Know what each person needs before you say it.
Throughline puts your team's consented working-style profiles inside the assistant you already draft in — so the answer to “how do I say this to her?” is about that colleague, not about people in general.
- Free for your first five
- Twenty minutes to join
- Works in Claude and ChatGPT
- No ranking, no promotion advice
The five minutes before you press send.
The small awkward moments in a line manager's week — the one-to-one you haven't prepped, the feedback you're softening too much, the message you've now rewritten five times.
The one-to-one that stays on the surface
Thirty minutes of status you could have read in the tracker. You leave knowing what they did and nothing about how they are. Two of the eight are like this every time, and they are never the same two.
Feedback that landed wrong
You said the same thing to someone else last month and it went fine. This time it went cold for a fortnight. Nothing in the words explains the difference, so you stop giving the feedback.
You delegated it. They did it differently
Not worse — differently, and now you're unpicking it on a Sunday. The handover was clear to you. It was clear to the last person you gave it to. It wasn't clear to this one.
To make each one-to-one a coaching conversation rather than a status update, read our guide to being a manager as coach.
One piece of feedback. Two colleagues. Two messages.
The same intent, written for two people on the same team, should stop making sense the moment you swap the names over. That's the test guidance has to pass before it ships.
Friday's deck went out with last month's revenue chart on slide nine. I've sent the client the corrected version already. What I want from you is whatever check stops it happening again — your call what that looks like, tell me by Thursday.
Evidence
- Dominance (D)
- wants the headline first
Source
To Dana
Consented profile
One thing on Friday's deck, and I want to be precise about it because I know you'll go looking. Slide nine had the revenue chart from three weeks ago. Everything else in it was right. I've sent the correction. Can we look at where that chart gets pulled from — I think the source is the actual fault here.
Evidence
- Conscientiousness (C)
- will go looking for the detail
Source
To Henrik
Consented profile
Four moments in your week where it helps.
It earns its place at four points in a manager's week — all of which most managers already do inside an assistant window.
Four minutes, not a form
What to open with, what this person won't volunteer unprompted, and what you got wrong in the last one. Short enough to read while the meeting is connecting.
I've got Lin in ten minutes. What should I open with, and what will she not tell me unless I ask directly?
Drafted once instead of five times
Give it the substance and the person, and it returns the shape: how much preamble, whether to name one behaviour or the pattern, and what the follow-up needs to contain.
Draft the message. Tell me which part I'll be tempted to soften, and why I shouldn't.
A handover that survives the person
Most delegation failures are a specification mismatch, not a capability gap. Some people need the constraint and the deadline. Some need to know why it matters and who else is affected.
I'm handing the migration plan to Ade. What do I need to make explicit that I'd normally leave implied?
If you want the model itself before the product, start with the four working styles.
See how you work in six minutes
Free, no sign-up. Then bring your team in, free for five people.
Safe to give your whole team.
People share honestly when they know the tool cannot be used against them. That is why your reports opt in, see everything in their own profile, and stay in control of it — and why a working-style read is never turned into a judgement about performance.
How we keep it trustworthy- No ranking of your reports, on any measure
- No promotion, hiring, redundancy or performance judgement
- No profile of anyone who hasn't opted in — including the colleague you're worried about
- No inference from calendars, messages or meeting transcripts
- No claim that wasn't measured, and every claim traces to a file you can open
What people ask before they try it.
It would, if we shipped labels. Throughline records continuous scores, so two people who share a headline style still get materially different guidance — and the profile records where behaviour flips with context: quiet in a senior room, expansive with familiar peers.
The practical guard is the swap test. If a piece of advice would read just as sensibly with a different colleague's name in it, it has failed and it doesn't ship.
Also worth reading
Bring the report you find hardest to manage.
Twenty minutes, live, in a real assistant. If the answer isn't visibly better than what you'd get by asking without us, don't buy it.
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