It organises what you observed. It never rates anyone.
One leading eleven people in an engineering organisation, one leading six in customer operations. Both were promoted for being excellent at the job they no longer do, both were given no training, and both are quietly drowning in the administrative residue of managing people.
Preparation, or rather its absence. Eleven 1:1s a fortnight, each of which should begin with "last time you said X, how did that go?" and instead begins with the leader silently trying to remember. Then the writing: feedback that needs to be specific and therefore needs evidence, evidence that lives in scattered memory, and twice a year the review cycle, which consumes two full weekends.
- Keeping a running record per person: what was discussed, agreed, and left outstanding
- Producing the 1:1 prep sheet — last agreements, their status, open threads
- Turning your rough notes into specific situation-behaviour-impact feedback
- Tracking delegated work and its deadlines
- Auditing your own calendar: how much time actually goes to the team
- Assembling the evidence file for a review cycle from a year of your own notes
- Drafting onboarding plans and documenting recurring team processes
- The assessment of a person
- What is really going on with someone
- Who gets promoted, who gets the hard conversation
- The relationship, which is the whole job
- The person record
- One private file per team member, held by you, containing what they said they would do, what happened, and your own observations with dates. Ninety seconds of dictation after each 1:1. It is the entire system and it changes management quality more than anything else I build, because specificity is the difference between feedback that lands and feedback that does not.
- The prep sheet
- Before each 1:1: last time’s agreements, their status, what is outstanding, what you said you would follow up on. Thirty seconds of reading replaces four minutes of remembering badly, and the person on the other side of the table can tell.
- The feedback drafter
- You write "Tuesday, the deploy, handled it well." It returns a specific SBI-form paragraph built from that note and nothing else. You edit and deliver it in person.
- The calendar audit
- Once a month, where the time actually went. Both leaders were shocked. One discovered 8% of their time went to their team and 44% to meetings they had never questioned attending.
- The review assembler
- At cycle time, the year’s notes per person, organised. Two weekends become an afternoon, and the reviews are dramatically more specific because they are built from contemporaneous notes rather than recency.
No assessment of a person is ever generated, and nobody is measured by the machine.
It never rates, never ranks, never predicts flight risk, never suggests who is underperforming, never writes the review conclusion. A performance judgement produced by software and signed by a manager is a lie that a person’s career is built on.
It also never reaches into anyone’s work. No commit counts, no ticket velocity per person, no message analysis, no activity monitoring. Both leaders had access to tools that would do this and I recommended neither. Surveillance changes what a team tells you long before it changes what they do, and then you are blind in a way you cannot detect. The person records are your own notes about employees, so DSGVO rights including access apply — write nothing you would not show the person.
1:1s that begin with a follow-up rather than a blank: from occasional to standard. Time spent on review season. Percentage of your week actually spent with the team. And whether feedback got specific, which the team notices before you do.
When a leader wants visibility into their team’s activity. That is a trust problem and tooling makes it worse. I say so, and I have had that conversation both times.
Ninety seconds after every conversation.
I was promoted for being good at a job I no longer do and nobody trained me for this one. Ninety seconds of dictation after every 1:1 and now each conversation starts with “last time you said X, how did that go” instead of me silently trying to remember. My team noticed before I did. Review season went from two weekends to an afternoon and the reviews are far more specific, because they are built from notes I wrote at the time rather than from what I can recall in November.
The calendar audit was unpleasant. Eight per cent of my time went to my team and forty-four per cent to meetings I had never once questioned attending. I asked whether we could add visibility into what people were actually working on and he said no, and told me it was a trust problem that tooling would make worse. That was not what I wanted to hear and it was the most useful thing anyone said to me that year.
Tell me what your week looks like.
I'll tell you honestly which parts you can hand over — and which you can't.