Your report hit their 3 months mark. Time for a lightweight career conversation.

Your employee has been reporting to you for three months. This means you should have a quick career development conversation called "Love and Loathe" with them very soon. Read about how:    

Learn the purpose of ‘Love and Loathe’ conversations

Supporting your employee's career development is a part of your responsibility as a manager. But how? Asking someone what they want to do with their career can be too big of a question. Sometimes people don’t know. And putting together a comprehensive and detailed career development plan is useful, but is often super time consuming and quickly forgotten about.

Instead, start simpler by having what we call a ‘Love and Loathe’ conversation.

It’s a practical and simple way to quickly understand your employee's interests and motivations. This is often the first step to guiding someone down a path of career fulfillment.  

During a Love and Loathe conversation, you and your employee step back and identify what about their current role truly energizes them and what doesn’t. Instead of developing them for a different role, this exercise focuses on making adjustments to the scope of their current role.

Did you know that for most workers:

• About 10% of work is spent on tasks that we love. 
• About 10% of work is spent on tasks that we loathe.  
• For many, about 80% of work consists of general “ok” or “good” tasks. These are tasks that don’t necessarily fill us with excitement and energy but also don’t drain us or impact their mood in a negative way. 

Together, you’ll work on increasing the time (about two hours more per week) they spend on things they love and reducing the time (about two hours less per week) they spend on things they loathe.  

Schedule a 60-minute ‘Love and Loathe’ conversation

The best time to have a Love and Loathe conversation is about three months after someone begins reporting to you. This gives them enough time to get a feel for their new role and gives you enough time to observe them on the job. 

Keep in mind this conversation isn’t meant to change your direct report’s current role immediately; instead it will help shape their role over time and support them in progressing to their next level based on their strengths and interests. 

Two weeks before the conversation

Email your employee with pre-work and context to:

• Fully explain what the terms “love” and “loathe” mean
• Request some brief pre-work
• Share the purpose of the conversation

Sample email:

Hi [employee name], I’ve scheduled a meeting for us on [insert date] to have a ‘Love and Loathe’ conversation. This conversation is meant to understand what interests and motivates you so that we can work on increasing the time you spend on things you love and reduce the time you spend on things you loathe. I've included a bit of pre-work to help make the most of our time together. Please let me know if you have any questions.

What’s a ‘love and what’s a ‘loathe’?

Simply put, there are specific tasks you do at work that produce certain positive or negative emotions. Love tasks: - Give you energy. - Hold your interest and concentration. - Give you something to look forward to. - Motivate you to learn more about them. Note: Loves are not necessarily tasks you’re already great at. But the potential to become great in these areas is much higher since you’re already naturally interested in your Loves.  Loathe tasks: - Drain your energy. - Make it hard to concentrate. - Demotivate you. - Make you want to procrastinate.  Note: Loathes may include tasks you might be good at, but may not want to develop further.

Conversation Pre-Work: Create a list of your loves and loathes and bring to the meeting. When you are creating your list, include information about why you loved or loathed it. Also include information about the environment and time of day. For example, maybe you love 1-1 meetings because you can share ideas, but you loathe team meetings because you find it hard to participate. 

Try this: 

• Create a table in a Google or Word Doc with two columns. Label one column “Loved It” and the other column “Loathed It.” Over the next two weeks, pay attention to how your job’s activities make you feel. When you experience a change in energy or an emotion—positive or negative—that’s associated with a specific job activity, add it to either your “Loved It” or “Loathed It” columns along with any detail about why you put the activity in that column. 
• Use your calendar. If you use a virtual calendar, color code events in your calendar (e.g., green for “Loved It” or red for “Loathed It”). If you use a physical calendar, you can highlight and make notes on your schedule. This is a quick way to track and can also show you if there are times of the day that are just harder for you.
• Use a journal like this one to track your energy and interest level in your activities throughout the day.  Bring your research to our scheduled meeting. If you struggle to come up with loves or loathes, that’s totally normal. Make your observation period a little bit longer and try to really become aware of how you are feeling as you complete specific tasks.

Before the conversation: complete your own pre-work

Take a few minutes to reflect on the work you’ve seen your employee do to date. Answer these questions: 

• Has your direct report gotten excited about certain tasks they’ve worked on? If so, what have those tasks been?
• Has your direct report ever dragged their feet or lost interest quickly when working on a project? If so, try to identify which tasks may have caused them to procrastinate or disengage.

Bring this to your scheduled Love and Loathe meeting.  

In the conversation: Discuss the love and loathe lists together and identify patterns

It’s time to compare your lists and discuss together. Start with their list before incorporating your own reflections.

Together, try to uncover similarities in loves and loathes. Stay curious and ask questions about what they loved or loathed about the activity (e.g., their task, their ability to interact with others, the environment they were in, etc.).

In most cases, a pattern will start to take shape: your direct report will feel more energized and excited when doing certain activities and feel unmotivated and bored when doing others. 

In the conversation: Encourage specificity

The triggers of what makes a love task, meh task, or a loathe task can be subtle, so zeroing in on the specifics is critical to building a solid foundation that’ll support your direct report’s career development.

Let’s look at an example:

Stephen is an engineering manager and he has asked his 5 direct reports what they love most about their role. All 5 engineers gave him the same answer: they love solving problems. 

Unfortunately, this response is too superficial and won’t help Stephen work meaningfully with his direct reports to further develop this interest area. Stephen really needs to go deeper and ask probing questions about what in particular energizes them about solving problems.

Some questions Stephen could ask next time around include:

• Do you love solving problems under time pressure? 
• Do you like diving deep into the code to figure out what’s happening?
• Do you prefer to handle customer-facing improvements? 
• Do you enjoy solving problems alone or with others? 
• Do you prefer handling problems in the mornings or evenings?

Continue your conversation until you’ve identified 1 or 2 key loves and 1 or 2 key loathes.

After the conversation: Help your direct report spend 2 more hours per week on tasks they love and 2 hours less on tasks they loathe

Strength-based research from Gallup shows that successful people tend to spend a greater portion of their workweek on the things they love doing.

Support your direct report in becoming a more successful employee by finding ways to help them spend 2 more hours per week on things they love doing and 2 hours less per week on tasks they loathe.

List these outcomes in your shared 1-1 notes or send them in an email. Ask for feedback on these changes and continue to adjust the role over time where appropriate. Check in on this conversation at your next 1-1.