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How Team Support Drives Career Growth, Retention, and Engagement
A person’s career growth is often viewed as an individual journey. You dream, you set goals, you advocate for yourself, and you do your best to reach your aspirations. But almost none of this happens entirely alone. The people who help shape a person’s career trajectory are frequently the people sitting closest to them. It could be a manager who makes time, a teammate willing to make an introduction, and a colleague who says, “you should go for it.”
Whether someone gets that kind of support at work turns out to be one of the biggest factors in whether they stay and if they’re engaged while they’re there. New research from Wiley Workplace Intelligence surveyed 1,459 employees and found where career growth tends to break down or take off. We asked about how clear their career paths feel, who’s investing in their growth, and what’s getting in the way.
The findings are a mix of real challenges and opportunities for retention and engagement. Here’s what the data uncovered.
Managers Want to Help but They Need More Time
Almost half of employees, 46%, say their career path stayed the same or went backward this past year. This kind of stall rarely comes down to the person’s ambition alone. More often it comes down to whether someone, usually the manager, has the bandwidth to notice and invest.
87% of managers feel responsible for developing their team, yet only 24% have enough time.
This gap tells a story. Managers aren’t lacking motivation, most genuinely want to help their team grow. What’s missing is capacity, and that time is worth prioritizing and protecting. Manager time turns out to be the single strongest predictor of whether someone stays and how engaged they feel.
84% of employees are more likely to stay when their manager prioritizes development.
In contrast, only 41% of employees say they’re likely to stay with a manager who never makes time for development. Engagement follows the same pattern. 76% say they’re excited about their team’s culture when their manager makes time for them, compared to 23% when their manager never does. When managers don’t have that capacity, employees don’t wait patiently. They start forming their own theory about how advancement works.
Openness Builds Trust
According to our research, 54% of employees believe that advancement depends mostly on relationships, advocacy, or luck. Only 24% say career paths are clearly defined. Together, these findings paint a concerning picture. When people can’t see how decisions are made, they have no way to judge whether they’re being treated fairly. So, they guess, and it’s rarely generous. Once people stop assuming good intent, that assumption is hard to undo, and it doesn’t stay a mindset. It’s often the moment someone starts looking elsewhere.
Openness changes this dynamic. Teams that are upfront about how decisions get made tend to earn more benefit of the doubt from their people, even when the news isn’t what someone hoped for.
Mentors Help Define a Path Forward
Mentorship supports career growth too, though it’s something people hesitate to act on. Most employees without a mentor aren’t missing one because they tried and failed to find someone. They’re missing one because they never asked.
43% of employees without a mentor say they never looked into it.
That’s more than double those who cite lack of time (18%) and lack of quality mentors (15%). The biggest barrier to mentorship isn’t access. It’s initiative, which is good news, because the fix isn’t a new program. It’s culture. Asking for help feels less risky when someone already trusts their growth matters to the people around them, and on teams where trust exists, that first ask gets easier.
Mentorship is one of the top things employees say would help their engagement, and it’s one of the clearest predictors of retention. Mentorship spreads the way most team habits do, by watching someone else do it first.
Clear Career Paths Pay Off
Career path clarity is one of the strongest, most independent predictors of whether someone stays.
78% of employees with a clear career path are very likely to stay vs. 47% of those with no clarity.
That gap holds up even alongside manager time, which we know drives retention and engagement. Clarity isn’t one big problem to solve. It comes from small moments repeated often. A manager walking through what growth could look like or a mentor sharing how they navigated a similar move themselves.
Employees have told us what would help most. Skills development and training top the list at 67%, followed by mentorship (54%), transparency (46%), and more frequent manager conversations (44%). None of this requires a big budget, just regular room for these conversations instead of saving them for an annual review.
What Teams Can Do
Talk about how decisions get made. Don’t just make the call. Explain it. That’s what turns “trust me” into actual trust.
Ask what someone wants next. A five-minute conversation does more for clarity than any career framework.
Make asking for help normal. Model it, so the first ask isn’t the hardest one.
Treat these as habits, not one-time efforts. Trust is built in small, repeated moments.
Growth doesn’t need a bigger system, it needs people showing up for each other consistently. Do that, and people stay, and stay engaged.
Wiley’s suite of professional solutions gives organizations a shared language and structure to reach the next level, from building better teams with The Five Behaviors®, to creating engaged, adaptive cultures with Everything DiSC® on Catalyst™, making confident hiring decisions with PXT Select®, and unlocking leadership potential with 360 feedback from The Leadership Challenge®.
Wiley Workplace Intelligence conducts in-depth research on key workplace issues by gathering insights from individual contributors, managers, and leaders to deliver actionable solutions through our blogs.
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