So hi, everyone. Before I jump in to present more, can I just ask someone to confirm the chat that you can see my slide? Thank you, Elise. Much appreciated.I'm gonna go into screen share mode so I may not be able to see your comments, but I will keep coming back every once in a while. Alright. So let's go ahead and talk about the 4 g manager framework. Very simply put the 4 g manager helps their team do 4 things and all of them start with a tree. So it's really easy for you to remember. The first one, they help their people glow by bringing out the best in their people and in their people's work. The second one. They help their people grow by stretching them, holding them accountable, and expanding their potential.

They help the people get things done by unlocking barriers by learning when to coach, teach, or do the work alongside their people. And finally, they help their people go their own way. In their current role, this can look like giving them flexibility in autonomy in the day to day, but it can also look like helping them go their own way to their next play, whether or not it is on your team, when the time is right for them, not when the time is right for you.

So those are the very simple 4 gs. And what we're gonna do through this session is we're gonna unpack each of these. We're gonna do workshops, right, practice exercises with some of these because I do a larger, deeper workshop on this topic if you ever are interested in it in your organization, and the workshops will give you a sample for what those exercises are like. But important feature also help you apply some of these concepts to your day to day work. So to recap, the 4 g manager helps their people grow, helps their people grow, helps the people get things done and helps the people go their own way. This is a copyrighted framework that I've created but basically, this is a visual that kinda captures all of it in one place. So let's just jump right in. What does glow look like? What exactly, the sub components of bringing out the very best in your people and their work?

The most foundational element to helping bring out the best in other people is creating psychological safety. This is when in your team, you feel like your people can come to you with disagreements and that your body language when someone disagrees with you is that of inclusivity curiosity and open mindedness. It's like you are allowing yourself to be influenced by them rather than that you are putting up a wall, letting them speak and then you're gonna take it out of them either by stone walling and disregarding their input or worse still by lashing out of them for having spoken up.

It's a psychological safety manifests in several forms. And in my deeper workshop, I go deeper on understanding whether or not you have psychological safety today on your team what are some of the signals to look for and how you can build deeper psychological safety on your peaks. But that is the first element of helping bring out the best in your people because without this foundation, pretty much nothing else matters. So if you're the sort of person, that is abusing one day, yelling another day is unpredictable, and it's just difficult to influence because you will not listen and you do not encourage open and honest feedback. The rest of the stuff that I'm gonna talk about in this slide kinda doesn't matter because the foundation is broken. So that's the first element of glow. The second element of glow, I call this showing care and support. And I use all of these words very deliberately.

I didn't just call this care for your people and support your people. I call this show your care and support for your people. What I mean by this is that your people need to feel your support, and they need to know your support through explicit words and gestures. This includes things like remembering what's important to them, not just in their work life, but also in their personal lives. To the extent that you have that kind of transparent relationship, remembering those things and asking about things in their life, even if it's been months since they brought it up. This is how they know that you care because you're proactively bringing up stuff that they put on your radar, and it's not their job to keep reminding you of the tough things that they're going through in their lives. That's what showing support looks like.

Another form of showing support that I go deeper into in my workshop is when you are able to read the room when someone comes to you with a problem, and you're able to assess out what they're saying to you, not just what they're saying to you, but what they're not saying to you and what they're struggling with, for example, it could be that they're telling you things are going well on a project, but in reality, you can catch from the body language that something about working with this partner team is not going as expected.

This is lock you to step in and ask if something is wrong and if they need more air, power, or help from you, that's what black belt level care and support looks like. It's not just caring for them and supporting them. It's showing it through your words, showing it through your actions, and it's reading the room and offering support even when it hasn't been asked for the final element of glow, I find this to be the one that we are least likely to do because we take our superstars for granted.

But for your people that are doing a really great job, even if they're doing that great job in pockets, what are you doing today? To identify what they're really good at, to amplify that thing by talking about it to them, to by talking about it to other parts of the organization, and to leverage those superpowers into projects that this person would be really good at doing. To me, this is the part of a globe that most managers kinda take for granted because our superstars are going to be our superstars, and they do a great job, whether we say it or not. But when you are able to call out to your people, what they do exceptionally well, the skills that they seem to have that other people perhaps don't have as naturally You suddenly help this person understand why they are so valuable to your organization. What was the last time your manager told you what your special sauce was. What was the last time that in a review conversation, your manager didn't choose to maintain You are very collaborative.

You act like a leader, but went really specific and really deep into the things that you do so well that make your work really stand out. If you can't remember that, then that's something to think about and to fix in your own management of your people. So those are the 3 elements of growth. Creating psychological safety, showing care and support, and identifying the skills that your people are really great at, amplifying those skills both to them and to others. And leveraging those skills by giving them the projects that are a really great match for those skills. Before, before I move to the next g, I actually have a little practice exercise for you all. Here's what I would love for you to do. Buy yourself with your little notepad. We're gonna apply that skill, the last one on the previous slide, which I called making the implicit skills explicit.

So here's what you're gonna do. Think for yourself of someone on your team and 1 or 2 things that they do almost effortlessly well that are really unique to them. Now if you had to go back to this person, how would you describe what they do really well in the form of an explicit skill, and how would you share it back with them? I'm gonna give you about 4 minutes, which means at about 10:37. I'll call you guys back into the session, but stay here with your note pack. And just jot this down so you can go back and make the day of one of your superstars on your team. I'm gonna stop sharing so I can see the chat. Oh, you guys. I'm just noticing here that the slides were not changing.

So I'm gonna go ahead and bring up the glow slide and share it with you all and leave it here. I do apologize that I did not catch this earlier. Vanessa, thank you for calling this out and for the others as well. Can you just tell me if you can see the glow slide right now? Thank you. Thank you very much. Those are the 3 that I spoke about psychological safety, care, and support, and identifying, amplifying, and leveraging skills. I'm not gonna go because I don't want you guys to do. There you go. Just speak a person on your team. Identify something that they do incredibly well and write down how you might describe this to them next time.

I will bring you guys back at 10:38, given all of the delays with my screen sharing. You can see that in the notes below my slide, I have a couple of tips on what might make someone really special if you wanted some inspiration on where to get started. By now, I hope you have identified at least one person, at least a couple of things they do well, and you are starting to come up with ideas on how you would say this to them. I'm gonna bring us back in about a minute and keep going. Thank you, everyone. Alright. What did that feel like writing down what some of your people do really well and trying to note down how you might share this back with them? What was that like for you guys? Well, a comment here in the chat is that I feel great, and I like I should have done this sooner.

And today is better than never, but I love that realization. Thank you for sharing it with all of us. And, just imagine how much your people are gonna appreciate the fact that you can see them and you can see what makes them special. It's gonna be so wonderful, and they will double down and do even more of that moving forward. I'm gonna keep moving to the next g, which is grow. This is how do we keep our people accountable and expand their potential. I will say that as women, and this is the women in tech network after all, One of the things that comes very naturally to us and we have been rewarded for our whole lives is nurturing other people, making them feel really good about ourselves. Meaning all of the elements of glow come very easily to us.

And the thing that a lot of us struggle with is how do we do this other part of being a manager, which is helping our people stretch beyond their comfort zone, providing constructive feedback, and so on? What I'm gonna talk about here in GROW. So the first one is constructive feedback. I think the great baseline expectation is that if you are a manager, you are going to be highly skilled and highly willing to offer constructive feedback when you think it can make the other person even better at what they do. So a very simple tip providing really great quality constructive feedback. You guys, if I switch to the presentation mode, my slides are not moving. So I'm trying to stay on this mode. I appreciate your understanding. It's just gonna be hard for me to toggle between the 2. Thank you. So the first one, constructive feedback, 2 tips to provide really high quality, tangible, and specific constructive feedback.

Number 1, focus on a specific and observable behavior, meaning something that you can see this person doing that you can call out clearly. And number 2, focus on the impact that that behavior is having either on their reputation or on their team, the larger organization or the business. That's it. Those are your 2 tips for constructive feedback. And in a minute, we will go deeper into a quick exercise where you can practice providing this to any person on your team. In my larger workshop, I work in a deep, on constructive feedback. I codify what not to do, like expressing yourself, and I codify many more examples of how you can apply constructive feedback, and we do a lot of deep QA on this topic because it tends to be very, very, fraught a lot of people, and it makes a lot of us very anxious.

For today, this is all we have the time for. So number 1, constructive feedback, focus on observable behavior, focus on the impact it has. Number 2, productive stretch. What is productive stretch? This is basically instead of keeping your people in the comfort zone, and remember the 3 circles, the inner most circle is the comfort zone. The circle outside that is the zone of learning a productive stretch, and the zone on the very outside is what we call the zone of danger. What you want to be able to do with your people as they get more and more comfortable with what they're doing, and they get really good at it is you wanna give them opportunities to stretch into what we call the productive shed zone. So how can you give them a little more challenge in the existing project? How can you maybe put them on a different project that expands the challenge even more How can you give them the chance to be in front of more senior leaders and communicate there?

How can you give them more complex problems to solve? All of those are ways in which you can create a productive stretch. So ask yourself for the people on your team that seem to be maxing out their comfort zone. They're doing their work so easily. It's almost in their sleep. They're starting to get bored in the background without you realizing it, and they're not learning or growing. How can you generate a productive stretch for them? And then the 3rd piece of growth is proactively initiating career conversations and asking this person what is their vision for the next 2 years, the next 5 to 10 years, and the next 15 to 20 years if that's what they want for their career. You asking them that question will give them the permission to share what they really love doing, both in their current job, but also what they envision themselves doing in the future. If you are a really great manager, then a big part of it is letting your people move on to the things that are right for them versus holding them forever.

We will talk about the specific model later in helping people go their own way. There are several more details to talk about in how to conduct great career conversations Again, I do this at my Indian workshop, but for today, I wanna leave you with these 3 ways to help your people grow, provide constructive feedback, create productive stretch and have regular career conversations.

With this, I'm gonna take us into another exercise on how to provide constructive feedback. So here we go. Again, I'm gonna give you about 3 minutes, not 5, just to be interested in time. I want each of you to pick a team member, somebody who reports up to you if you're a manager, if you're not a manager than a colleague and think of an area that you feel like if they could do this differently, if they could do this better, they would really grow faster in their career.

Then describe in the form of number 1, the observable behavior. And number 2, the impact to them or the impact the business that constructive feedback. So describe that. Write it down for yourself. I just think how are you gonna share this back with your colleague or your team member. And that's it. Ignore the switch and repeat part of my instructions at the end. And I mean, if you have 3 minutes to do this, And we'll come back at the end of those few minutes and ask how this was. So go ahead. Think of someone, write down constructive feedback in the form of observable behavior and impact. And practice how you're gonna say it to the person when you leave this session. With a 1043, I will bring you all back at 1046. One moment before we come back.

I'm hoping you're using this time to wrap up you're gonna communicate constructive feedback to a member of your field. Alright. Curissa folks can go ahead and add in the chat what that felt like. Writing down how you're gonna offer constructive feedback to someone. I'd love to know what came up as you were doing that. And while I hear your reactions, I'm gonna move on and talk about something really important. Often in our minds, there is a false trade off between helping people grow and helping people grow. I've heard a lot of leaders talk about balancing, compassion with accountability as if they are choices that you have to make versus each other. I staunchly refused to buy into the notion that you can either treat people really well and care and support them and create safety or you will stretch them, provide constructive feedback.

These are not ours. These are things that could coexist with each other. And in fact, if you are offering a lot of glow, but very little opportunity to grow, you fall into what I fall for the buddy quadrant, you're acting more like a friend or a buddy that, like, the manager that is supposed to help them grow. On the other hand, if you're holding them accountable constantly, but don't bother telling them what they're doing well. Don't bother offering safety and support, then you are probably abusive under micromanagement. What you want to sit in is this quadrant of the empowering leader where they know you care for them, but they also know you care enough that you will put them on the right track the growth when they are not doing something that you need them to do. So I want you to think about this because those false trade off can really trip up a lot of us.

I think women in particular really struggle with leaning into holding people accountable, while also expressing compassion. With that, I'm just gonna take a quick look at the chat. Yes. A 100% both of these can exist together. In fact, I think that the more you are able to show support and safety, the more you earn the ability to provide constructive feedback and have it be received really well because you've already established this baseline of care and trust for your people. With that, I'm gonna go into the last two g's, and then we'll keeps some time for Q And A. So the 3rd g is getting things done. There are 3 elements here to getting things done, helping your people get things done. The first one is what I call unlocking barriers. And in my deeper workshop, I go into the many ways in which your people are sometimes asking for help without really asking for help.

So what are the signals you need to be looking for and reading to understand that somebody's crying for help? However, for now, what I will tell you is as a manager, you are what I call the umbrella that's supposed to keep all of the crap of your people. That is our literal job is to create focus, is to create boundaries, is to hold a sense of focus and priorities for our team, that all the random little asks that come from here and there, you are playing the role of air traffic controller. You are figuring out what is worth cascading your team and what is not worth hitting your team. That's one way of unlocking barriers. And the other way of unlocking barriers is knowing enough about the work that your people are doing and reading the signals enough to know when they are asking for you to get involved and provide air cover or navigate conflicts that are happening take rates that are well above theirs, then only you can help them solve.

So that's the first one unlocking barriers. The second one is what I call knowing the difference between coaching. Versus teaching versus doing. So I don't know how many of you deploy this today, but I feel like often when I am so busy with my day to day, I can revert to treating all my people the same way. The reality, some of my people are more tenured and more experienced, and other people are newer. Which means that I want tenure people probably need me asking them questions that kind of guide them on the right track, but I want them to be making a lot of the decisions. I wanna ask them questions about the choices they're making, the potential trade offs, and I want to teach them how to think for themselves so I do this through coaching, meaning asking questions, playing things back, laying out options, etcetera. Teaching is where someone literally does not know how to do something.

I sit there and I teach them what to do, often this applies to more junior folks or people that haven't done something ever before. And the doing becomes really important when you're in either crisis mode or when you're in the last mile of a delivery deadline. And what your team really needs is not your voice, but your hands alongside them. Helping them move the project forward. So knowing when to discern between the need to coach do versus speech, think that is one of the most underrated skills of great managers. And then finally, under get things done is what I call rewarding the invisible work. I mean, there are so many women here and some men on the call. You know what it's like to do the grunt work that happens behind the scenes?

To organize a team get together sometimes to keep projects that, that are just keeping the lights on for the business, but are not on the shiny project trackers that the executive team was paid attention to. There's a lot of people in every organization that are working on really important things. That are really necessary, but are super undervalued and don't have the spotlight on them. Those people are important to your organization. If they leave, you are in a lot of trouble. But when they're there, are you rewarding them for all the invisible work that they're doing? So this is what rewarding invisible work is about. In a deeper workshop, I get deeper into what sorts of invisible work exists, what are some of the patterns that you can observe, and what does rewarding them actually look like? But for now, I will leave you with reward invisible work. And then finally, healthy people go their own way.

So this 4th g is all about When people are in their current job, it's all about creating autonomy, creating flexibility. So you are clear with them on what great looks like on the outcome. But you are not micromanaging how they get from point a to the outcome. You have a set of expectations, perhaps, on when you will check-in with other, depending on their seniority, depending on their performance history. But at what point are you jumping in at every minute to check on how they are going, you're letting this person feel like they're running the project. And, again, there are deeper elements to this, but we don't have time for today, but autonomy flexibility to the extent that your organization allows it are really important elements to core intrinsic motivation. But for the people that you feel like have maxed out their time on your team, they've learned what they can.

They're offering they're operating at the peak of their capacity and their performance, and you feel like this person needs a new challenge. They've been doing this for a very long time. Great managers are exceptional at posing the question. What's next for you? Are you happy here? Are you still feeling fulfilled and stretched? Or is there something else we should be talking about deploying you towards? If we can keep you within the larger organization, that's a win for everyone, even if it is a loss for me, But this is how we help talent move around by encouraging them. And remember, when you let great talent go, they will eventually find their way back to you. And even if they don't, they're gonna go tell other people about what a great manager you are, and you will attract other great talent instead.

So help if people go there one way. This is all about creating autonomy and flexibility and current roles, but also when people are looking like they're peeking out of their current role, and when they're maxing out their performance and their potential in the current job, you proactively raising the question of, what is a great engaging next play look like for you, whether it's within my team or somewhere else?

And with that, folks, I know that some of my earlier slides were lost when I was presenting earlier. And so I wanted to make sure I brought up the 4 g manager framework again. A quick recap, the 4 gs are helping your people grow, helping your people grow, helping people get things done, helping people go their own way. And there's a lot more detail in there. Like I said, I do a more detailed version of this workshop that is more customized to where you feel like your people managers need to develop, and we can just focus all of the exercises and the deep dives on those sections. That session is obviously longer than an hour. This is everything that we were able to pack in today.

I'm gonna leave my LinkedIn profile QR code up here so you could scan it if you wanna connect with me about anything. And I will go ahead and invite any questions you wanna drop into the chat right now so we can make this even more useful to you. Thank you for your engagement, everyone. I would love to take any questions in the in the 6 or so minutes that we have left. While I'm really questions, I would also love to hear if there are any insights that folks have from this session that they are planning to apply immediately at their workplace and with their teams. While I'll wait for any questions to come up, I'm gonna go ahead and pull up the slide on the 4 g framework itself. If you're using this anywhere, please make sure you're crediting me because I've copyrighted this framework.

If you're ever interested in a deeper engagement on this topic, I would love to talk. You can go into my LinkedIn profile, Diana, and, you should see a little book and appointment button there. You can use that button to set up an appointment with me so we can scope out what a workshop looks like. I will also be introducing a little appointment pattern for the workshop itself. But in the meantime, you can just send me a direct message on LinkedIn, and we can start that. If you wanna find more detail on the 4 g manager framework in written form, you can go to my LinkedIn profile and have written a whole article about it.

That serves as, like, a too long don't read version. But my workshop is nowhere, obviously, because it's something that I do if you engage me separately. Thank you. Are there any other questions folks are grappling with on managing people and becoming talent magnets? Some of the questions that I have gotten in the past that I can introduce to this group. Number 1, at a recent forum, I was asked the question Why should I bother to do this if, someone like an Elon Musk will not bother to do it? And my answer to that question is I think you just need to decide what kind of manager you to be, it feels to me like Elon has chosen what to prioritize. So you just need to ask yourself, what are your values? And what's the sort of person you wanna be?

If you wanna be a talent magnet, I would say this is, like, this is the broad recipe. If you want to do a bunch of other things and you're optimizing for a different as outcomes by all means, you should operate like Elon Musk. Thomas, thank you for your question. For those who are just listening, Do you have any tools or guidance on how to engage with colleagues to have career conversations when you have a team member who tends to deflect these conversations repeatedly? Oh, what an exceptional question, Thomas. I'm so glad you asked us everyone's gonna benefit from hearing this. I think of career conversations as an absolute two way street. In fact, I would say that as a manager, it is your job.

Like, you can go above and beyond, basically, by initiating a career conversation, but career development is an individual's responsibility at the end of the day. So if you bring it up and a team member repeatedly deflect it or says, hey. I don't really know what I wanted of my career. I think you've done your job. You can ask them to dig a little bit deeper using some coaching frameworks around what are their important values. What do they get happiness from doing? What are they what are skills that they already have? What are some new skills they wanna learn? These are all, what I call, scaffolding questions that you can use to ideas for them. But if at the end of the day, an individual does not want to take responsibility for their career development, and they don't wanna engage in a career conversation that you are starting, then I would say you are absolved of the responsibility of pushing them hard because individuals have to own our careers.

This is true for us too. We have to own our careers as managers but I think this wonderful when your manager comes to you and says, hey, I'd love to encourage the conversation. And so that's all I meant is it's your job to initiate and put it on the table. So it feels safe for them, but I don't think all the responsibility rests with you. I hope that helps Thomas. We have about 2 minutes. If there are any other questions, I'd love to take them right now. Alright, folks. If there are no more questions, again, here's where you can find me on LinkedIn. If you want to do a deeper workshop on this topic for your organization, then, please reach out to me on LinkedIn through a direct message, and we can talk Thomas, one more question, any frameworks or tools to identify productive stretch opportunities for colleagues?

Well, I I hope that when you say colleagues, you mean team members, that report up to you. Absolutely. I do. This is a longer answer. We go into it more deeply in the workshop. The simple clue is if I think about where they are really proficient across 4 skill dimensions, which I mean, functional business acumen, organizational acumen, and leadership acumen, spasmacy across all of those dimensions of skills, whether they already really, really competent and maxing out versus where are they still developing?

I would choose productive stretch opportunities on the dimensions where they're closer to maxing out and becoming super proficient rather than giving them productive structure opportunities on dimensions where they are still developing. So that's the starting point for an answer more later, hopefully. Thank you everybody for joining this session. It was great to be here with you. Connect with me on LinkedIn, and let's talk. Take care, everyone.