Kim Scott

If you wrote, “Your team gets frustrated when you cancel your staff meeting at the last minute,” they might interpret this to mean, “My team hates me, and I’ll probably be fired tomorrow.” For people prone to such reactions, you need to deliver the review orally, to check and recheck for understanding, before giving it to them in writing.

To understand a person’s growth trajectory, it’s important to have career conversations in which you get to know each of your direct reports better, learn what their aspirations are, and plan how to help them achieve those dreams. You should have these conversations with each person who reports directly to you, regardless of where they are in the team framework described in Chapter Three.

Conversation one: life story
The first conversation is designed to learn what motivates each person who reports directly to you. Russ suggested a simple opening to these conversations. “Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life.” Then, he advised each manager to focus on changes that people had made and to understand why they’d made those choices. Values often get revealed in moments of change. “You dropped out of graduate school after two years to work on Wall Street—please tell me more about that decision.” Answers like, “I couldn’t even afford orange juice on my grad school stipend, and I just wanted to make more money,” or “I was bored with all that theory and no practical, tangible application of the ideas I was working on,” enable you to begin to put together parts of the human puzzle. In the first case, you might write down “financial independence” as a key motivator; in the second, “see tangible results of work.” If somebody says they quit running and started playing soccer because they liked being on a team, you might write down “being part of a team” as a motivator. If on the other hand somebody quit cheerleading to focus on swimming because they “were sick of the chitchat and preferred to focus on beating a personal best,” you might write down “personal growth” as a motivator.