Author | Keynote Speaker | Career Development Consultant | Leadership Developer | Facilitator | Researcher | Trainer | Columnist
For decades, career development gravitated toward one trajectory. Up. The conversation (when it happened) typically ended in the same place: the next title, the next rung. And every manager leading the conversation knew the arithmetic. There are far more people who want to grow than there are positions to grow into. Julie Winkle Giulioni spent her early career inside companies that lived by those conversations before she found a way to help managers address what the math had implied all along.
Not an Outsider Throwing Rocks
Julie Winkle Giulioni is an author, keynote speaker, and researcher based in South Pasadena, California, and for most of her working life she was one of the people designing what managers were trained to say. Her book with Bev Kaye, Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go, is in its second edition and has been translated into seven languages. Her follow-up, Promotions Are SO Yesterday, takes aim at the model she helped standardize.
From a Woodbury Classroom to the Room Where the Programs Got Made
She started in front of students. In 1983, she became a professor and department chair at Woodbury University. Three years of that teaches you something specific. Telling people something and getting them to do anything differently on Monday are unrelated skills.
Retail came next, as training manager at Carter Hawley Hale. Then Alexander and Alexander, now part of Aon, where she took over a training department that had gone dormant and restarted it. A $500,000 budget. Every program across a five state Pacific Region. Sales, supervision, interpersonal skills, technical skills, all of it hers.
At Zenger Miller through the first half of the nineties, she moved from running programs to consulting with clients to design interventions, sitting with senior executives on leadership, quality initiatives, self-directed work teams, and culture change. She was learning that good training isn’t enough to ensure success. dies.
Then AchieveGlobal, where she moved into product development from 1995 to 2000, ending her tenure as director and leading international teams of designers, writers, marketers, and video producers. Her personal proving ground and final product was called The Service Difference, the first commercial training product built and brought to market by three previously independent and competitive companies that merged into one.
“It was one of the most challenging projects of my career, bringing together people who had been selling different products and advocating strongly for different points of view, and aligning them behind a new, untested solution.”
Her team validated what the legacy products got right, kept the best of it, piloted, then beta tested to confirm the design actually delivered results.. The Service Difference went on to be used by tens of thousands of organizations, reaching hundreds of thousands of employees.
The Question She Now Asks Every Organization That Calls
In July 2000 she launched DesignArounds and began keynoting, and over twenty-six years the firm has built custom learning for organizations worldwide, collecting recognition from Human Resource Executive Magazine’s Top Ten Training Products, Brandon Hall, the Global HR Excellence Council, and the New York Film Festival. But the argument she is known for arrived in the books.
Julie Winkle Giulioni’s position is deceptively simple and quietly expensive for anyone who has built their talent strategy around openings.
Organizations should stop asking people what they want to be and start asking what they want to do.
The distinction is not semantic. One question depends on a vacancy existing. The other does not. Her research into multidimensional career development, published in Promotions Are SO Yesterday, identifies seven ways people say they want to grow that have nothing to do with a title, all of which employees in aggregate rank above climbing. The book won both the Nautilus and Axiom Book Awards.
Most of Julie’s client engagements start the same way, with a company that is doing everything the industry told it to do and getting nothing back.
They have a career development process, often an annual IDP, but employees aren’t necessarily experiencing meaningful development.
She does not respond by fixing the form. She moves the whole thing off paper and into the workflow into the one on ones, the project debriefs, the goal setting, the assignments that were happening anyway.
The key is not adding another process, but embedding development into existing ones.
That is the part organizations find hardest to accept, because it offers nothing to launch and nothing to announce. The payoff is a different kind of measurable.
Talent becomes a competitive advantage when development stops being an HR event and becomes part of how work gets done.
Inc. Magazine named her one of its Top 100 Leadership Speakers. She writes a regular column for Training Industry Magazine and SmartBrief, and her work has appeared in Fast Company and The Economist. Forty years after that Woodbury classroom, the audience has changed and the problem has not.
What the Ladder Never Counted
The arithmetic that opened this story was always going to end badly. Finite rungs, infinite ambition, and a generation of managers trained to keep promising the one thing they could not reliably deliver. What Julie Winkle Giulioni did was refuse the premise rather than the people. She built the programs, watched them work in thousands of organizations, and noticed that the growth employees actually described almost never fit the container the industry had handed them.
There were never enough rungs, and there never had to be.
Julie Winkle Giulioni is an author, keynote speaker, and career development consultant based in South Pasadena, California. She works with organizations and leaders who want development to be something employees experience continuously rather than complete annually. Her newest book, Checked Out: Why Engagement Efforts Fail and 4 Everyday Leadership Practices That Success, will be published in 2027 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. To connect with Julie or learn more, visit https://juliewinklegiulioni.com or find her on LinkedIn.
