Career Conversations
Have you ever wondered how your direct reports feel about the career conversations you've had?
"They seem like a formality. We have them quarterly, but by the time we meet again, we've forgotten the previous discussion and end up repeating it."
"I received feedback about improving soft skills like communication and collaboration, but these concepts are vague and I'm unsure where to begin."
"The career conversation was useful in identifying my need to improve prioritization and time management. However, with everything else I need to work on, it's challenging to commit and make progress."
In this post, I'm sharing a career conversation template that can assist in fostering alignment, clarity, and accountability. With the annual performance review almost completed, it's an ideal time to initiate these conversations and prepare your team for the challenging yet fulfilling year ahead!
Once or twice a year: Establish employee-initiated annual growth goals
What it looks like
The goals should be clear and succinct, limited to three. For example:
For the year 2024, I aim to achieve the following three goals to prepare for a potential promotion in the 2025 review cycle:
Establish myself as a domain expert and a trusted data science partner in the XX field. This includes enhancing my business understanding and improving my communication and collaboration skills.
Enhance my coding and architecture skills to meet next-level requirements.
Expand my influence by mentoring others and contributing to citizenship efforts.
Tip 1: Ownership and timing
It's crucial that the direct report drafts this, not you. It fosters a sense of ownership and control, reinforcing that they are responsible for driving their career growth and investing the necessary time and effort.
Ideally, this should be done after the annual performance reviews. By then, you should have clearly communicated their strengths and areas for growth. Give them some time to absorb this feedback and consider what aspects of career growth are most important to them. Then, ask them to list their annual career growth goals in a concise and clear manner, no more than three.
Tip 2: References for setting annual growth goals
Revisit their career motivations discussed during the onboarding 1:1. Try to contextualize these long-term motivations in their current work environment to inspire them to work towards these goals.
Use feedback from annual performance reviews.
The career ladder can be a valuable reference.
For junior employees who are just beginning their careers, the career ladder can provide an excellent guide for professional development.
For more senior employees, while development goals can be more personalized, the career ladder can still inform 50-75% of their development goals in most circumstances based on my experience.
Tip 3: Feedback and final alignment
Don't view the goals suggested by employees as final. Instead, provide feedback and agree on a final version during the first career conversation.
Give insightful feedback and achieve alignment. For example, an employee may view multitasking and increased productivity as growth goals, particularly if they are overwhelmed by numerous requests from multiple partners. However, you may identify that effective stakeholder management and prioritization are the real solutions. Therefore, consider focusing on these areas instead.
Discuss the priority of different goals. For instance, junior employees might prioritize technical development, like learning new modeling techniques. However, improving their communication, documentation, and coding practices may be more needed at the moment.
2. Quarterly: Set concrete personal growth OKRs
What it looks like
After setting the annual growth direction, it's time to get concrete. For example:
Enhance communication with partners
Deliver a presentation at the cross-functional weekly meeting. Discuss the project's progress and request feedback from the manager and at least two team members both before and after the presentation.
Improve the documentation hub for easy stakeholder engagement, measured by feedback from stakeholders after project completion.
Improve modeling
Write a model design document using the template and get a detailed review from the tech lead.
Conduct comprehensive model evaluations and meet with the tech lead and manager to discuss the findings.
Tip 1: Less is more
I typically restrict individuals to a maximum of two objectives and two Key Results (KRs) for each objective. Given that these are extra tasks in addition to their daily duties, it's crucial to stay realistic and help employee stay focused. However, remember that there are four quarters in a year. You might be amazed at how much one can grow by consistently meeting their quarterly growth OKRs.
Tip 2: Strategic Alignment with Current Work Setting
Assess the current work context to identify objectives that align with ongoing tasks, and strategically prioritize them. If one must devote personal time to learning the best practices for deploying machine learning models, success may be unlikely. However, if she is already working on machine learning projects, she will naturally have the opportunity to learn and practice. This could also lead to a more successful project outcome.
Tip 3: Specificity and measurability are key
Managers can assist in the following ways:
Pre-work: Sometimes, an employee lacks experience or understanding of what it means to achieve an objective. It's the manager's job to contextualize it for them. For instance, what does becoming a domain expert entail? I often ask the employee to outline their understanding, then supplement it with my own to make it more comprehensive and tangible. This way, the employee can assess where they meet expectations and where they need to improve.
Setting goals: Choose 1-2 concrete Key Results (KRs) for the objective. The important thing is that these should be specific and measurable. There should be no doubt about whether the KR has been met. The selection of the KR should consider the most effective way to address the identified gaps within the current work setting.
Tip 4: Provide necessary support to set employees up for success
At times, an employee may need support from you or other team members to improve in a specific area. As illustrated in the previous example, it's beneficial to formally list the required support (like a tech lead's design review or feedback on a presentation from a teammate) in the OKR. While the employee typically initiates requests for help, the manager can also communicate to the supporters in advance.
3. Ongoing: Bi-weekly check-ins and support
What it Looks Like
I recommend discussing these personal OKRs regularly during your one-on-one sessions. This check-in may serve as an additional commitment device to hold the employee accountable. These discussions don't have to be long - usually just 2-3 minutes to ensure things are on track, or a 10-15 minute targeted conversation to help unblock the employee.
Tip 1. Overcoming mental obstacles
In my experience, when addressing soft skill OKRs, employees may encounter mental obstacles. Often, the best help you can provide isn't discussing tactics but addressing these mental roadblocks.
For instance, if employees struggle with pushing back on stakeholders, it's often because they want to be helpful or liked by partners. Here are some strategies I've used to help them overcome these obstacles:
Remind them that our job is to maximize our impact on the business, which requires prioritizing and focusing energy on high-impact projects. These are essential skills to master.
Emphasize that partners will understand our approach since we share the goal of doing what's best for the business. They, too, prioritize and push back at times. Encourage employees to view this not as a personal issue, but as professional communication that benefits the entire organization.
However, remind employee it's important to convey this rationale respectfully and constructively to partners. For example, explain what takes priority at the moment and, if possible, suggest simpler ways for partners to self-serve and move the project forward.
If you feel that an employee understands the above but still needs encouragement, consider offering a trial run. Have them draft their response to an incoming request and share it with you before sending it to partners. Follow up in one-on-one sessions to discuss how the conversation went and what they learned from taking this first step.
4. Repeat and restart
There's no shortcut to career growth. The quickest way to achieve it is by starting today and continually repeating this process.
What do you think
I hope you find this template useful. Please feel free to share any feedback or suggestions; I aim to continually improve it!
