Career Conversations Are Not a Retention Trick — They're a Leadership Responsibility

Alexis:

Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. I'm your host, Alexis Monville. In today's episode, we are honored to have Russ Laraway, an accomplished leader with 30 years of operational experience. Russ has held significant roles, from being a company commander in the Marine Corps to managing positions at Google and Twitter. He co-founded Candor, Inc. with best-selling author Kim Scott, and has served as Chief People Officer at Qualtrics. Russ is also the author of the insightful book "When They Win, You Win: Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think." Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, Russ! How do you typically introduce yourself to someone you've just met?

Russ:

Yeah, that's a wild question. I just say my name at this point. I don't really say anything else. And I have some reasons for that. I think, Alexis, what you'll gather from me over the next several minutes together is I'm a very intentional human being in ways that I think are perhaps uncommon and might seem a little bit nutty to people.

This is one such example. I realized that what's common is that we often introduce ourselves and we sort of lead with our really our professional identity, our title and company or whatever. And that's not even probably in my top five identities. I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm a friend.

So I started to just become really conscious about that. Additionally, as my career has transpired, I've had some really, really good jobs that one might say objectively are kind of impressive. Then I get into this problem where, gosh, I don't want to sound like I'm bragging either. So I really started to sort of subordinate the professional identity in introing myself and just kind of wait. If someone wants to talk about what do you do, I'm happy to talk about that.

Alexis:

And what happens when you do that?

Russ:

We have this house here in Utah. It's a very unusual house. It's really neat, but it's unusual. And when we show people the house and take them through, because of some of the features and the size, it's very common — people think they're being slick, but this has happened a hundred times — somebody will say, so what do you do? Because they're looking at this house and they're like, how the heck, you know. And it took me a minute to realize they were trying to triangulate some version of how can you afford this. So that makes me want to subordinate the professional identity even more. Then I'll just generally say I've been an executive in tech. That helps explain the house. I let other people kind of take the lead and see where our introductions take us.

Alexis:

That really resonates with me. For years, I introduced myself to anybody, regardless of the context, by stating what I was doing for a living. Sometimes people were impressed, and sometimes not, but it always led the conversation to professional stuff. While I would have loved to discuss something else. I am an avid book reader of fiction and non-fiction. I would love to hear about that, or anything you are interested in, and not necessarily what you are doing for a living. In short, it really resonates with me!

Russ:

Well, glad to hear that. It's also been frankly a mouthful the past few years. I go from chief people officer at Qualtrics to chief people officer at Goodwater. By the way, wrote a book sort of in between those two. So I'm an author. Then switched over to operating partner at Goodwater. That's two titles in a little over two years and author and chief people officer of culture. And by the way, now I'm with some buddies writing a screenplay. So you just, it's tough to fit it all. Say my name and see where it goes. I'm way more proud of my sons and my marriage and that I'm a good friend to people than anything else.

Alexis:

I love it! My friend Michael Doyle, who is a great coach and a great communicator and also the co-author of my second book, wrote that question for me. I love that you liked it! Your book, "When They Win, You Win," proposes that being a great manager is simpler than one might think. Can you tell us more?

Russ:

Yeah. Why I wrote the book — it's a really simple idea. I believe people deserve to be led well. The problem that I have seen and measured is that actually people are not being led well, and this is kind of hard to believe — in fact, measurably, managers have not improved in 30 years. You start to combine stuff from Gallup and Qualtrics and other employee experience companies, and you start to see a pattern that managers are really flailing in the world.

Employee engagement is a measurement that's been around for 30 years. It comes from the field of IO psychology. About 70% of employee engagement is explained by manager quality. And employee engagement itself predicts business results. So you've got this really interesting relationship — manager quality, employee engagement, business results — and engagement has not improved in 30 years. Managers have not improved in 30 years. How can that be when I can't walk 10 steps outside without tripping over another book or podcast or HBR article about how to be a better leader?

I had this realization that one of the reasons managers are failing is because all this content out there, including their training programs, is too much stuff. It does not hang together — there's no common system. There's a lot of "well, what worked for me." Worse, the manager receiving the advice is extremely biased in what they choose to opt into. They grab for things that sound familiar, things they may already be good at, things that sound easier. And worst of all, none of it is held to measurable account.

So I said, the world does not need another person's opinion about what it takes to be a great manager. What we need is to measure a set of leadership behaviors, small in number, that measurably and predictably lead to more engaged employees and better business outcomes. My team of quants at Qualtrics and I set about running that experiment. We were able to tease out about a dozen leadership behaviors that predicted engaged employees and better business outcomes. The book is organized around three buckets: direction, coaching, career.

Alexis:

So you are telling us that the leadership behaviors you organized into the three buckets — direction, coaching, and career — are direct predictors of employee engagement and business performance. I have to admit, I'm a big fan of your career conversation approach, and I've used it more than a hundred times in coaching or mentoring sessions. Could you explain this concept to our audience and share why it's so effective in managing and developing teams?

Russ:

Yeah, absolutely. So part four of the book — career — is something very original. A model that I've invented over coming up on 20 years now. It's called career conversations. And it's three distinct conversations.

The first conversation is called the life story conversation, which is really about having people tell you their life story and then taking the time to understand their pivots — even at young ages — and why they've made them. Through that process you learn what people deeply value in their work. It's important to do it that way rather than just ask them what they value, because people accidentally frequently lie. They're not generally conscious of what they value. But when you have them tell you their life story and you help them probe the pivots, you learn a show-don't-tell version of what they value.

The second conversation, which is the most important by far, is helping to get to what I call a career vision statement: what's your dream job? What do you want to be when you grow up? A lot of people have skepticism that this is feasible for our young Gen Z employees, or even people our age — "I don't even know what I want to be when I grow up." I give a really strong prescription in the book for how to do this well. I've done this a thousand times and I have successfully facilitated every single one of those people into a working vision statement. The reason this is so important is because it puts someone's development into the context of what they want to be. Those vision statements will generally be — and should be — outside the four walls of this company.

And then the last conversation is really about the career action plan: now that we know what you want to be when you grow up and what you deeply value, let's put together a short-term plan that helps you take tangible steps toward the long-term vision right now. The first thing we do is evaluate what we can change in your current role, given your long-term vision. So if you want to be the CFO at Disney, I can have you run my team's budget. You start to see from the inside what the CFO's organization looks like. We can chart a next job for you on my team or another team inside this company. We bring to bear people in our networks who can inform and influence these decisions. It's robust and it really helps a person feel invested in.

Counter-intuitively, whereas it feels like you're greasing the skids for somebody to slide out the door, the reality is they tend to stay longer when the manager goes through the full career action plan model with them.

Alexis:

That's exactly what I believe. When we truly invest in people, we take the time to make it work. And it's a lot of effort. It sounds very simple — yeah, there are three big conversations — but please don't believe you will be done in half an hour. That requires a lot more work, a little bit from you and a lot from the other person. I had people targeted by recruiters outside of the companies. And once you have those conversations, they listen to the recruiter or even don't listen to the recruiter, because those arguments don't resonate with them — they have their development plan, they have their action plan. Those things don't fit their action plan. They don't care. They have a plan. They are working towards it. And that's very cool.

Russ:

That's right. A woman who worked for me at Twitter named Ann — I had gone through the career conversations model with her and I knew what her vision was. She came to me one day with an external offer. We sat down and evaluated the offer together and reached the conclusion together that this wasn't the right move for her. She was an all-star — she's the CEO now of Gretchen Rubin Media. Nine months later she came in with another offer and I was like, you've got to take this one.

Retention at all costs is a bad practice. It doesn't put the human first — it puts the company first, and people feel that. I had a manager one time at Google who talked me into staying. The company I was going to join ended up getting bought by Google — would have been a huge payday and I would have ended up back at Google in a good role. When I got back to the States, our one-on-one, all she did was apologize. That person is Kim Scott actually, who wrote Radical Candor. So I know what it feels like when someone engages in retention at all costs and it feels bad. With Ann, when the right thing came, like Sting says, if you love someone, set them free. She became a CMO, then a COO, and now she's a CEO. We were able to help make sure she took the right next step given her vision.

Alexis:

I love the all-stars story, but I definitely love the story of retention at all costs. And then you mentioned Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor. I love that book and I did an episode about the four quadrants of Radical Candor. Co-founding Candor Inc with Kim Scott must have been a remarkable experience. What key insights did you gain from that venture?

Russ:

By a mile, the theory for my book came from my time at Candor Inc. Kim and I co-founded the company and I took on all of our go-to-market activities. We had a ton of demand. As the chief operating officer, I talked to like a thousand companies. I would always start with a simple discovery question: what problem are you trying to solve, and how do you think we can be helpful?

What I heard from a thousand companies was an alarmingly similar answer: we have an engagement problem related to low manager skill. When I asked what's the nature of your manager's skill gap, three words jumped out in the center of the page: direction, coaching, and career. Those are part two, three, and four of my book.

That wasn't sufficient — it was back-of-the-napkin research. I took that theory to Qualtrics and we measured whether those were the right groupings. Our customers at Radical Candor came from every industry — government, education, finance, consulting. They all had the same exact problem with their managers. We tested it over four years rigorously and learned that these direction, coaching, and career behaviors break down into about a dozen behaviors that, when managers regularly practice them, lead to more engaged employees and better business outcomes.

Alexis:

Yeah, that's very impressive. Reading about your experience measuring precisely the impact of leadership behaviors in the book convinced me to try the approach you outlined. By the way, thank you for the tools that are available online. There were some things I was doing and others I was absolutely not doing. For example, I was not doing the life story conversation. I was trying to get people to tell me about their values, but I was not doing that by listening to their stories. That suddenly changed everything because I needed to pay a lot of attention and do a lot of work to really try to extract that. The first time it was very difficult. I learned to discover people that I thought I knew, and I did not.

Russ:

I knew almost nothing about what they really care about. I thought I'm a human leader. I try to know my people. I ask about what they do on weekends, about their families, about their health. I do these activities that we've been incorrectly taught help us know someone — and we don't know them in a way that really helps them grow in a relevant way. That's the big insight.

If I had to offer one criticism of the book, one thing I noticed is you're probably an anomaly in that you've clearly read the book quite carefully. A lot of people have missed part one that talks about the rigor of the model. Most people are very appreciative of the how and what of parts two, three, and four — and they skip the why. What's extraordinary about that is that the actual invention is leadership as an independent variable statistically in a regression model, with engagement and business results as dependent variables. Nobody has ever done that before. That's the reason you should pay attention to this book.

Alexis:

Yeah, it is very funny. If you ask people what they need, they need results. And for a lot of them, they understood that employee engagement is linked to results. I usually describe this with impact and satisfaction. You cannot have one without the other, at least sustainably. They have some common sense or street wisdom about how the manager role is important and related to employee engagement. But when asked what they are doing about that, they tell you about incentives, without any proof that it's working.

Russ:

Always. And on top of that, what leadership approach we follow suffers badly from chief executive officer flavor of the month. The CEO went to a conference and they were talking about situational leadership, and so now that's what we're doing. The people who do leadership development now have to pay attention to a new thing they teach their managers. Then the CMO or the CFO goes to some conference and comes back with another new leadership idea. None of it has any rigor. It's too much stuff. It doesn't hang together and none of it is held to measurable account. Now our managers are confused about what they're supposed to do.

The most important thing we did at Qualtrics was the model I call STAC — select, teach, assess, coach — all with the same leadership standard. The assessment was the key: a measurement for every manager from their employees on whether they're demonstrating these behaviors. Not 360, not from the boss. Suddenly we could show a manager every quarter how their team was experiencing their leadership. We didn't use it punitively — that's the fastest way to get employees to stop telling the truth. We used it to coach. The assessment was organized and prioritized around the things that were correlating very strongly with employee engagement on their team. Nobody's doing that. Selection, teaching, assessment, and coaching should all be done around a coherent, concise leadership standard that we know works measurably and predictably.

Alexis:

Yeah, I love it. I have one last question that I like to ask. Looking back at your career, what is the one piece of advice you would give to your younger self?

Russ:

I'd say, hey, you had a good instinct. It was well executed. Do that again. I was in the U.S. Marines and I loved it. There's a number of things in that culture that I miss — I've never seen again in corporate America. But I got out after four years because I realized that the tempo of the Marine Corps, the deployment schedule, was not conducive to me being the kind of husband and father I would one day want to be.

When I was graduating business school, I was interviewing with McKinsey and Bain. I came home one night and my wife said — with sarcastic air quotes — "now that you're getting this fancy degree, does this mean you're going to get a job where we'll never see you anymore?" We sat down and talked it through, and I made a promise that I would never allow my career to get to a point where I was no longer being a good dad or a good husband — and further agreed that she and the kids were the ones who got to evaluate that, not me. It's very similar to the assessment of the manager: I care what the employees think.

As a result, I became a really good prioritizer. In the book I say prioritization is an exercise in subtraction, not addition. It's one of the most misused words in business. People think it means a task list. It doesn't. So what I became very, very good at is subtracting work. When I subtracted work, I tended to have a better work-life balance. I won an award at Google for being a great manager — your employees are the ones who recommend you, and you get chosen by the CEO's team, and they don't pick people who don't have a track record of getting meaningful things done.

So I would go back to my younger self and encourage that instinct. When you're at the end of your career — which I pretty much am now — all that will matter is you're looking at your three sons and your wife. Are you still happily married? Yes. How are your sons doing? Do you know about their lives? Are you involved in their lives? I can't think of one other thing that gets anywhere near as important.

Alexis:

I love it, and thank you for sharing that. I hope it will inspire a lot of people to think and reflect on what they are currently doing. Thank you very much for joining the podcast. I hope we will have another opportunity to discuss all the other things that we were not able to discuss today.

Russ:

Anytime you want, anytime you want. Thank you so much for having me.