
Conversations Managers Should Have to Develop Their People - bootload
http://firstround.com/review/three-powerful-conversations-managers-must-have-to-develop-their-people/
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opaque
> "Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life."

Wow, don't do this. Getting to know your team is extremely important. But,
this is a pretty gross pseudo-psychological way to go about it. Also people
should be aware some cultures will react extremely negatively to being asked a
question like this.

American's tend to have a canned response, what I call an 'origin myth' e.g.
"I'm a doctor because as child my relative had (disease X) ... then later
...". They dispense these quite readily at parties and interviews. Try it out.

Ask a European why they do what they do and you'll likely get a glazed
expression as they consider nature vs nurture, the class system & the deeply
invasive nature of the question itself.

~~~
jt2190
Please don't quote out of context.

> "Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life." Then probe with more
> questions when they talk about pivots in their lives... Look for the
> patterns over the course of your people's lives that give you strong signal
> and just write them down.

The goal is to look for the things that motivate people to change their
behavior, not how they mythologize their origin.

~~~
asdfologist
You missed the point. It doesn't matter what the goal is; this line of
questioning is invasive and inappropriate.

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IndianAstronaut
I have plenty of career conversations with my manager. But it goes nowhere.
Lots of talk and no action. "I want to learn more about forecasting models",
"definitely". No forecasting work given and even side projects are squashed.

My current manager recently gave me a front end project. I started learning a
lot of Angular and started working on it. She recently came to me and said
don't learn too much about it.

I have learned that career progression is your own battle and managers are in
general a hindrance to that.

~~~
ta998877
wow, cynical much?

sometimes you manager is actually trying to help you, sure it's not purely
altruistic but is anything? you own the burden of responsibility for achieving
your dreams, your manager is merely a facilitator that can sometimes help you
achieve that. when you delegate your future, it's your fault.

"I want to learn more about forecasting models". Understand that your manager
has many contradicting tensions and they are trying to balance them all. Is
this delivering business value or aligned with company goals? It's ok if not,
but expect other things to keep being prioritised over it. How many growth
opportunities did you find that were denied, or did you not find any?

Take responsibility for yourself.

~~~
IndianAstronaut
>Take responsibility for yourself.

My last statement basically said just that. I am taking responsibility for my
own growth rather than rely on management. My manager even asking me these
questions is really a silly exercise so when reviews come around we can say
that managers are interested in our career growth. The reality is that there
are tasks and projects to get done and those with business value, rather than
personal growth value, get prioritized. Discussing where I want to go is a
fruitless exercise.

~~~
RazZziel
> Discussing where I want to go is a fruitless exercise.

In my experience, it's neither silly nor fruitless, but you can't expect solid
results either, your interests are not the only factor at play.

As a manager, I'm genuinely interested in my team's personal growth, but that
needs to be balanced with business needs. I'll always try to match business
needs with each team member's personal interests and not just skills, because
that'll render a much more motivated (thus productive) work environment, but
sometimes it's just not possible, and uninteresting work will just have to be
dealt with to keep the paychecks coming until something more interesting shows
up.

~~~
maxxxxx
Maybe you are an exception but from my experience most people in management
don't have the depth to really help their people. They are too busy surviving
themselves. In addition most companies have no interest in developing their
workers' careers. They want them to perform better within their little box but
that's it.

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Angostura
A few years ago I read a really excellent piece by a CEO who talked about his
approach with new employees was to have a conversation right at the beginning
about how they were unlikely to work at the company until they retire and
therefore the expectation was that the company would work to help them grow
into their next career.

I've been completely unable to find this article subsequently. Can anyone
point me at it?

~~~
seanstickle
Sounds like Reid Hoffman's book "The Alliance". Good read.

[http://www.theallianceframework.com/](http://www.theallianceframework.com/)

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random314
> “Promotions, at their very best, represent an incremental increase in scope
> and growth. At their worst, they're nothing more than a title and comp
> change, a nice formal recognition for a job well done. Promotion
> conversations do not equal career conversations.”

Somebody give this guy an award!

~~~
curun1r
The mantra we were fed as managers was that promotions were _not_ an increase
of scope or growth. Instead, they were a recognition of scope increases and
growth that had already happened.

When my directs came to me wondering about a promotion, my response was always
to figure out immediate increases in scope that we could implement. I told
everyone that if they wanted a promotion, they should make my job in arguing
for a promotion as easy as possible. I loved coming away from calibration
meetings with multiple promotions since that let me throw most of my comp
increases to non-promotions.

~~~
random314
> When my directs came to me wondering about a promotion, my response was
> always to figure out immediate increases in scope

Which does mean that promotion conversations are THE career conversations you
need to have.

~~~
curun1r
Not at all. I had lots of career talks with people that were much less focused
on the immediate future. Things like figuring out whether an engineer was
interested in moving towards architect, principle or management. I got one of
my engineers a chance to try out working as a PM because we determined that he
really enjoyed designing features more than coding. I helped one of our DevOps
engineers realize that he really wanted to be doing product development and,
unfortunately, we couldn't find him a role in our company so he ended up
leaving. But even though we lost an engineer, I still had my manager's support
to give that kind of guidance because we were doing right by the employee. And
it also helped establish our reputation for caring about our employees
development.

There's a lot more to career talks than just the immediate next step. There's
also figuring out whether your current career trajectory is the one you really
want. Performance review time is an excellent time to discuss taking the
immediate next step, but it's a terrible time for the broader perspective
meeting. That should be separate, but should still definitely happen.

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ktRolster
I'll be honest, I would feel rather uncomfortable if someone tried to have
this conversation with me.

Just let me do my job. I want to get back to programming.

~~~
owyn
Well, whenever I'm confronted by some kind of management thing like this I try
to think about it from the manager's perspective. First, it seems like this is
something that matters when a "10-point bump on engagement scores" is how your
manager is being rewarded. Also, they don't necessarily know what you're doing
all day but they can sense you don't really care that much about it. That
makes management nervous, because they DO know turnover is bad. So, at a
company where the engineers don't actually really care that much about what
they're working on they want to try and manufacture that environment. So you
create a "career plan" for someone to keep them engaged for the next 6 months
to build the widgets you need.

I do find it interesting that one of the quotes in the article is "They
discover that in three to five years, a bunch of people are going to leave
because they're concerned about career growth and development. Panic ensues".
Uh what? Three to five years is a pretty good stretch these days in SV. If you
really wanted to keep people longer than that, you would have a completely
different business and reward structure.

The rest of it boils down to "get to know your co-workers", I guess? It
doesn't really seem that revolutionary. If you want to spend more than 5 years
working with them, I think that should happen naturally not as part of some
kind of corporate management mandated dream sharing time.

~~~
ktRolster
_That makes management nervous, because they DO know turnover is bad._

Turnover is bad because to get any kind of decent raise, you either need to
quit or threaten to quit. This is true at most companies.

~~~
NPMaxwell
Good point. If you switch jobs, chances are good you will be paid more in your
new position and your replacement will be paid more than you were.

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Annatar
This will be met with clandestine opposition by management.

I have been observing them for years. The current school of thought is
basically a rat race where the managers only manage their own self interest,
and they do not stick around in any one position longer than two to four years
(team leads tend to be an exception to this behavioral pattern). By the time
the damage their decisions have caused takes effect, they are already either
at a different position in the hierarchy, or if the strategy was particularly
harmful to the company, they have jumped ship.

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lucaspiller
Side note: What do people think of the 'subscribe to our mailing list' popup
on this site?

On desktop, it first appears as you are about half way down the page as a
small banner at the bottom of the screen, as you scroll more then takes up
half the page, and finally covers the whole page (with a close button to
dismiss - which sets a cookie and stops it appearing again).

It's not in your face when you load the page which is nice, but it's still a
popup - these things must work though, so I can't see them going away anytime
soon.

~~~
jSully24
Dislike.

Especially the "No thanks, I don’t want to learn more." button to dismiss it.
Pretty condescending in my opinion.

On mobile that popped up immediately. I did click on through and read the
article despite that, but my interest in coming back to that site is
diminished by the sense of arrogance displayed in that pop up.

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freshflowers
Any management advice that consists of a one-size-fits-all approach is by
definition bad advice.

Every member of my team is an individual, and they all deserve an individual
approach. Also, I find this particular approach rather condescending, and
assuming the employee in question needs handholding and psychotherapy.

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Odenwaelder
Or don't. Your employee's childhood is none of your business.

~~~
AnthonBerg
Directly asking to non-reciprocally mine employees' childhoods for
psychological data is a counterexample to said manager having the
psychological makeup necessary for becoming a "servant leader" \- in other
words it's quite callous and has more than a whiff of sociopathy about it.

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phereford
I have had a number of managers in my career. Some where they couldn't
careless about my career prospects (no 1-1s, no conversations, nothing). And
the best ones put me in positions to thrive and grow.

For those of you in either of these scenarios, recognize it and learn from it.
Believe it or not, so much can be learned from good managers, but even more
can be learned from bad managers.

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heisenbit
Ethical disaster. A few observations

\- there is a difference between a coaching relationship and a manager-managed
relationship. Even as a manager how do you reconcile in your head the need to
judge the employee with the knowledge you gained inappropriately? Know my
girlfriend is working in a company that is relocating - will you invest into
me?

\- disclosure - to a degree - can be helpful. But pushing for it from a
position of power is wrong. Disclosure starts with oneself.

\- Information is power. There is usually limited upside for the employee but
significant downside. Treat carefully

As an employee you sell yourself to your manager. Ever seen a company selling
a product opening the shop and showing how the gory mess became a sausage?
Most keep the sausage secrets secret for a reason. Sausages still may be tasty
but please don't think too hard what all went in to make me 8-)

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mobiuscog
There is a great book called "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink and Leif
Babin who were (are ?) US Navy SEALs.

I think it has a much better approach for management.

Well worth reading.

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OliverJones
This guy Robert Greenleaf, mentioned in the article, is worth reading.
[http://www.worldcat.org/title/servant-as-
leader/oclc/2491811...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/servant-as-
leader/oclc/24918113)

He was a manager of line workers (people who climb telephone poles, etc) at Ma
Bell back before the Baby Bell era. He may not have invented the idea that
management is a service job, but he wrote about it eloquently.

Greenleaf gets used in some questionable contexts. He has lots of fans in
right-wing theological schools, for example, where student preacher wannabees
are fed the myth that they are "servant leaders." Those folks can deceive
themselves into thinking they're humble and become blinded to their own
arrogance. The same is true of everybody. But the misuse of Greenleaf's work
doesn't mean it's bad work.

I believe the context of a management consultant saying, "get to know your
employees" and then beaming back up to his starship is also questionable. This
stuff is not magic. It's hard work and long term work for the manager. It
takes a lifetime of practice to get it right. That means people who do this
are going to get it wrong, a lot.

Military academies have year-long courses in ways of leadership, where officer
wannabees get to read about and practice doing these sorts of things. So they
get to make a few of their lifetime quota of mistakes in a controlled
environment. We programmers don't get that kind of training.

In business, "willingness to make mistakes" is usually a trope advanced by an
egotistical senior executive. It's usually not real at the level of line
manager where these "powerful conversations" make sense. All this is
especially true in the Silicon Valley style youth culture.

Lots of comments here have said, "I don't want my manager psychoanalyzing me"
or something like that. They're right on. If a manager in a management-by-
objective company gets a monkey on his back to ask every staffer "tell me
about your childhood," lots can go wrong. First of all it's forced and fake.
Second, what if staff members tell you the truth when you ask that? Are you
ready for that? Probably not.

So what can a manager actually do?

It's all about attitude. A manager who often asks, "how can I help you?" and
then accepts both "leave me alone so I can get my work done" and "send me to a
conference on some-new-thing" as answers, is a manager with a good attitude.

A manager with such an attitude can ask, "why?" when somebody discloses hopes
and dreams, learn something about the staff member, and become a partner in
helping that staff member get closer to those hopes and dreams.

So, here's MY listicle for managers: One step to developing your people:
Habitually and often, ask "how can I help you?" and accept the answers you
get.

