How to hold effective Career Conversations - Their check-in with you 🌱 (part 4 of 4)
This is where their action plan comes alive or gathers dust.
💡 This post is part of a series about holding Career Conversations with your team based on the book “Radical Candor”. Evolved and adjusted for practical (re)use.
Part 4: Their check-in with you 🌱 (this post)
🔗 Supporting material:
The results of your three conversations
If you’re anything like me, you will greatly enjoy going through this process with your direct reports and you will feel drained. You aren’t doing this to kill time, but to have a meaningful, intense start in actively supporting your direct reports to achieve their career aspirations. Let’s look at the fruits of your labor!
First Conversation - Their life story 📙
You gained a deeper understanding of their past, life choices and what truly matters to them.
The trust between you increased from all the sharing, open listening and documenting.
You helped them document their life story! I sometimes joke that this is an early draft of their autobiography. 😉
Second Conversation - Their dreams 💖
You reached a deeper understanding of their future aspirations, keeping in mind everything you learned about them from the first conversation.
You created a list of dreams including the required skills to live them successfully.
You documented skill gaps for each dream in a simple-to-use and easy-to-understand format.
Third Conversation - Their action plan 🎯
You found out how they learn best.
You brainstormed a list of people and resources to supercharge their learning.
You created a manageable list of small, concrete actions to empower them to continue their growth journey.
To summarize, you equipped them with a robust tool to think systematically about their professional life and brought clarity on what they can do to achieve their dreams. ✨
Why check-ins are critical
❌ “Now it’s up to them! It’s their career after all, not mine!”
Sure, it is their career. Yes, almost all of the items from their career action plan have their name attached to them. No, you’re not getting a free pass to be an absent manager and remove yourself from their growth journey.
While you’ve theoretically given them the tools to start managing their own career through this process, you can’t expect that everything will go brilliantly the first time. It’s unlikely that your direct reports will immediately understand the finer differences between your company’s annual or quarterly goal setting and their action plan. So, please, do your job as the expert for this approach.
Here are three specific reasons why check-ins are critical:
Combat the “set and forget” antipattern: Many of us have experienced this with our annual goals or quarterly OKRs (objectives and key results). You set ambitious goals everybody agrees on, but check in way too infrequently or not at all. People go into panic mode during the last few weeks of the quarter because they “forgot about their key priorities”. Let’s avoid that, shall we?
Prevent drift: Drift is what happens to your direct reports when they don’t get timely feedback and don’t quite know how to reach their goals. It’s literally your job to keep guiding your directs on an ongoing basis. Don’t expect that you can just squeeze these deeper conversations in your regular 1:1s or that they will always let you know when they’re stuck. Don’t underestimate how overwhelming a sizeable action plan with slow progress can feel to your direct reports. Be on the front foot and set up that check-in ASAP.
Highlight the approach’s flexibility: The truth is, that anything can change. They might set their eyes on a different dream, which means you need to get back to their skill gaps and likely redo the action plan (more on that later). Checking in regularly gives you a chance to show that the process can actually handle these significant changes. It brings a flexible and stable foundation to our messy lives.
By the way, so far I’ve never managed anybody who told me “yeah I’ve done that Career Convo thing with a manager before”, which should tell you that abandoning them after your conversations is a terrible idea. Of course, you want to encourage and empower them to use this framework on their own, especially if they should decide to leave your team or organization.
How to facilitate an effective check-in
Now that you know why check-ins are important, let’s talk about how to do them. Your involvement has to be flexible, as the required time, frequency and approach depend on the current context of your direct reports. Your two options are to either extend an existing 1:1 or create a standalone meeting. Due to the volatility of our work environments in recent years, I prefer extending 1:1s. There the goal is to get more context about their progress, how they feel and what support they need. Generally speaking, you want to return to the relevant elements of the full framework depending on the situation.
💡 If you don’t know much about 1:1s (one on ones, or, one to ones) I strongly recommend the free Manager Tools podcast on this topic.
Using the framework “a la carte”
The elements of this Career Conversations framework build on each other. The action plan is derived from the learning guidelines sheet, which is based on their dreams and the skill gaps. If they want to pursue a different dream and are not adjusting the connected elements, they will struggle. That’s why I have some recommendations for the following scenarios.
“My direct report ran out of actions!”
If you notice that a direct report runs out of action items, just brainstorm new ones in your extended 1:1 or any of your weekly 1:1s. This should only take a few minutes unless you also ran out of learning resources entirely. In any case, my guidance for the third conversation is absolutely relevant here. Honestly, this is super rare, but you should certainly shower the person with positive feedback in this situation. They are owning it!
“My direct report ran out of learning resources!”
This can be a challenge even as you’re filling out the learning guidelines sheet for the first time. A neat little trick is to create one or more action items to have them research the topic of interest, share a resource list with you and pick a resource to start learning. I recommend going back to my post on the third conversation for further guidance.
“My direct report set their eyes on a new or different dream!”
This doesn’t happen often as dreams don’t change every week or month. If they set their eyes on a new or different dream, that would require a larger time investment on your end. I would strongly recommend carving out a follow-up and simply going through parts of the second and third conversations again. In any case, you will have to brainstorm skills, check for skill gaps, re-evaluate the skill priority in your learning guidelines and so on.
“My direct report feels bad because they couldn’t make significant progress!”
This is actually the most common scenario I’ve encountered. It’s unfortunate, but many of us deprioritize our own professional development when times are busy, we are stretched thin and are focused on delivering results for our organization to protect our jobs through sheer performance.
If you find yourself in this situation, remind your direct reports that they don’t serve this tool, the tool serves them. You have to focus on listening to and supporting them so they can succeed without racking up overtime or doing the action items in their free time. Your role is to listen and emphasize with them while they vent and put on your coaching hat afterward to figure out what prevents them from progressing. Is “everything more important than this”? Recommend blocking just one hour per week to progress towards their dreams. If this already seems too much to ask, have them come up with all of their priorities and commitments and help them delegate (to the floor if needed) or reprioritize.
❗ There are probably more scenarios you might encounter or have already encountered. If you do, please leave a comment and share your experience! 🙂
Final considerations
Before I close, I wanted to point out a few final considerations regarding Career Conversations and how they might or might not connect to other “things” in your organization.
Career Conversations and Performance Management Systems
Your organization probably requires you to have annual or quarterly performance reviews (or appraisals), 360 feedback or 90-day plans. In any case, the Career Conversations framework serves as an extension and not as a replacement. Your direct reports may feel overwhelmed or confused by the different tools. It’s your job to explain the tools’ purpose and differences.
For example, maybe your 90-day plans contain objectives and milestones, while the career action plan is a list of tiny, achievable to-dos. You might share that the purpose of the 90-day plan is to connect your daily work to larger business objectives and the strategy, while the Career Conversations framework provides a long-term view of an individual’s career with a focus on their growth beyond their current role.
Career Conversations and OKRs (objectives and key results)
You could technically use OKRs as a way of setting goals and measuring progress (the purpose of OKRs) in someone’s career action plan. I’ve never done this, but feel free to experiment with this. Again, OKRs are not a replacement for the Career Conversations framework - they are different tools.
The one thing I’d caution against is setting OKRs on an individual basis in relation to the career action plan and connecting them to a performance review as this is one of many anti-patterns when using OKRs today.
Career Conversations and promotions
Finally, some might confuse this Career Conversations approach with a promotion process. Unless you actually connect the two, you have to be explicit about the difference between individual growth and an official promotion. Surely, taking charge of your professional development and systematically and steadily progressing toward your dreams increases your odds of receiving a promotion. This, however, does not mean that achieving a certain list of action items can trigger a promotion (e.g. from manager to director or from mid-level to senior). By the way, if you ever get the sense that your people prioritize their career action plan over their role’s key duties, you must resolve this misunderstanding immediately as it poses a risk to their employment.
🏁 So that’s about everything I had to say about Career Conversations - at least for now. If you found this series useful at all or have feedback for me, don’t hesitate to reach out! Thank you for reading! 😄
What’s next?
That’s all for Career Conversations from me! Check out the other posts of this series and the supporting material to get the full picture when it comes to Career Conversations:
Part 4: Their check-in with you 🌱 (this post)
🔗 Supporting material:
Where I learned this
Kim Scott’s popular book Radical Candor.
I recommend this to any leader, yet Career Conversations fill only a handful of pages in the book. I tried looking for more information online, but the only meaningful resource I could find was this article on the Radical Candor website. So, I set out to try it out myself, ran into some issues, refined my approach and am now ready to share it with you all.
Let me know your thoughts or how it went in the comments! 💬