Springboard Your Direct Report’s Career: Talk to Them About Their Next Job
After 3.5 incredible years at Springboard (now a Series B Edtech Startup!), I’ll be leaving to pursue a new adventure. This article is about one of the most important management lessons I learned at Springboard.
Okay Siya, what’s the TL;DR?
As a manager, talk to your employees about their next job. You’ll enable:
- Stronger company loyalty. In an era where millennials have a propensity to jump jobs, freely talking about an employee’s career goals cultivates a stronger sense of loyalty towards the company. They start seeing your company as a training ground for their life’s work. By embracing the opportunity to discuss career opportunities with your employees, you build a culture that promotes continuous growth and inspires the team to stay dedicated to improving work product since it fits into their larger career narrative.
- Smoother transitions for your team. Having more visibility around an employee’s career goals ensures you won’t have to scramble and fill roles at the standard 2-weeks notice. It typically takes 4+ weeks to hire a strong candidate, and the corresponding lag often means missed productivity for your team and critical gaps in knowledge transfer during new hire onboarding.
- Lifelong connections. There are good managers who help an employee succeed in their role, and then there are life-changing managers who help shape an employee’s career trajectory. If you support your employees in the pursuit of their long-term career goals, you will gain a lifelong relationship with them.
Now the story.
During interviews at LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman often asked candidates: “What’s the next job that you would like to have after LinkedIn?”
It seems like an awkward question for both sides. Winning over an interview panel is already tricky without the pressure of being carefully ambitious in such an answer. And as a hiring manager, you probably don’t want your future employee to be already thinking about their next steps.
Reid explains his reasoning:
That’s not because we don’t want our stars to stay at LinkedIn for a long time. It’s because we’re so committed to the idea that we’re going to be transformative in the prospective employee’s career. So we need to know, what’s the next job after this? What do you want it to be? How can we help prepare you for it?
Having experienced this approach to mentorship, I wanted to share the positive effect it has on an individual’s growth, their relationship with their manager, and the value that they create for their company.
Back in the spring of 2017, I was interviewing for a business role at Springboard, then a young company based out of a WeWork office in San Francisco. Springboard’s CEO, Gautam Tambay asked me what I wanted to do after the job I was interviewing for.
Against the better judgment of friends who cautioned that I would look like a flight risk in an industry already plagued by high attrition, I told Gautam that I was looking for a place to build cool things for two years before pursuing a career in venture capital. Gautam joked about my path to the ‘dark side’ and said that a shared understanding between a manager and their reports actually opens up opportunities for meaningful professional development.
“This is just the beginning, Siya,” he told me then.
“We’re building a long-term relationship together — one that’ll span across many companies as we grow in our careers.”
Over the next few years, Gautam consistently put in the effort to help me prepare for my career in venture capital. In our performance reviews, he would map out my skills against what I needed to become an impactful VC. He identified external mentors for me, molded several projects to ensure skills overlap, and even gave me the flexibility to do a part-time summer externship at a venture firm in addition to my Springboard responsibilities. After two years, when I started receiving opportunities to transition into VC, he would be the first person to look over them with me. Together, we would assess the roles and how they could shape my career.
Finally, when the time came, he said, “taking off my Springboard hat and putting on my Siya’s mentor hat, I think you should go pursue that opportunity.”
When I asked him why he was so invested in helping me grow beyond my role at Springboard, Gautam said that when he was an early-career professional at InMobi, his managers bet on him the same way. InMobi’s co-founders urged Gautam to develop within the organization — helping him build his skill-set and gain diverse experiences — and later, encouraged him to leave and go build Springboard.
“It’s a manager’s responsibility to ensure that you’re prepared for that next step in your journey,” Gautam says.
Finally, no matter what job your direct report does, it’s likely just one step in the larger career path they aspire to build. Taking time to understand what that path is — and what you can do to help them achieve it — makes you a truly unforgettable coach.
