Have you asked your team to step-up?

Kedar Sovani
3 min readOct 11, 2024

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As a manager, it is helpful to ask a question to yourself, do you contribute in any active way to your team members’ career growth paths? And if so how?

And how much change do these contributions effect in the career trajectory of the individual?

Often managers are super focused on their primary responsibility, harvesting the crop of high-quality timely deliverables. While this is often the visible result, what is overlooked is that the abundance of this harvest relies on developing the seeds, tending to the soil and nurturing the growth of team members.

A trusted partnership between managers and team members helps employees unlock and reach their true potential. This partnership benefits both, the individual and the team.

What is important here is getting into the right frame of mind, for the manager. The following, I think, are the most critical pieces to develop the right mindset, particularly for newly promoted managers:

  • Plan for the team member’s career path
  • Act as a sports coach working towards this outcome
  • Create opportunities to carry greater responsibilities
  • Call out slack, ensure optimum performance levels

Plan where are they going, and how fast?

One of the things that has helped me is to understand where is the career trajectory of a team member leading to? One way to look at this is, how can they eventually take over your role (or the senior-most person’s role in their career track)? Second, how can they get there fast? And then, based on this, identify what should they do this year in a concretely actionable way.

There should be clear progress year over year, more responsibilities, more influence. Growth should happen fast enough. Having a continuing conversation on this topic helps in mutually understanding how and where the trajectory is going.

Coach about blindspots of ailments

People need a coach because an external entity can help you visualise problems that you yourself are blinded to.

If Sachin Tendulkar is slightly angling his bat incorrectly (and unconsciously) while hitting a Yorker, he needs to be informed of that. As a coach if you do NOT tell him this, you are doing a disservice to him. An engineer’s MRs need to be more disciplined, their unit tests are too run-of-the-mill, they are dragging their feet on something. These need to come out and be discussed in a constructive way.

Only then does a Sachin Tendulkar emerge.

In my experience, I find this analogy very helpful for managers to have the conversations that they think are ‘difficult’ to have. Its even better if you communicate this “coach” mindset of yours with the team.

Create Opportunities

As you work with the team on the plan and the team pitches in, you start to see people going above and beyond. For those who do, create opportunities to take on greater responsibilities. This is exactly what they signed up for, faster growth, bigger role. As work allocators, managers have a high-degree of agency for facilitating this, use it effectively.

As the team members put in extra effort in their own way, this is your way of rising to the occasion: thus creating a flywheel for progress.

Ensure optimum levels

Through the year, there are ebbs and flows in an individual’s performance. Your role is to ensure that the average is always at optimum levels. If somebody is getting too complacent, its time for a conversation. Not an end-of-the-world-PIP conversation, but an informal over-a-tea are-you-distracted conversation.

This often gets overlooked by many. If these conversations don’t happen in a timely manner, the baseline of what is considered acceptable, devolves for the whole team. In a short while, it becomes a team of proud under-achievers.

Managing deliverables and a team involves many moving pieces and dimensions, requiring varying approaches and tactics. The above is what I believe a good foundational model to lay the other pieces on. I’d love to hear of your experiences.

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Kedar Sovani

Startups, Learning, Innovation, Internet-of-Things, Technology, Books, Yoga, Leadership, Teaching http://kedar.dumpstack.com