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The push and pull of ongoing career conversations

How to harness the opportunities to further your engineers
March 23, 2021

Have you ever been told that you needed to have a career conversation with one of your direct reports?

What came to mind when this happened? Perhaps, you visualized a performance review where you would share a few strengths and areas of growth, or a team member asking you for a promotion and having to tell them they weren’t quite ready. These are both valid, but what other examples are out there? I’d like to share a mental model for planned, and more importantly, unplanned career conversations.

Let’s start with a common question: what is a career conversation? Or similarly, how exactly should you have a career conversation? One approach is to master each different type, but I’d like to offer a model that’s more fluid, more improvisational.

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