> "Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life."
Wow, don't do this. Getting to know your team is extremely important. But, this is a pretty gross pseudo-psychological way to go about it. Also people should be aware some cultures will react extremely negatively to being asked a question like this.
American's tend to have a canned response, what I call an 'origin myth' e.g. "I'm a doctor because as child my relative had (disease X) ... then later ...". They dispense these quite readily at parties and interviews. Try it out.
Ask a European why they do what they do and you'll likely get a glazed expression as they consider nature vs nurture, the class system & the deeply invasive nature of the question itself.
I had a manager who believed very strongly in this approach. Her go-to tactic was to take whole teams out to an idyllic retreat center on an island where we did ropes courses and trust falls and spent the evenings sitting in a circle until late in the night sharing every tale of woe from our childhoods in the pursuit of better understanding one another and correcting team dysfunctions. Best case stories were about parents who did not provide the love and affirmation someone needed. Worst case...well it was an eye opener on how many people were fairly deeply damaged by those around them in their childhood or formative years. Many tears were shed and yes it did make us appreciate each other more as unique individuals and not simply cogs in the corporate machine, but I question how effective it really was.
As a private person who tried to maintain some level of segmentation between personal life and my career, the group over-sharing made me very uncomfortable. And it was a pretty huge expense in terms of time away from the office, payroll, and of course the tens of thousands of dollars for the retreat center and management/leadership coaches.
It also made me long for the management team I had come from where there was still the devotion to helping employees achieve personal and career goals, but without all of the group therapy. But the projects my old team worked on were not quite as cool or impactful as my new team. I used to windsurf, and one of the things the windsurfers would say is "don't leave wind to find wind", or in other words, there are real risks that come with leaving the good in search of the perfect.
In Western Europe, you'll especially get the latter. And be glad it doesn't result in an HR complaint. Or at least a permanent distrust of that creepy invasive manager.
But the worse would be a truthful answer. As a manager, I know some of my people well enough to know what kind of painful shit that would dredge up. It's impossible, and even downright undesirable to have a relationship with all your team members in which it is okay to discuss such things.
It also is a completely tone-deaf and robotic way to get to know someone. It sounds like "I'm busy and taking the time to get to know you is inefficient, so just upload all information about yourself directly into my brain so that I know how to take advantage of all your strengths and weaknesses, and in return I will give you nothing."
> "Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life." Then probe with more questions when they talk about pivots in their lives... Look for the patterns over the course of your people's lives that give you strong signal and just write them down.
The goal is to look for the things that motivate people to change their behavior, not how they mythologize their origin.
Wow, don't do this. Getting to know your team is extremely important. But, this is a pretty gross pseudo-psychological way to go about it. Also people should be aware some cultures will react extremely negatively to being asked a question like this.
American's tend to have a canned response, what I call an 'origin myth' e.g. "I'm a doctor because as child my relative had (disease X) ... then later ...". They dispense these quite readily at parties and interviews. Try it out.
Ask a European why they do what they do and you'll likely get a glazed expression as they consider nature vs nurture, the class system & the deeply invasive nature of the question itself.