How to hold effective Career Conversations - Their action plan 🎯 (part 3 of 4)
Collaborate on an action plan to build a bridge between the present and their dreams.
💡 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 3: Their action plan 🎯 (this post)
🔗 Supporting material:
The third conversation: Their career action plan
By the third conversation, you will have reached a deeper understanding of your direct reports. You will know about their past, how they got to where they are today, and how they envision their career's peak. Now is the time to connect the present to their aspirations with a clear action plan.
Unlike previous conversations, there is no single prompt to help you kick off this third, final long-form conversation. The following questions will guide you in collaborating on an effective career action plan:
What do you have to learn to move closer to your dreams?
How should we prioritize the skills you have to learn?
Who can help you learn these skills?
How can your role evolve to facilitate your learning?
For that last question, the Radical Candor authors deserve extra credit - it’s that useful - more on that later. First, focus on capturing relevant information to structure and guide their learning journey.
❗ If you haven’t checked out my Action Plan Google Sheets Template yet, now’s the time. I’ll be referring to it throughout the rest of this post.
Guiding them to focused learning
Prioritize their skill gaps
The easiest way to determine the order of skills to tackle is to review the dreams sheet. Look for gaps that are bold, colored red, and pop up in multiple dreams. You might also spot some yellow, bold skills, which indicate a smaller gap compared to red skills. This isn’t an exact science but more of a dialogue with your direct reports, so try to agree on two to four skills that seem meaningful to them. I’ve never seen anybody grow 5 different skills effectively at once, so the most important thing is to agree on the top one or two skills you want to start with.
Describe their skill gaps
Hopefully, you have descriptions for the chosen skills at hand so your direct reports and you have a shared understanding of what these skills mean. Crucially, you want to document the current state of their competence in said skill. Pick their brains on what “good enough” means in practicing this skill as they imagine living one of their dreams. I typically capture these quick exchanges via comments resulting in a timestamp and a yardstick for the future.
Brainstorm people who have the required skills
Next, we want to document the people who have demonstrated these skills in your direct report’s eyes. You will see the benefit of this simple activity later when creating todos for their action plan. For now, encourage your direct reports to lead this brainstorming and contribute if they get stuck. While you can even list inspiring people they don’t know, I recommend focusing on colleagues, friends, family, and acquaintances. That makes reaching out to these folks easier to exchange their knowledge and experiences.
Brainstorm further resources to boost learning
While skilled people in your network may represent superb learning opportunities, you also want to look at resources your direct reports can work through independently or in a group setting. For this activity, I start by asking them about resources they might already know before contributing some I have personally enjoyed or seen referenced in my career.
Ask and document how they learn best
I’m sure you already know this. People learn and retain information in various ways. Some people need to summarize their learnings in writing to retain their new-found knowledge, while others have to put everything into practice. Maybe your direct reports learn best when talking about their insights with others. Through career conversations, I have learned about a direct report’s dyslexia more than once. Just because I find books cost-effective and helpful doesn’t mean everyone else will. Consider other mediums, such as audiobooks, podcasts, or community immersion to offer different ways of learning.
How can their role evolve to facilitate learning?
Let’s return to my favorite guiding question for the third conversation.
How can your role evolve to facilitate your learning?
This question is compelling for various reasons:
We often feel limited and blocked in our day-to-day and forget all the current opportunities and possibilities. This question cuts through all the noise, negativity, and confusion by asking straight up what they could do differently in their current role - practically starting tomorrow.
When your direct reports are hungry for traditional promotions or compensation bumps, this gives you a chance to talk openly about things you can and can’t do. Some folks have limited knowledge of compensation and promotion processes. This is a good moment to explain how these concepts work generally and in your organization.
The question focuses on learning, improving your skills, and increasing your sphere of influence. We sometimes forget that this is what “growing your career” means. All potential rewards are a consequence of great performance, not a prerequisite.
The answers to this question are highly contextual, but let me share some real-world examples to offer you more guidance:
Let’s say you have a person who wants to improve their presentation skills. If you have various opportunities to present to different audiences in your organization (demos, all-hands, knowledge sharing, …) then you can work with them to get them a slot to present their work, key learnings, or anything else that’s relevant to that particular format.
Maybe you have someone who wants to build up their hiring skills. How about including them in your next hiring effort? They could shadow you, be part of a panel, or even lead an interview with your support.
What if someone’s written communication is poor and they would like to change that? You probably have reports, presentations, or documents to write in your leadership role. How about including them to write a draft for you? This is also a great opportunity for feedback and for both of you to learn (learning by doing, learning by teaching).
After all that effort, here’s what your resulting “Learning Guidelines” might look like:
Collaborating on “who will do what by when”
We’re close to the finish line: a list of todos that will serve as their career action plan. For this last activity, we want to end up with a simple table of action items that might look something like this:
This is a collaborative brainstorming activity, but you drive this conversation as the leader. Here are some tips for your consideration:
Most actions will be assigned to them, but you might also end up with a few. I start every action plan with an action for myself that reminds me to set up a quarterly 50-minute check-in with them.
Start by reviewing all of the resources and how their role might evolve. There might be an action item captured already that you can copy and paste. In that case check if the todo can be broken down further, which brings me to…
…make sure that actions are concrete and as small as possible. It’s better to be too granular (“that’s only going to take 2-3 minutes!”) than too vague (“I don’t know where to start”).
For “people who have this skill”, encourage your direct reports to schedule a coffee, organize a knowledge-sharing session, ask them if they are open to being shadowed, and so on.
For “resources”, consider working through them step-by-step, e.g. breaking down a book into chapters. Reading a book is not a good test of skill or knowledge, so consider phrasing todos similar to “summarize key learning from chapter X in our weekly 1:1”.
For skills that seem too nebulous to either of you, create a to-do to brainstorm interesting resources, such as “find 5 free online courses about skill A” and “pick one of the courses” to make it easier to start their learning effort.
For due dates, ask them “Until when could you get this done?” and only challenge them if you find the due dates to be unreasonably far in the future after some probing. By the way, if you use my template you can always sort the actions by date (sort the When column A-Z). That way you can focus on brainstorming now while sorting everything with two simple clicks later.
While “Radical Candor” describes this action plan’s time horizon as 18 months, I found it impossible in practice to plan actions that far into the future. I recommend aiming for enough action items until your next scheduled check-in (typically 3 months for me). Additionally, your direct reports will “get it” after a while and can add actions independently.
💡 If you’re struggling with creating the action plan I’d encourage you to check out the Manager Tools Coaching Model. You will learn a step-by-step approach to coaching direct reports to learn new skills or grow existing ones. It’s a great match for this activity.
❗ You might not finish the entire plan or nail down every possible action in this third conversation. Importantly, you have given your people structure and focus by creating a path toward their dreams. Completing these three long-form conversations can be quite draining, yet the real managerial work only begins now. We’ve all been in situations when we set long-term goals and forgot about them after a while. Continued care and ongoing guidance are required to reap the maximum value from this framework. This is the topic for the fourth and final post in this series.
Congratulations on completing your third conversation! 🎉
What’s next?
You’re not done! Check out the other posts of this series and the supporting material to get the full picture when it comes to Career Conversations:
Part 3: Their action plan 🎯 (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! 💬