Development: Turning WIOA Challenges into Workforce Solutions

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    Navigating Opportunity: Career Information and Mobility in Low-Wage Employment

    By: Joseph B. Fuller, Kerry McKittrick, Amanda Holloway, Rony Rodriguez Ramirez and Ali Epstein
    • March 10, 2025
    • Harvard Business Review (website)

    How Gen AI Could Change the Value of Expertise

    By: Joseph Fuller, Matt Sigelman and Michael Fenlon
More from the Authors
  • Governors Reshaping Workforce Development: Turning WIOA Challenges into Workforce Solutions By: Joseph B. Fuller, Kerry McKittrick, Nathalie Gazzaneo, Ariel Higuchi, Justine Gluck, Zoe Butler, Jack Porter and Malena Dailey
  • Navigating Opportunity: Career Information and Mobility in Low-Wage Employment By: Joseph B. Fuller, Kerry McKittrick, Amanda Holloway, Rony Rodriguez Ramirez and Ali Epstein
  • How Gen AI Could Change the Value of Expertise By: Joseph Fuller, Matt Sigelman and Michael Fenlon
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