Essentials to engaging employees & developing high-quality managers — Qualtrics’ Russ Laraway

Today’s episode is with Russ Laraway. After starting out in the Marine Corps, Russ made his way into the world of startups, joining Google in 2005 where he led teams for 7 years and was recognized as one of the company’s best managers. Russ then went to Twitter, where he founded and ran the SMB advertising business. Afterwards, he teamed up with Kim Scott to co-found Candor, Inc to help people implement the concepts from Radical Candor and have better relationships at work. 

In 2018, he joined Qualtrics as the Chief People Officer, a position he stepped away from this past January to focus on helping the company’s customers think differently about employee experience. Russ also has a book on this topic coming out soon — and we can’t wait to read it.

In today’s conversation, we dig into how startups can drive employee engagement and develop high-quality managers. Russ reaches across his career to serve up some incredible wisdom, whether you’re a first-time manager or a seasoned leader.

He starts by sharing his direction-coaching-career framework, along with his thoughts on where companies go wrong on OKRs. He also gets really tactical, sharing the typical phrases he relies on when delivering feedback, his go-to questions for soliciting what folks on his team really think, and underrated questions to include in employment engagement surveys. Finally, Russ gives us 13 recommendations for leadership reads for managers.

For more of his thinking on talent development, we recommend reading his article from a few years ago in the First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/three-powerful-conversations-managers-must-have-to-develop-their-people 

You can follow Russ on Twitter at @ral1 and you can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson