Crafting Capability-led Career Conversations

When speaking to product professionals, we often get into career conversations. It is hardly surprising as product people tend to be an ambitious and curious bunch!

Having the right skillset to have empathetic but realistic career conversations is essential for product leaders to build better teams and nurture product talent. It is, however, a conversation that can be uncomfortable for many.

Discussing someone’s career can come with uncomfortable truths. Maybe they do not have the capability they think they do to progress, or maybe a talented individual would be better off leaving the organisation to pursue their career elsewhere.

The fear of people leaving is often one of the biggest barriers to managers discussing team members’ careers; so, they don’t. But this ignores an important point – not discussing people’s careers misses the chance to address any opportunities they have to stay and grow. Most often while you can’t keep good talent forever, there are things you can do to keep them longer.

Moreover, we are often not given the tools to discuss careers in a structured way, which in and of itself can be a barrier. In this blog we describe a simple process to structure career conversations around capability. But first, let’s address the difference between the different types of people management conversations we may be having already.

What Are Career Conversations Anyway?

Career conversations are just one type of people management conversation we might be having as a manager; these include:

• Performance conversations – these are what we will be most familiar with. Usually held on a yearly or half-yearly basis, they review the performance of individuals over the year against goals / KPIs. They are short-term and retrospective and may be held together or separately from compensation review conversations.
• Development conversations – these should be separate from performance conversations and are short-to-medium term and prospective – looking 6-24 months into the future. A similar cadence to performance conversations (or more frequent) should be held as a best practice. These conversations seek to set and track development and learning goals for individuals and identify opportunities in the course of everyday work to support these goals within the organisation e.g., through projects, secondments, sponsored learning etc.
• Career conversations – as a best practice, these should again be held separately from other management conversations and may be held on a less regular cadence than performance or development conversations, though check-ins on careers can be done informally more frequently. These conversations are long-term and prospective, looking out 3+ years to the aspirations the individual has for where they would like their career to take them and usually consider opportunities inside and outside the current organisation.

From the above, it is clear these conversations span the time horizon from short-to-medium-to-long term and from past to future. This is often the sticking point, while managers may be perfectly comfortable discussing past performance or even short term learning opportunities, when we get into the realm of careers, it can get a bit more uncomfortable. How do you even know what careers people may be suitable for? How do you give advice on this? Well, a great place to start can be capabilities.

Three Steps To Better Capability-led Career Conversations

The reason why capabilities are a good place to start is they are often long lasting, hard to acquire and slow to change – that’s why I call them non-perishable. By contrast, knowledge (e.g., SME) is often fast changing and easier to teach or learn.

By identifying the capabilities that someone already has, and those they will need to build over the longer term, it is much less likely that by the time they get to their career goal (which may be years into the future) that their capabilities will be out of date. Also, by planning capabilities into the future, it helps people look out for opportunities to build these capabilities which may only come up once in a while. Like all capability journeys, this one starts with self-reflection.

Step 1: Start with Self Reflection

Self-reflection should focus on two elements:

• Capabilities: What areas are strengths & areas for growth? A capability assessment can be a good start.
• Task Alignment: What parts of the job do you love or hate? What is it about them? People can hate tasks because they are not good at them, but also because they do not align with their personal values, personality or temperament. While the first can be addressed, the second is harder and it is important to know the difference.

Once a thorough self-reflection has been completed, it should be discussed and feedback given before moving on to aspirations.

Step 2: Identify Aspirations

It is important to identify a direction for the future. An aspiration may not be as concrete as a role title. It may instead be “I want to do more of x [task] and less of y [task]” or “I want a role that supports [lifestyle choice]”. There may also be more than one aspiration and sometimes they may even conflict.

There is no right or wrong answer for this step. It does not matter if the aspiration matches a current capability strength or development opportunity or if it is something they have experienced before or not.

It is important in this step to not crush an aspiration with reality, but to instead hold it carefully and nurture it in the conversation. Once we have acknowledged, validated and made space for the aspiration, we can then start to compare and contrast it to the self-reflection and plan.

Step 3: Compare & Contrast

In this final step, the previous two steps are brought together to identify whether the aspiration matches:

• Strengths and interests (loved) – in this case, finding opportunities to stretch further in the current role will make progress easier.
• Strengths but not interests (hated) – in this case, exploring if there are ways to love parts of the role currently hated will be important, as will being honest about the amount of time and effort these parts of the role take up. This commonly happens with people leadership roles, where individuals may be attracted to the status but not actually like the work.
• Development area and interest (loved) – this needs to be taken into development planning conversations. Development should not just include training but also integration of tasks into everyday work (in safe ways) to get experience.
• Development area but not interests (hated) – a gentle reality check may be needed in this case. It is hard to get better at something that you hate doing and while a development plan may help, it is likely motivation will be an issue. Also consider exploring adjacent aspirations that may be better aligned strengths or interests.

In this step, it is important to gently and curiously explore the potential reality of an individual’s aspiration. Often, we have the tendency to believe the grass is greener over the fence, but have little idea of the realities of the day-to-day of a role. This may be something you can do yourself as a manager from holding the role or you may need to reach out to others.

Everyone wants a motivating and enjoyable career that makes them feel capable and valuable. Rarely do we find this without the support and guidance of others, as well as more than a little self-reflection. By taking the time to understand your team’s career aspirations, you can support their development over the longer term and help to create engaging product careers.