Know Your People
You can't lead levers you never learned exist
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 72%
Yapp's practical leadership takeaway is a deliberate act of getting to know each team member as a person: where they were born, where they grew up, what they studied, what they do at weekends, whether they have children and what their names are. The mechanism is twofold. First, knowing these details lets you find the specific levers that stoke a person's ambition or drive. Second, the act itself carries an unwritten message that you care, and its absence carries the opposite. He extends it to career intent, asking each person what they want to become, then routing work that lands on his desk toward that goal and giving feedback along the way. He ran this with 30 people, rejecting team size as an excuse.
Origin
Extracted from Roderic Yapp's Royal Marines leadership practice, where he ran the routine with troops of thirty, later formalised in his corporate leadership coaching at Leadership Forces.
Core principles
- 01Not knowing your people signals you don't care about them
- 02You can only motivate levers you have found
- 03Career direction is the leader's job to surface, then serve
- 04Work that crosses your desk is a development tool
- 05Team size is an excuse, not a barrier
How to run it
- 1
Sit down one to one
Schedule a direct conversation with each person on the team, however large. Frame it as wanting to get to know them.
Pro tip Open by naming that some questions may feel invasive and they can decline any of them.
- 2
Learn the person, not the worker
Ask about where they were born and raised, what they studied, weekends, disposable income, children and their names. Build a real picture.
Watch out If you can't answer these about your team, you don't actually know them, whatever you tell yourself.
- 3
Surface their career intent
Ask directly what they want: the top job, or a skill and an exit. Make clear either answer is fine.
Pro tip Both ambition and 'I just want a pay rise, not a team' are legitimate answers.
- 4
Route work toward their goal
Use tasks that cross your desk to move each person in the direction they named, and give feedback that builds toward it.
Pro tip Turn a recurring duty into a development rep, e.g. letting a would-be trainer run team circuits.
- 5
Write them up against their aim
At review time, evidence the growth against the goal they told you, so the development is visible and rewarded.
Watch out You cannot develop someone toward a goal you never asked them to name.
In the wild
One of Yapp's Marines wanted to become a Physical Training Instructor. Knowing this, Yapp set him to run a couple of troop fitness circuits a week and gave him feedback on each. The sessions became inventive and interactive rather than routine. At year's end Yapp could write him up as understanding the principles of exercise and set him off on the PTI course, all because he had asked what the individual wanted.
→ A stated ambition was converted into concrete progress and a qualifying course place.
Common mistakes
Claiming you know them 'reasonably well'
Most managers say they know their team, then can't answer basic questions about their lives, which proves they don't and quietly signals indifference.
Using team size as an excuse
Leaders with eight or ten people say the team is too big; Yapp ran the routine with thirty, so the excuse doesn't hold.
Is it for you?
Best for
New or struggling leaders who feel they can't get their team to buy in or perform.
Not ideal for
Leaders who confuse this with becoming personal friends and then can't hold performance conversations.
From the transcript
“If you don't know them, you can't pull those levers in order to manage them and sort of stoke the fires of their ambition or…”
“Do you know where they were born? Do you know where they grew up? ... No. Right. Well, then you don't know your people.”
From the episode
Lessons From Afghanistan & Capturing Somali Pirates - Roderic Yapp - #133
Roderic Yapp