Hacking People Growth - Part 2

Joao Fernandes — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 12:55:29 +0000

In part 1 of this series I described on how I could help my team members raising self-awareness by building a habit of continuous feedback. This part will focus on how I tried to take action on my duties of understanding every person’s concerns and motivations and help them define the direction of their growth.
I started by doing some research on coaching models and processes and found out about the GROW model.

Â The Grow Model

The GROW model, published in 1992 by John Whitmore in his book “Coaching for Performance”, is a simple but powerful framework that helps maximise and maintain personal achievement and productivity, through a sequence of phases and conversations. GROW stands for (G)oals, (R)eality, (O)ptions and (W)ay forward, which are the four pillars of this framework.

The first phase focuses on raising awareness on the person’s aspirations and broad goals, after which comes a reflection on his current reality and what steps are or have been taken towards those aspirations. In the third stage, a brainstorm is undertaken with the purpose of discovering approaches and ideas on how to effectively work towards the person’s goals. Finally, the last phase concentrates on materialising these ideas into concrete and effective actions.

Introspection Sessions

Using this model as a basis, I undertook a series of 1:1 sessions with my team members, where I experimented to initiate discussions around the GROW topics. After a few sessions, I compiled a list of questions that address these topics and began using them as starting points for discussions and as funnelling mechanisms. This allowed me to get much more value and content from these meetings.
These meetings became the first part of the process I started using, I called them Introspection Sessions

In these sessions, the Goals and Reality phases were addressed. Here are some examples of the questions I used:

Goal

What do you want to achieve long term?
What does success look like?
How much personal control or influence do you have over your goal?
What would be a milestone on the way?
Is that realistic?
Is that positive, challenging, attainable?
What would you like to happen that is not happening now, or what would you like not to happen that is happening now?

Reality

What is happening now? (what, where, when, who, how much, how often). Be precise if possible.
Who is involved (directly and indirectly)?
What is their perception?
When things are going badly on this issue, what happens to you?
What have you done about this so far?
What results did that produce?
What is missing in the situation?
What is holding you back?

I found the best duration for these sessions was between 20 and 60 minutes. It allowed enough time to develop and dive deep into some subjects, without becoming too wearying.
Throughout these sessions, it is important to take notes and capture as much as possible. However, I realised I had to do so without deviating attention from the person and retain an engaging posture. One thing that helped was to regularly read the notes with the person, to ensure everything was captured and to summarise parts of the discussion.

In the next part of this series, I will continue to explain how I took the outputs of these sessions to create meaningful personal development paths and visions.

Hacking People Growth - Part 1

Joao Fernandes — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 12:44:59 +0000

This piece is centred around one of my favourite areas of management: personal development. The inherent ties between performance management and personal development sometimes lead to the creation of processes that compromise the latter. This is one of the main reasons that I decided to invest time to investigate and create a process (or even small framework) to help the people I am responsible for, in their personal growth. Something that would be useful for them to plan and track their growth on a personal level and that was not tied to the company’s performance management system.

What is my role?

The first thing I did to start building such a process was to look at myself and my role, and establish what were my responsibilities to my team members regarding their personal development. After some thinking I outlined four main responsibilities:

Raise and ensure self-awareness
Understand their concerns and motivations
Help defining the direction of their growth
Create an environment propitious to their growth and remove any impediments that might affect it

Raising Self-Awareness

What could I do so that my team members had proper self-awareness? It is very important for one to know where he is in order to know where he needs to go and where to concentrate his efforts.

“Feedback is a gift only others can give”â€Š–â€ŠMarshall Goldsmith

We already had a 360'ish feedback process that everyone did at the end of each quarter, backed up by a form with closed and open questions. Despite the information gathered being valuable, some aspects of this process fell short. The feedback form did not satisfy the needs and was not applicable to everyone. Every person at different points of their career need different kinds of feedback. Also, the period that everyone was asked to collect feedback was 1 to 2 weeks before the end of the quarter. This made the feedback to be somewhat rushed, due to the fact that everyone was asking for it at the same time.

To try and tackle these problems and improve the feedback process, I suggested a Continuous Feedback process consisting of four steps:

Start by making a list of people to collect feedback
Plan and schedule sessions with each person to collect feedback in person
Regularly discuss with manager and compile all the info in a useful manner (e.g. 4. Start/Stop/Continue)
Take action promptly

By spreading the feedback process throughout the quarter, the person can gather information from different points in time, which did not happen previously (everyone just remembered things from the previous 1 or 2 weeks). The absence of the form and the collection in person also helped the person to collect more useful and appropriate feedback. The list is not meant to be fixed, one can add and remove people freely and re-plan accordingly. For example, if I do pair programming with a person during a whole sprint, it makes sense for me to ask feedback from that person at the end of the sprint. The continuous aspect of this process also incentivises the person to take action on the feedback received and measure the results of that action quickly (think rapid prototyping of personal growth).

But the main reason, and the main thing I wished for my team members to take from this process was to have the mindset of continuous feedback. To make the process more natural and automatic. After all, if in our development work we constantly inspect and adapt, why don’t we do it with ourselves?