Using the Profile with your team.

Before you ask anyone else to fill it in, make your own card and share it with your team. This does two things at once: it shows them exactly what they are being asked to do, and it shows them that gaps are normal, because you have some too.

If you are willing, ask one or two of them to make your card as they see you. Few things build trust as quickly as a manager who asks for honest feedback, listens to it, and then acts on it.

The Profile is a set of observations, not a score, and it stays useful only for as long as people answer it honestly. The moment it is tied to pay, promotion, or a performance rating, people will check the habits they think you want to see, and the card will tell you nothing. As a general rule:

• Make it optional, and mean it.
• Keep it out of performance reviews, hiring, and promotion decisions.
• Let each person decide whether to share their card, and with whom.
• Never rank people by their cards, privately or in front of the team.

The most useful thing you can do with the Profile is put two views of the same person side by side. Your report makes their own card, and you make a card of them, choosing, “Someone I work with,” so that every habit is worded about them. Then put both codes into Compare before your next one-to-one.

Let’s say Sam checks the habit for Composure and you don’t. That is not a disagreement to win; it is a question to ask. Perhaps Sam stays calm in moments you never see, or perhaps the moments you remember matter more than they realize. Either way, you now have something specific to talk about, which is far better than, “So, how do you think things are going?”

Start with where you agree, especially the strengths you both see, before you move on to where you differ.

The card gives you the topics; questions turn them into a conversation. A few that tend to work well:

Note that the last question matters as much as the others. A conversation about growth that only runs in one direction is a review by another name.

With everyone’s agreement, the cards can also tell you something about the team as a whole. If five of your six reports have an empty Negotiation row, that is not five separate problems; it is a gap in how the team works, and a good reason to work through a Guide together.

However, keep it about the team rather than the people in it. Look for patterns, never rankings, and never single anyone out for the squares they left empty.

A profile is a snapshot, and a snapshot only tells a story when you take another one. Agree on one or two habits to work on, keep both codes, and come back to them in three to six months - at a regular one-to-one at the end of a quarter, say.

Then make new cards and compare them with the old ones. The squares that filled in are worth noticing out loud, since people rarely hear that the effort they put into a habit was seen.