Employer here. Small company, < 99 employees. Helping employees grow is important to anyone running a company. Business has ups and downs, dealing with them is

Employer here. Small company, < 99 employees. Helping employees grow is important to anyone running a company. Business has ups and downs, dealing with them is very hard unless you have a team you care about. The professional and personal development of the people around you becomes something that matters and keeps many of us up at night. The "around you" part is what to pay attention to. While we issue financial bonuses each year, we keep compensation in the top 80% of employers for the work being done, we send people to conferences, we help pay for college education, and offer copius amounts of time off - caring is more than material concessions and doesn't scale effectively. I don't personally know everyone who works for me, there are several layers of management and I'm separated from some employees by great distances. Teaching technical managers how to care is hard - they have KPIs and work hard to achieve them. Reminding managers the people who work for them are humans and morale matters is something I have to spend more time on than I care to. The part about reaching maximum potential - no, that's not your employer's job. Your boss can help you craft the vision for what that means and offer you some help along the way, but you are the only one who can say what it means. Seriously, you don't want an employer telling you what your maximum potential is. It will be defined in a way that solely benefits the employer. Unless it's the Army, quit any job where that's even suggested.