The Ultimate Coda Handbook for People & HR Teams

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The Ultimate Coda Handbook for People & HR Teams

Career & succession planning
Career & succession planning

Prioritize collaborative career and succession planning conversations.

Prioritize collaborative career and succession planning conversations.

We can not—should not—underestimate how important it is to enable managers to manage well. Great 1:1s, career conversations, and informed succession planning sessions aren’t just best practices; they’re the most fundamental things every manager needs to do intentionally to ensure their people are engaged, growing, and executing. Not focusing on the fundamentals turns into those “time sucks” that every manager and HRBP dreads: urgent performance management cases, employee relations issues, the negative impact of a sudden departure of a critical employee, and so on.

We can avoid this with simple templates that enable our managers to consistently do the fundamentals really well and stay aligned with the People Team to better engage, grow, and retain talent.

Take a look at these guides and templates you can use to support your managers:

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Square’s 1-on-1 Toolkit: The secret to managing your team’s careers I'm Jenny, a Design Lead for Square's ECOM team. I developed this 1-on-1 doc to help my designers prioritize their career development and design beyond their day-to-day. coda.io⁠

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Dynamic Career Conversations: Turbo Charge Your Teams' Careers Massively increase the impact of your team with the Dynamic Career Convo (DCC) framework coda.io⁠

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One-on-one meeting framework Five ways to get the most out of one-on-ones. coda.io⁠

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Talent review & people development kit Identify and track your company’s high/low performers, talent gaps, and succession planning—all in one place. coda.io⁠

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Or, read on for four tips for managers to get the basics right.

1. Have meaningful 1:1s by starting with a partnership agreement.

When a team member isn’t delivering, or they surprise us by leaving the company, it’s normal to try and trace back to understand why. But more often than not, it’s simply caused by complacency on the fundamentals we all know:

We weren’t giving them meaningful, timely, actionable feedback.

We never established what they were looking for—and how we could best support as a manager.

We didn’t know what their broader career aspirations were.

We didn’t actually know how they were feeling about their work.

Sound familiar? We’ve likely all seen 1:1 docs that simply capture notes on how a week went, but this isn’t effective for seeing the bigger picture. To do that, we need to go back to the foundation of a 1:1— the partnership agreement.

In a partnership agreement, the manager and team member add their individual and shared expectations about how they will work together. As part of this agreement, it’s essential to also define a cadence and commitment to chat about career goals and development. This sets the tone early on that 1:1s are not just about project updates, but also about how an employee’s work connects to their career goals.

I’ve found it super powerful to be able to hand managers a template that walks them through important steps like creating a partnership agreement and has an emphasis on development.

You can try one out here⁠

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Try Coda's 1-1 meeting template
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2. Follow up on goals and feedback frequently in 1:1s.

Managers are not just supervising a person and how they’re executing on their projects; they’re also guiding and supporting their career. Just as we’ve dedicated a page for partnership agreements in the

1:1 doc⁠

, it’s also crucial to carve out time and space to discuss goals and development.

this toolkit from Square⁠

, you’ll find a template that managers can use with their team to list out their goals, grouped by category:

Scope / Experience.

Skills.

Communication.

Character.

Broader Impact.

Learning.

You can customize these categories to however your company assesses performance. You’ll also find columns to track progress and for managers to share their feedback, along with performance grades. This may seem a lot to include in a 1:1 doc, but it’s important to be this intentional when it comes to careers.

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Try the 1:1 toolkit from Square
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Or,

here⁠

is another framework you could use: for every quarter, the team member adds their goals and expected outcomes or metrics, and tracks their progress. The manager and team member should regularly review these goals, and it’s vital that the manager shares their feedback and insights along the way.

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Try it out
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3. Create a simple framework to empower and energize career conversations.

Yes, a career conversation is different from a 1:1—and you should assign dedicated time for them. A 1:1 ensures your direct report is engaged and executing day-to-day. A career conversation not only continues to strengthen your relationship, but will inform your strategic lens on what sort of projects to assign your direct report now and in the future, how you may want to think about your future composition of the team, and how to most effectively maximize your team’s impact.

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This template⁠

for setting and tracking career goals will help make your career conversations alive, structured, and impactful.

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Get the career conversations template
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4. Be a step ahead with collaborative and dynamic succession planning.

The most effective succession planning is proactive, collaborative, and dynamic. Rather than reactively creating plans in slides that go out of date, you can keep a dynamic list in Coda that helps you track potential successors in your team and who’s ready for future management opportunities.

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This template⁠

allows you to log who is a flight risk, their successor options, how ready the successor is, and even things like the impact of the person leaving and any plans in place to prepare for the change. And you can keep this all in one place, connected to other talent review input like your performance ratings.

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Try the talent review template

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Explore the rest of the People Team handbook:

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People Team hub⁠

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Recruitment & headcount⁠

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Onboarding⁠

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Training & development⁠

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Rewards & recognition⁠

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Workplace management⁠

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Offboarding⁠

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Performance management systems⁠

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Compensation & benefits⁠

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Employee engagement⁠

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People analytics⁠

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Career & succession planningCareer & succession planning