Essential Conversations Guidebook v.12 - online version

Essential Conversations
A Guidebook for Managers
How to Conduct Effective, Valuable
One-to-One Meetings with
Your Direct Reports

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….………………………………………………………3
THE WHY………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..….4 – 5
THE HOW…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…………..6 – 10
Be a Coach……………………………………………………………………………………………………………7
Use Strengths-based language……………………………………………………………...........…….8
Provide not just feedback but also feedforward………………………………………........…..9
Listen……………………………………………………………………………………………………......……...10
Prevent interruptions……………………………………………………………………………...........…10
Leave time to brainstorm………………………………………………………………………..........…10
End with agreement………………………………………………………………………………..........…10
THE WHAT …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….11 – 16
Create a regular schedule…………………………………………………………………………….……12
Prepare………………………………………………………………………………………………….………....13
Ask good questions……………………………………………………………………………………….…..14
The Tools…………………….……………………………………………………………………………………..15
The Process………………………………………………………………………………………………………..16
APPENDIX…………………………………………………………………………………………………….……………….17 – 27
Infographic: Essential Conversations – Tactics for Success…………….…………….…….19
The 15-5 Report…………………………………………………………………………………......…20 – 21
Custom Conversation Guide…………………..……………………….…………………………….…..22
A Manager’s Quick Question Guide for an Essential Conversation.……………….…..23
7 Powerful Questions to Radically Lift an Essential Conversation……………….………24
Strengths Roll-a-Die Exercise……………………………………………………………….…………….25
The Challenge Question Exercise……………………………………..………………………….…….26
Quarterly Conversation Form.….………………………………………………………………………..27
SOURCES……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….28
Sungard Availability Services Confidential and Proprietary

Managing a team has never been more complex. Knowledge-based employees are challenging status-quo leadership at every turn.
Many of them work from home or are distributed across time-zones, and sometimes across continents. Even at locations where
everyone works under one roof, the unique demands of the modern workforce are evolving.
To perform at their best, employees seek purpose and meaning in their work. They want the right mix of challenge and autonomy
and crave strong relationships with their managers and colleagues. They need to understand how their work and their results
connect to the big picture: our strategy, our corporate goals, and our customers.
How will we retain talent, ensure their happiness and
allow them to do their best work week after week?
Providing meaningful and timely coaching and feedback throughout the year is important to our individual and collective success.
One-to-one meetings having meaningful conversations are critical to building relationships and maintaining an open line of
communication between you and each of your direct reports. These meetings can serve as a vehicle for monitoring progress on
goals, providing developmental feedback, and coaching.
To facilitate a more productive dialogue between employees and their managers,
we are transforming our performance management program.
In the talent development world, employee performance is everything. To
ensure optimum business results, managers must adept at determining
standards of performance, identifying performance gaps, and coaching
employees to ensure that any gaps are quickly and appropriately addressed.
In order to be successful managers, we must be effective coaches with the
ability to conduct more frequent, meaningful conversations with our
employees, ask powerful questions, listen actively, and offer observations.
Managers must help employees create shifts in their beliefs and actions that
will result in the achievement of desired results. Having these essential
conversations is a partnership between the manager, or coach, and the
employee, where the main goal is to help the employee develop and
contribute to the business.
A regular cadence of essential conversations are based on the premise that, with help,
employees can ignite their own potential and achieve or even accelerate their results
by discovering solutions for themselves. These frequently scheduled meetings will help
people identify their individual aspirations for change, desired results, and solutions
and then match those goals with the needs of the business. A successful manager is a
partner of employees and teams, helping them to come to their own conclusions, take
action, and reach their potential.
This Guide Book is designed to provide you with the Why, the How, and the What to having essential conversations with your direct
reports. It’s content explains how to schedule, prepare for, and conduct recurring, productive one-to-one meetings and having
essential conversations with your direct reports. The following pages are packed with best practices, job aids, tactical steps, and
tools for you to get started.
Introduction
3

The WHY…
4

COMMUNICATION
AND
TRUST
Managers can
foster positive
relationships
and broaden capacity in their
teams through communication
and genuine understanding
which leads to trust. And, trust
lies at the heart of strong
manager-employee
relationships.
ENRICHES
CULTURE
Organizational culture drives
employee engagement. And
employee engagement drives
bottom-line results.
TRANSPARENCY
Employee engagement is
affected by perceptions of
transparency. Regular,
authentic, and reciprocal
one-to-one communication
is a key action
for creating
transparency
that can improve
engagement.
CONNECTED
RELATIONSHIPS
Having frequent one-to-one
meetings with essential
conversations contributes
highly to improved
communication and trust
between managers and
employees, which nurtures
their relationship.
CONTINUOUS
IMPROVEMENT
A one-to-one essential
conversation has the
potential to reinforce
company values,
strengthen workplace
culture, and achieve
strategic objectives.
Ideally, employees feel
respected, invested in the
company’s success, and
committed to their own
learning and development.
PERFORMANCE
MANAGEMENT
Regular one-to-one meetings
provides opportunities for
managers to share performance
information, and the employees
take ownership of and use the
feedback, feel empowered to
take action toward performance
that is aligned with
organizational goals and self-
directed development.
The Value of
ESSENTIAL
CONVERSATIONS
Managers must also be equipped with the ability and tools to conduct recurring performance conversations with their employees.
Three necessary skills that managers must demonstrate during those essential conversations include:
Set reasonable,
measurable goals
Identify and recognize
praiseworthy behaviors
Focus on enhancing employees’ strengths
and not improving their weaknesses
5
TheWHY…
Essential conversations give employees an understanding of where they stand relative to their work so that they
can improve, and it gives managers the ability to realign the team. One-to-one meetings require an investment in
time; however, the essential conversations during these meetings are valuable for many reasons.

The HOW…
6

Be a Coach
manager – [man-i-jer] n.
(1) a person who has control or direction of an institution, business, etc., or of a part, division,
or phase of it.
(2) a person who controls and manipulates resources and expenditures, as of a household.
Wow, that sounds scary. Who wants to be controlled or manipulated? Not your employees. The best way to
run a team is not view the employees in service to the company, but to view the company in service to its employees.
Given the right structure and environment, people have an incredible innate capacity for learning and growth. But with barely
enough time to get your own tasks completed, you may be tempted to just let challenged employees figure things out for
themselves. Employees wither in overly-stressful and unsupportive environments.
Having more frequent one-to-one meetings allow managers to offer their observations and support, and create shifts in employees’
thinking.
The ability to help your employees shift their thinking is the
difference between merely having a conversation and having an
essential, coaching conversation.
Provide balanced coaching and developmental feedback
based on what you’re hearing in the conversation.
Recognize accomplishments and help your direct reports
navigate challenging relationships and difficult
circumstances. Help them change their perspective on
their own situation or their potential for growth.
Guide them without giving them all the answers; give
them space to reach their own conclusions.
7
Creating a shift in thinking is the
defining moment of any coaching
conversation, the clarifying
moment when your employee
can see possibilities that weren't
apparent just moments earlier.
TheHOW…

Use Strengths-based language
When only 25% of your workforce strongly agrees with the statement –
“I have an opportunity to do what I do best every day,”
there is an opportunity for managers to make a difference.
Sungard Availability Services has adopted the concept of Strengths-based development. That is, employees should develop and
grow those abilities in which they excel and are engaged. These are known as Strengths. All Sungard AS employees will have an
opportunity to complete an assessment showcasing their Top 5 Strengths. Managers should support their direct reports as they
develop, utilize and leverage these Strengths to achieve success.*
As discussed in the Facilitating Your Strengths class, Managers should:
1. Appreciate and Understand Unique Strengths of individuals
2. Identify Tasks and Activities for the role and individual
3. Invest in Individual Strengths
Return to the Strengths Discovery Discussion Guide to utilize all of the
questions shown there, but here are a few key questions:
Which of your Top 5 Strengths and themes resonates with you
the most?
How can I help you use that Strength more often?
Tell me about a recent time where you’ve used that Strength
successfully? Be specific about how the Strengths influenced
your thoughts or actions
Which Strength do you envy/wish you had? Why? Which of
your Strengths could “parrot/look like” this Strength?
Which of your Strengths could benefit the team if you had more
opportunities to use it?
8
*Check out the Strengths Roll-a-die Activity
TheHOW…

Provide not just feedback but also feedforward
Feedback provides information on how a person performed; it focuses on what a person did in the past. Feedforward provides
information on how a person can enhance his/her perform; it focuses on how a person can change for the future.
Marshall Goldsmith, a thought-leader on all things leadership, highlights the concepts saying,
The goal of a one-to-one conversation is to help your direct report reach success. Solely
focusing on how he/she performed will not permit growth or development. As a manager you
have the ability to reflect on situation and the performance. Your greatest ability is to provide
guidance on how your direct report can behave differently to ensure success.
Here are a few reasons why Marshall Goldsmith believes in feedforward as an important tool for managers:
It can be more productive to help
people learn to be “right,” than prove
they were “wrong.” Negative feedback
often becomes an exercise in “let me
prove you were wrong.” Even
constructively delivered feedback is
often seen as negative as it necessarily
involves a discussion of mistakes,
shortfalls, and problems. Feedforward,
on the other hand, is almost always
seen as positive because it focuses on
solutions – not problems.
People do not take feedforward as
personally as feedback. In theory,
constructive feedback is supposed to
“focus on the performance, not the
person”. In practice, almost all
feedback is taken personally (no
matter how it is delivered).
Feedforward cannot involve a personal
critique, since it is discussing
something that has not yet happened!
Positive suggestions tend to be seen as
objective advice – personal critiques
are often viewed as personal attacks.
Feedforward is especially suited to
successful people. Successful people
like getting ideas that are aimed at
helping them achieve their goals.
Successful people tend to have a very
positive self-image. I have observed
many successful executives respond to
(and even enjoy) feedforward. I am not
sure that these same people would
have had such a positive reaction to
feedback.
Feedforward tends to be much faster and more efficient
than feedback. An excellent technique for giving ideas to
successful people is to say, “Here are four ideas for the
future. Please accept these in the positive spirit that they
are given. If you can only use two of the ideas, you are
still two ahead. Just ignore what doesn’t make sense for
you.”
With this approach almost no time gets wasted on
judging the quality of the ideas or “proving that the
ideas are wrong”. This “debate” time is usually negative;
it can take up a lot of time, and it is often not very
productive. By eliminating judgment of the ideas, the
process becomes much more positive for the sender, as
well as the receiver.
People tend to listen more attentively to
feedforward than feedback. Can you
relate to this ? “Normally, when others
are speaking, I am so busy composing a
reply that will make sure that I sound
smart – that I am not fully listening to
what the other person is saying I am just
composing my response.” In
feedforward the only reply that you
should make is ‘thank you’. Then you
don’t have to worry about composing a
clever reply. You focus all of your energy
on listening to the other person!
9
TheHOW…

Listen
Give your direct reports time to respond to the questions, without interruption. Everyone needs time to gather
and finish their thoughts, so don’t interject until the time is right.
The words that employees use are only part of the stories they’re telling. Their gestures, tone of voice, emotions,
and even what they are not saying can be equally important. Listen as much to what’s not being said as to what is,
and write down any words or phrases that trigger more deeper questions for you. The information and
impressions you gather will lead to more powerful questions and greater observations to share with your
employees.
Prevent interruptions
You can demonstrate how important one-to-one time is to you by clearing your desk, locking
your computer, forwarding your desk phone to voicemail, and silencing your cellphone. If you
have an office, closing the door is recommended as a way to maintain privacy. If you don’t have
an office, consider choosing an alternate location for meetings, such as a conference room.
Leave time to brainstorm
As a partner on this journey to new management practices with your direct reports,
you can help brainstorm solutions based on the new insights. These may include
offering your observations, suggestions, and support. If so, remember that any
suggestion is just that—an idea or a hint, not an answer or a mandate. The purpose
of brainstorming is to help employees come to their own conclusions and establish
the actions they’ll take. Keep an open mind and stay flexible about what develops as
a result of brainstorming solutions.
End with agreement
Never presume that you understand everything an employee tells you, and don’t rely solely on your intuition. As a great
manager and coach, check your understanding by summarizing what you heard and sharing your hunches. Ask if your
conclusions are correct, and ask for clarification when it’s needed.
There are two very powerful questions on which you can end every meeting:
1.What can I be accountable to you by the next time we meet?
2.What will you be accountable for by the next time we meet?
Both you and your direct report should note what next steps (actions) each of you is responsible for, and include relevant
details like ownership and due date.
Follow through. If you have any action from the meeting, be sure to take those actions in a timely way. If you’ve agreed to
a follow-up action by a specific date or time, follow through. In any event, be sure that any open-ended follow-up items are
complete before your next meeting.
10
TheHOW…

The WHAT…
11

Create a regular schedule
At the start, this management shift may prove challenging for everyone. When taking on this new managing method, share your
approach with your team. Describe how you’d like to involve them and what you expect of them. Explain your role as a partner and
coach who will help them discover answers. Show them how this will benefit them, the team, and the business. Be sure they know
that this partnership will work only with their full participation.
Create recurring one-to-one meetings in your calendar with each direct report. Choose the meeting interval that works best for
timely communication and support. It is highly recommended to schedule a minimum of
You can conduct one 60-minute meeting on a monthly cadence; however, you may find that more frequent meetings, such as half-
hour meetings occurring every other week are needed. Be sensitive to the needs of your direct reports as individuals, and get their
input when creating a schedule.
On a quarterly basis, you will be required to document one of your one-to-one meetings with each of your direct reports.
You will also have a 5th conversation at the end of the year.
By no means should more frequent one-to-one conversations become the only face-to-face communication between you
and your direct reports. You should continue scheduling and conducting other touch points, (e.g. team meetings) as
needed. The one-to-one meetings are intended to routinely provide (and protect) time for essential conversations that
support individual growth and success.
Stick to the schedule. Making these meetings a priority demonstrates that you value your relationships with your direct
reports. If you absolutely have to miss a meeting, try to reschedule it for the same day or the next day. Never skip a
scheduled one-to-one meeting.
12
TheWHAT…
“To succeed today, companies cannot rely on the most important conversations
between managers and employees happening only once or twice a year.”

Prepare
Spend some time before the meeting to review your direct report’s goals and make note of any
potential updates/additions to goals and/or emphasis you want to place on specific growth behaviors
during the one-to-one meeting.
Figure out what information you need and what you want to say, and prioritize items in case the
time allotted isn’t enough to cover everything in one session. After selecting the topics or categories
you will cover in your one-to-one meeting, you should prepare questions to ask which will guide the
essential conversation. Take advantage of the various one-to-one meeting resources, templates and
tools, which you can find in this guide book and on Community.
It is important to note that one-to-one meetings are essential conversations that build relationships and provide support. In
preparing for them, remember that the meeting is not just your agenda and should not be used to clear your to-do list, or elicit just
a status report. There are seven key topics or categories which can be covered during a one-to-one essential conversation:
Depending upon the frequency and length of your one-to-one meetings, you may not be able to cover all seven topics.
Prepare for each one-to-one meeting and determine which topics to cover.
13
TheWHAT…
General status of
activities and goals
The how – Sungard Availability Services
values and general description of how
accomplishments are made
Take time to learn about your
direct report and who they are.
Where the employee is looking to grow
How engaged is the employee?
What motivates him or her?
How do they like to be recognized?
What is working? What is not? What processes
need to be improved and how can we fix them?
What new ideas does the employee have?
Always ask for feedback from
your direct reports.

Ask good questions
14
TheWHAT…
Questions to ask during a one-to-one meeting*
Use the 15-5 Report to gather status reports on projects**
► What is the best thing that happened to you this past week/two weeks/month?
► What’s going well in your role?
► Any wins (big or small) this past week/two weeks/month?
► What activities are you employing to create progress?
► What are some great contributions made by other team members?
► What is the business doing, or can be doing, to make you more successful?
► What team(s) are you collaborating with? How is that collaboration going?
► Which of the Sungard AS values are you using to achieve success?
► Which of your Strengths are you using to achieve success?
► What is the best thing that happened to you outside of work this past week/two
weeks/month?
► How are you feeling about the work that you are performing?
► How do you like to be recognized?
► What’s the morale around you?
► Which of your Strengths are you current using?
► How would you describe your engagement with the work that you are
performing?
► What could you and I do increase your engagement?
► What learning opportunities and experiences do you need to increase success?
► What, if any, changes would you make?
Consider having a career development conversation on a quarterly basis
► What challenges/road blocks are you facing?
► Where are you stuck?
► What is one idea to improve a product/service/process at Sungard AS?
► If you were the CEO, what is one thing you would do differently?
► Provide feedback on how I can better support you.
► What do you need me to be doing differently? Continue doing?
► What can I do to help remove any roadblocks or support you in your work?
After selecting the topics or categories you will cover in your one-to-one meeting, you should prepare
questions to ask which will guide the essential conversation.
Asking the right questions to employees is an agile and lightweight way of keeping up with what’s
really going on. Questions are the sparks that ignite the imagination, and light the way towards
desired results. The power of inquiry allows managers to acknowledge successes and offer support to
help people learn, grow, and eventually become their greatest selves. Answers to powerful questions
become the essential conversation about what is meaningful for the team and the company, and
those conversations transform into action.
Conversations Guides have been created for you to help you use these questions.

The Tools
The appendix contains various tools and templates for you to use to prepare your one-to-one
meetings and to record your direct reports’ responses. The four ‘go-to’ tools are:
15
TheWHAT…
Go to
AS Community
to find printables
and downloads
1
2
“Don’t just review performance, improve it.”
3
4

The Process – a Method and a Model
Asking good questions is how you can produce meaningful dialogue, but how you create, continue and change behavior is what
sustain success.
There are 3 methods you can achieve this through – Feedback, Feedforward and Coaching
So that you can effectively utilize these tools, ask good questions and engage in essential conversations, exercise the STAR Method
and GROW Model to provide feedback, feedforward and coaching.
16
TheWHAT…
Task
What were the
smaller tangible
goals your direct
report set to help
achieve the
overall goal?
Situation
What was the
overall goal
he/she wanted to
achieve?
Result
What were the
results after
he/she put the
actions in
place?
Action
What actions
did your direct
report take to
achieve the
goal?
Feedback provides information on how a person
performed; it focuses on what a person did in the past.
Using the STAR method can help provide guidance
based on experiences that were conducted.
Feedforward provides information on how a person can
enhance his/her performance; it focuses on how a
person can change for the future.
Now that we’ve discussed your
experiences from the Cloud project, may I
offer some ideas for how I believe you
can improve for the next time?
Being a coach may be different than using a
coaching model. Coaches should help employees
focus on the future based around issues and
problems that the employee wants to solve.
Coaches may make suggestions on how to handle a
situation but it is up to the employee to make the
decision and take ownership of the process.

Appendix:
Tools to Conduct Essential Conversations
17

Appendix:
Tools to Guide Essential Conversations
► Infographic: Essentials Conversations – Tactics for Success
► The 15-5 Report
► Custom Conversation Guide – an Excel tool
► A Manager’s Quick Question Guide for an Essential Conversation
► 7 Powerful Questions to Radically Lift an Essential Conversation
► The Walking Meeting
► Strengths Roll-a-die Activity
► The Challenge Question Exercise
► Quarterly Conversation Form
► Guidebook Sources
18

Agree
25%
Disagree
75%
Essential Conversations – Tactics for Success
…because only 25%
of employees agree
they have an
opportunity to do
what they do best
every day.
TaskSituation
Result Action

Peter Drucker said it best, "What gets measured, gets done.“
The concept of The 15-5 Report is simple –
a single-page flash communication
that a direct report submits to the manager
on a regular cadence to provide a status
report.
The 15-5 Report
the report for managers who have no time for reports
20
15-5 Reports provide
instant feedback that
is crucial to a
smoothly functioning,
process-heavy
workplace.
A 15-5 Report should
take no more than
fifteen minutes to
hand-write on a
standardized form and
…………… five minutes
…………… to read and
…………… understand.
These reports allow
individual
contributors to
communicate
successes without
feeling awkward,
capture important
lessons, demonstrate
awareness of next
steps, and alert you
to setbacks without
asking for support.
15-5 Reports are intended
to help managers and their
direct reports think
proactively, work smarter,
not harder, and create a
sense of involvement,
teamwork and inclusion.
They reinforce the
importance of regular
and consistent
feedback.
Employees who are required to
set goals on a regular basis will
always perform at a higher level.
Complete a 15-5
Report prior to
each 1-to-1 for
your project(s)
update

My Weekly 15-5 Report
Name
Date
Achievements
List your accomplishments during the week, including activities you’ve completed and objectives you’ve met. What’s working?
What are the tangible progress/results accomplished? How did you achieve it/them?
What Sungard AS values, and Strengths did you leverage?
Priorities and Plans
State your specific, targeted prioritized plans for the next week. Include due dates.
Potential Challenges
Describe any potential obstacles. What’s not working?
Opportunities
Record any lessons you’ve learned and note areas where you can improve.

22
Custom Conversation Guide

A Manager’s Quick Question
Guide for an Essential Conversation
What’s the best thing that happened to you this week, either at work or outside of it?
What’s going well in your role? Any wins (big or small) this week?
What are some great contributions made by other team members?
How are you feeling? What’s the morale around you?
On a scale of 1-10, how happy are you? Why?
What challenges are you facing? Where are you stuck?
What is the business doing, or can be doing, to make you more successful?
What is one idea to improve a product/service/process at Sungard AS?
If you were the CEO of the company, what’s one thing you would do differently?
Provide feedback on how I can be a better leader.

7 Powerful Questions
to Radically Lift an Essential Conversation
If you are already having regular one-to-one meetings, here are seven questions for busy managers to radically lift those essential
conversations.
These questions are not used in sequence of one another but sprinkled into the conversation with a direct report to exhibit your
curiosity and service to them as their manager. When we feel the pressure to get things done, it’s all too easy to default to giving
advice and providing solutions. That’s often a hollow victory. Adapting some of the principles and practices of building a coaching
habit may be a little uncomfortable at first – for you and for the people you lead – but the upshot is you’ll work less hard and have
more impact. And these seven question will get you there.
1. What’s on your mind?
The Kick Start Question starts fast and gets to the heart of the matter quickly.
It cuts to what’s important while side stepping stale agendas and small talk.
2. And what else?
The AWE Question keeps the flame of curiosity burning.
“And what else?” may seem like three small words, but it’s actually the best
coaching question in the world. That’s because someone’s first answer is never
the only answer – and rarely the best answer. There are always more answers
to be found and possibilities to be uncovered.
3. What’s the real challenge here for you?
This is the Focus Question. It gets to the essence of the issue at hand. This
question defuses the rush to action, which has many managers and employees
busily and cleverly solving the wrong problems. This is the question to get you
focused on solving the real problem, not just the first problem.
4. What do you want?
This is the Foundation Question. It’s trickier than you think to answer, and many
disagreements or dysfunctional relationships will untangle with this simple but
difficult exchange: “Here’s what I want. What do you want?”
5. How can I help?
It might come as a surprise that sometimes managers’ desire to be helpful can
actually have a disempowering effect on the employee being helped. This
question counteracts that. It prevents you from leaping in and beginning things
you think people want you to do.
6. If you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?
If you have an employee who feels compelled to say “yes” to every request or
challenge, than this question is for you. Many employees feel overwhelmed and
overcommitted; they’ve lost their focus and spread themselves too thin.
That’s why you need to ask this Strategic Question.
7. What was most useful for you?
Your closer is the Learning Question. It helps finish the essential conversation strong, rather than just fading away. This
question helps reinforce learning and development. They identify value in the conversation – something they’re likely to
miss otherwise, and you get the bonus of useful feedback for your next one-to-one meeting.
The Walking Meeting
Ask your employees to take a walk with you.
There is a growing trend of holding more
purposeful walking meetings, especially in light
of research that indicates how damaging
sedentary lifestyles are to our health.
So how does one have successful walking
meeting? Here are two simple ideas for
holding effective walking meetings:
• You should plan to walk outdoors because
there’s no better way to stimulate
creativity than a change of scenery. Quiet
parks and other green spaces are ideal;
busy sidewalks along noisy streets are not.
• The purpose of a walking meeting should
be clearly defined so that everyone stays
on topic.
Walking meetings are especially good
opportunities to have a brainstorming session.
It’s “getting out of the box that leads to out-of-
the-box thinking.”
24

Follow these steps to add Strengths into your Essential Conversations:
1. Ask your direct report to roll a die.
2. If the numbers 1-5 come up ask him or her to discuss their top five Strength
from his or her Report that matches the die.
For example, if he or she rolls a three. He or she will read his or her
third Strength and discuss the statements below.
3. If the number 6 comes up, he/she can choose any Strength.
Potential areas to discuss could be:
► Tell me about a time in the last month that you have used the
Strength of ______ and how it has helped you achieve success.
► Tell me about a time in the last month that you have used the Strength of
______ and it became a liability because you maximized it.
► Tell me why you think the Strength of ______ is beneficial to the team and how
we can be using it more effectively.
Strengths Roll-a-Die Exercise
25

The Challenge Question Exercise
One way to add some spontaneity to your one-to-one
meetings is to write Challenge Questions on notecards.
Before concluding the meeting and ending with agreement,
spread out the notecards face-down , have the employee
randomly choose one and answer the question.
CAUTION: A deeper conversation may occur.
► Tell me a fun story about you that recently happened
at work or outside of work.
► What part of your job is least enjoyable? How can you
change it? Or capitalize on your Strengths?
► Is there any part of your job that you didn’t expect doing? If so, what part?
► What has been the most challenging part of your job recently?
► What part of your job do you love doing?
► What is one thing you’re consistently doing that I am unaware of or don’t
completely understand?
► Where would you like more responsibility within your role, if any?
► What have you accomplished that you can put on your resume?
► What attribute/skillset/competency are you
intentionally working on enhancing?
► Tell me about a new person you recently added
to your internal network.
► How have you embodied Sungard Availability
Services’ corporate values? Be specific.
26

QuarterlyConversationForm
EssentialConversations
AGuidebookforManagers
SungardAvailabilityServicesConfidentialandProprietary
27
AneasyExceltoolhasbeendevelopedtohelptrackyourconversations.Ithasfivetabs–oneforeachQuarterandonefortheEndoftheYearConversation.UsingthefourQuartertabs,
youmustdocumentatleastoneessentialconversationduringeachthreemonthperiod.ThelasttabistodocumenttheEndoftheYearConversation.
Simplyentertheemployee’sperformancegoalsintothecellsinthefirstcolumn.ThencompletetheothercolumnsafteryouhaveconductedanOne-to-OneEssentialConversation.
ItisimportanttoremarkontheSungardAvailabilityServices’Values.TheManagerCommentscolumngivesyoutheopportunitytoincludeinformationabouttheemployee’sengagement,
andproblemsolvingandinnovationskills.
Thesedocumentswillbekept________andshouldbemaintainedthroughouttheyear.ItisimperativetokeeptheseupdatedtomakeyourEndoftheYearConversationeasier.More
frequentconversationsthroughouttheyearwillbeprovidemoresufficientdatatosupporttheannualassessment.Thisavoidsthemajorproblemofrecencybias–thehumantendencyto
keeprecenthistoryattheforefrontofourmemory.Moreregularcheck-insyieldsmoretangibleresultsandbetteroverallcommunication.Aminimumofquarterlyconversationswill
betterequipyoutoreflectonwhatwasaccomplished,aswellas,howitwasaccomplishedthroughouttheyear.

Sources
“6 Things Managers Could Stand to Learn From Coaches,” Gary Magenta. Fast Company, May 2014.
“7 Essential Questions All Great Managers Ask Their Employees,” Michael Bungay Stanier. Business Insider,
March 2016
“8 Steps to High Performance Coaching,” Rick Conlow. LinkedIn.com, April 8, 2014.
“15Five’s Guide to Creating High Performing Teams,” David Hasell. 15Five.com.
“Coaching Increases Communication, Employee Engagement, and Productivity, Study Finds,” Maria Ho. TD
Magazine, December 2014.
“Delivering Effective Performance Feedback,” Deborah Busser. TD Magazine, April 2012.
Mindreading 101: The 10 Questions You Need to Ask Your Team Every Week,” David Hassell. 15Five.com.
“Performance Management for Managers,” Vanessa Fludd. TD Magazine, March 2016.
Stephen M.R. Covey Interview, ATD Staff. TD Magazine, May 2009.
“The Uncertain Future of the Annual Performance Review: A Guide for Your Company,” David Hasell. 15Five.com
“The Walking Meeting,” Serena Holloman. TD Magazine, August 2014.
“Three Ways to Strengthen Work Relationships,” ATD Staff. TD Magazine, June 2014.
“Transparency on the Menu,” Kristen Fyfe-Mills. TD Magazine, March 2016.
“Try Feedforward Instead of Feedback,” Marshall Goldsmith. Marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com, 2002.
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Essential Conversations Guidebook v.12 - online version

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