Article Summary
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‘So, I was thinking we should talk about your career goals?’
Erm…ok
Many of us have been in a situation where either we’ve said those words, or we’ve been on the receiving end of them. Often, it doesn’t go that well.
Cynthia Chen, a product designer at Stripe, posed exactly this question. You can see from the number of likes and replies that she’s not alone.
It’s a great shame, because (in theory) these conversations should be some of the most valuable that a manager has with their team members. It’s only by knowing what your team members really want from their careers that you can begin to help them plot a way to success. In many ways, it’s the key to being a good manager.
So why do these conversations so often feel artificial, difficult and worthless.
If we break down that first sentence on how we talk about goals, it becomes easier to see where these conversations go wrong and what we can do to make them better. So in this article we’re going to tear down ‘we should talk about your career goals’ and give you some practical tips on what to do instead.
Let’s get started.
Find out how to effectively manage your team's goals so you can see team status and successfully complete goals.
This is the first potential problem.
Describing them as ‘Career goals’ makes it all sound like a bullshit HR discussion (which it often is - see Part 2), but what we’re really talking about here are someone’s plans for the future. When discussed fully, this is actually a very personal question.
It might involve deliberations of how their personal life interacts with their work. Or whether they enjoy their current job. Or how they’re worried they’re not able to do enough of what interests them in your team. Or perhaps they are thinking of leaving your company. Maybe they’re thinking of leaving the company because they’ve been badly managed. The list could go on.
Behind the banality of ‘career goals’ sits endless possible questions, many of which your team member might typically only discuss with a trusted friend.
So the ‘we’ in this situation really matters. Have you established the right relationship and context with your team member for this kind of discussion?
If you’re a new manager who has only been working with someone for a short period of time, asking them to discuss these topics is inevitably going to be difficult - particularly if it’s phrased as we’ve described.
The trust just isn’t there yet.
That’s not to say you can’t talk about these topics, but you have to consider your relationship and think about easing your way into it. More on that later on.
Assuming that you have the right relationship to discuss some of these topics, why ‘should’ you? This has two aspects:
There is a clear wrong answer to the first question, but unfortunately it’s often the truth.
Evelyn Kim, Director of Product Design at Uber Eats, tells a story on this topic which probably sounds familiar. She speaks about how every quarter she had to fill out a form with her manager on:
Understandably she was sceptical:
“I never liked this format. It felt like I had to boil down my life and professional career into a 45 min conversation and somehow this document was going to help me reach 5-year goals.”
Spoiler: it’s not.
But these are the kinds of discussions that happen when managers feel they ‘should’ be talking about these topics because they’ve been told to (often for HR process), not because they genuinely want to develop the careers of their team members.
Cynthia Chen again:
When you tell your team members that you ‘should’ or ‘need’ to discuss their career goals with them, you will only have a meaningful discussion if they know it’s motivated by a genuine desire to help them progress.
Now, it may be that you’re in a situation like Evelyn and your company has a structured goal-setting program which you have to engage with. This may even be formalised into an OKR-type structure and/or tied to compensation. We’ll get onto how to align these with a fulfilling career goals discussion later on. But suffice to say the starting point should always be a genuine desire to help, and then alignment, rather than using an HR process as a prompt for opening the discussion.
The second aspect to ‘Should’ relates to the impact of the conversation.
The scenario goes something like this: ‘Ok so I trust you, and I know you’ve got my best interests at heart, but why bother talking about goals? Either nothing’s going to change, or everything’s going to change, in which case my goals will be irrelevant in three months anyway.’
It’s up to you as a manager to demonstrate that this conversation can actually make a difference, and how you can positively impact their career. You can’t assume that they will think it’s a worthwhile discussion.
Outside of a contrived HR process, have you ever paused to consider your ‘career goals’? Probably not. You’re a human being after all.
You might have stopped to think about whether you’re happy at work. Or types of projects you’d like to work on. Or what you enjoy doing most. But rarely ‘career goals’.
This jargony phrasing has been hindering positive conversations about employee development for years. It’s not a phrase people recognise, so unsurprisingly, they struggle to respond.
Depending on who you ask, you might also get some pretty blunt answers.
Often these wording also leads to individuals narrowing their ambitions to the scope of your organisation, rather than what they genuinely want to achieve.
‘What are your genuine ambitions for the future?’ ‘Gee, I’d just love to be a Senior Sales Manager one day at this firm’. Said no one ever. Except when they’re asked about ‘career goals’ in a contrived meeting with a manager they don’t trust, which they just want to end as soon as possible.
So if we are going to talk about career goals, let’s at least make the discussion more human. When we say ‘career goals’ what we’re really talking about are the skills people would like to learn, the relationships they’d like to build, the work they’d like to do and the life they want to lead. Let’s talk more in those terms.
Ok so we’ve established that to do this well as a manager you need to:
If that sounds difficult to pull off, that’s because it is. Management can be hard.
But you’re halfway there just by acknowledging that, rather than just ploughing ahead and asking shitty questions about goals.
Fortunately, to get the rest of the way there, we think there’s a framework that can help.
Some of you may already be familiar with Russ Laraway, the former Chief People Officer at Qualtrics. Several jobs prior, while he worked at Google, he developed a new way of discussing career development with his team. After he implemented it, a subsequent employee satisfaction survey found a degree of improvement which the HR department had never seen before.
He taught every manager on his team to have three 45 minute conversations with their individual team members over the course of three to six weeks. We’re going to summarise them here but they’re discussed in more detail in Chapter 7 of Kim Scott’s Radical Candor and here in an interview.
Whilst there’s no silver bullet for these conversations, this is as close a universal tool as we know to helping you have them in a constructive and engaging way.
In the first conversation, you’re trying to get a better feel for how the team member got to where they are today. Russ suggests beginning this one with ‘Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life.’
It’s a great start, because whilst it’s a personal question, it’s very open and your colleague can choose how they want to approach it. You’re also not going to have the ‘career goals’ problem of people not having anything to say, because the question is on everyone’s specialist subject: themselves!
The areas you should pay particular attention to are where transitions occurred in the person’s life or where they had significant decisions to make. At these points, an individual’s motivations can tell you a lot about what they might want in their future career, and the things they care about. For example, why they left a certain job, or moved to a different city, or prioritized their family or mental health etc.
You shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions. It’s meant to be a conversation, not an information download. However, if you feel you’ve pressed on a subject that’s too personal, you should also back away. Particularly if you don’t know the person that well. You’ll be able to get all the context you need without it getting awkward.
Remember to leave one to two weeks’ gap, no need to force it. Then you’re ready for the next conversation.
By now you should have some context about what motivates the person and what they care about, and crucially by discussing these things, you’ve demonstrated that you care about them and have started to build some trust. Now you can talk about the future.
Calling this conversation ‘Dreams’ can make it seem ephemeral, but the choice of word is very important (you may want to explain this to your team). The point is to discuss what someone sees as the very apex of their career. Not the promotion they’re hoping for on your team, not where they want to be in 5 years, but what they would see as the best possible outcome for their career. As Russ says, when he spoke to one Google employee, he was surprised to hear her dream was to run a Spirulina farm!
You’re not just looking for job titles or positions. You’re also trying to get a feel for what pattern of life they’d ideally like. With reference to one of the tweets above, that might mean being financial secure for the first time. It might mean being home in time to pick up their kids 3 days a week. Or working remotely from a certain country over the course of their lives. Or ultimately becoming an expert in a particular field. The answer to this question shouldn’t just be one thing. Ultimately Russ advises team members to come up with 3-5 dreams for the future.
The final step in this conversation is mapping out what skills the employee feels they’ll need to ultimately fulfil their dreams, and their current competency level. Then you can start making a plan.
For each of those skill areas, you can then work out:
If you convert those into to-dos, for want of a better word, there’s your ‘career goals.’ And for once, they actually align with what a person wants to achieve, and they come from a place of care and trust. It’s at this point that you can look to align them with any internal processes. You can revisit the plan in your 1:1s, probably on a monthly basis, to check progress and update it.
As you can probably see, you don’t just get a plan out of this process. You’ve learned so much about your team members. Armed with this understanding, there will be innumerable intangible ways that you’ll be able to steer opportunities their way and progress their careers, because you know what they want.
It should be said that it is almost certain that someone’s personal aims will not precisely match up with the work you can offer them at your company. Russ was not able to offer that person a Spirulina opportunity at Google. But hopefully most of the time you can offer them opportunities to develop their skills whilst providing value to your firm. At the point where that stops being possible, it’s probably time to move on.
In many ways, the worst thing a manager can do is kid a team member that they can pursue meaningful work which will advance their interests, when it doesn’t really exist at your firm. At this point, a good discussion about career development should involve advice about opportunities beyond your company.
Good luck!
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