What's your secret to identifying and leveraging team strengths?

As a manager at Google, I managed a team distributed across EMEA. None of my team were in de same country as me. I couldn't easily learn about team members over coffee and lunch, so flew to their countries twice a year to run full day conversations about career and personal growth. These were a powerful tool to see the whole person. They'd bring me to their favorite places, a forest walk, their favorite museum, their home town etc. We'd talk about work and life, where their energy came from, where they want to grow, their strengths, weaknesses, fears and more. This setting, and the gift of time helped establish high levels of trust. Combined with an expansive conversation framework this gave me deepest possible insight in my team members.

As a manager at Google, I consciously joined meetings of project teams about once a month. This helped me stay connected to projects. Team members could ask for input, I could connect the dots between teams, people would have equal opportunity to share their accomplishments AND it allowed me to observe people in action, on the job, interacting as a team, overcoming obstacles, generating ideas, working through issues etc. Combined with the conscious time I planned for full day conversations about career and personal growth and weekly one-on-one conversations this gave me a rich source of information about the talents and struggles of team members. It also allowed me to give in the moment feedback and nudges to cultivate healthy team norms.

I can't agree less with this point. While it is great to observe how your team members perform their tasks and interact with colleagues, it is also helpful to do a performance review of their strengths and weaknesses. For examples, feeds backs from colleagues and clients/customers,they directly interface with, work attitude to a given task, contributions, use of initiatives and discretion, can provide insights into their strengths.

Validating people's talents starts with giving them the right projects to demonstrate those talents. I use quarterly OKR-writing (Objectives and Key Results) for this purpose. When we translate team OKRs to individual OKRs, I use information from career conversations, observations and one-on-one meetings to give people projects that fit their talents and desired growth path. We track progress during project meetings and one-on-one meetings. Mid-quarter we score progress across the team to see whether course correction is needed. In all touch points I assess who needs autonomy, and who support. All people get feedback, negative and positive, because both types help people grow. The feedback is always delivered with high personal care.

I critical thing many managers overlook, is that the fact that you are someone's manager doesn't mean they see you as a credible coach. You can't coach people who don't want to be coached (by you). Even as a manager, you need to earn the right to be a coach, give feedback etc. You can try doing it without earning the right, and people will politely listen, but it won't land. Being a good coach starts with investing time and personal care in people, in genuine career conversations, one-on-one meetings, by joining project meetings etc. Those touch points will not just give you the credibility to coach and support, but also and endless amount of moments to provide your input in the moment, which is when support and feedback is most effective.

The reason why many managers don't make the investments I advocate for in my other comments, is that they don't think they have the time. For a small group of managers this is because they chose the manager role for the wrong reason: to progress their own career. They spend more time managing up than down. And unfortunately that often works, so peer managers who do have the right intentions get caught in a prisoner's dilemma. Spending more time on their teams means losing the fight for senior leadership attention from their peers. When you take a long term view though, it's still smarter to invest in your team. There's nothing you can do faster and better as an individual than a high performing team, so investing always pays off.

I strongly feel the empathetic connection with team members is very important. Humanistic connections lead to Empathetic Conversations which lead to identifying the strengths of team members. This leads to meaningful contribution from the team. Please move away from transactional conversations to empathetic conversations. Delegate the work to team members based on their strengths. Also ask people to take turns to do the activities! Trust me your team members will surprise with what they can accomplish and achieve!