The choice forced by most management systems is often false. There is the quarterly review, where numbers get interrogated, and there is the development plan, where careers get discussed, usually once a year and usually in a separate meeting that nobody schedules with much urgency. The split feels tidy. It is also the reason so many teams hit their targets and still lose their best people, or keep their best people and watch capability stagnate. Michelle Sohn, an executive coach and advisor at Michelle Sohn Coaching who spent two decades leading brand, loyalty, and growth at companies including American Express, Cartier, Tiffany & Co., PVH, and Uber, argues the separation is artificial and expensive. Performance and development are not two conversations competing for a manager’s calendar. They are the same conversation, and the leaders who understand that compound their results while everyone else resets each quarter.
The Check-In Is The Development Plan
The standard performance conversation is retrospective by design. A number gets examined, a variance gets explained, and the meeting ends with a corrective action. Nothing about that exchange makes anyone better at their job next quarter. Sohn’s reframe is deceptively small: when you review a result, ask what skill it revealed and what skill comes next. “A missed target becomes a lesson in planning,” she says. “A big win becomes a chance to stretch someone further. One conversation, two outcomes.”
What that does to the economics of a manager’s time is worth noticing. Development stops being an additional meeting that gets postponed whenever the quarter tightens, which is precisely when people need it most. It becomes a property of conversations that are already happening and already protected on the calendar. It also changes what a miss means. Under the conventional model, a missed target is a verdict on the person. Under Sohn’s, it is diagnostic information about a specific capability that can be named and built. That distinction determines whether a high performer who stumbles doubles down or starts looking elsewhere, and most leaders never realize they are deciding it in the moment.
Leading With Questions Instead Of Answers
Senior leaders are normally promoted for having good answers, which makes the instinct to supply them almost involuntary. Sohn’s second principle cuts directly against that instinct. Great coaches ask before they answer. The question she favors, “What would you try?”, costs nothing and does something an answer cannot: it forces the other person to exercise judgment rather than receive it. It builds confidence and sharpens discernment.
The evidence she draws on is operational, not theoretical. Leading a major customer relationship management shift at Tiffany & Co. across Asia Pacific, Sohn watched adoption behave in a way that should be familiar to anyone who has rolled out enterprise technology. “New tools take hold when people own the thinking behind them,” she says. That is a finding about change management disguised as a coaching tip. Systems fail not because the training was inadequate but because the people who expected to use them were handed conclusions instead of being brought into the reasoning. Directive leadership scales badly for the same reason: every answer a leader supplies is a decision the team did not learn to make, and the dependency accumulates until the leader becomes the constraint on their own organization.
Measuring Capability The Way You Measure Revenue
Here is where Sohn’s argument becomes uncomfortable for most executive teams. Revenue is tracked weekly, forecast obsessively, and owned by name. Capability is discussed in adjectives. “Track capability alongside the numbers,” Sohn says. “Who is ready for more responsibility? Who is stepping up on their own? What gets measured gets developed, and those people drive your next results.” Those are answerable questions, and the fact that most leadership teams cannot answer them with any precision reveals how little rigor has been applied.
The consequence is a lagging indicator problem. Financial results tell a leader what already happened. Readiness tells them what is about to be possible. A team where three people are visibly ready for more responsibility has a different future than a team where nobody is, even if this quarter’s numbers are identical. The organizations that make capability a tracked, discussed, named metric find out about succession gaps and flight risk while there is still time to act. The ones that do not find out when a resignation letter arrives. Sohn’s three practices – treating every check-in as a growth moment, leading with questions, and measuring growth with the same seriousness as revenue – share a common logic. Each one converts a routine management activity into something that pays twice: once in this quarter’s output, and again in the capability that produces the next one. The barrier to starting is not budget or process redesign. It is the next conversation, and whether the leader in it chooses to ask rather than tell.
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