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.

The second conversation: dreams
The second conversation moves from understanding what motivates people to understanding the person’s dreams—what they want to achieve at the apex of their career, how they imagine life at its best to feel.

Conversation three: eighteen-month plan
Last, Russ taught managers to get people to begin asking themselves the following questions: “What do I need to learn in order to move in the direction of my dreams? How should I prioritize the things I need to learn? Whom can I learn from?” How can I change my role to learn it?

Once a year, you need to put together a growth-management plan for each person on your team. Take a look across your whole team and make sure that you understand how each individual’s aspirations and growth trajectory is lining up with the collective needs of the team. Then, unless everyone on your team is both where they want and where they need to be, you’re going to have to have some pretty challenging conversations.

The best advice I ever got for hiring somebody is this: if you’re not dying to hire somebody, don’t make an offer.

And, even if you are dying to hire somebody, allow yourself to be overruled by the other interviewers who feel strongly the person should not be hired.

Once you’ve identified performance issues, take the time to get advice from your boss, to calibrate with your peers (if appropriate), and to get help from HR. Don’t take the attitude that this is your decision alone.

Sometimes it’s your job as the boss to be Radically Candid when something’s just not working.