Shipulski On Design

As leaders of people, we have a responsibility to help people grow. One of the best ways to help them grow is to put them in a position to do so. But what does that look like?

Here’s a process and some questions to help you quantify your efforts to help people grow.

Choose one person on your team and ask yourself – over the last six months how many times you took these actions:

Ask them to work with someone who works on another team.

Create conditions for them to work with someone two levels above them in the organization.

Ask them to meet with your boss one-on-one without you.

Ask them to present their work at your weekly staff meeting.

Ask them to create the agenda for your weekly team meeting.

Ask them to learn about a new topic and present their learning to a group of their peers.

Ask them to present something to a big customer.

Ask them to do work they’d never done before.

Ask them to mentor a less experienced coworker.

Ask them to rough out their personal development plan.

Ask them to come up with a discretionary project that is important to them.

Ask them to use their judgment.

Tell them they did good work.

Tell them you liked their idea.

Give them credit in front of their peers.

Give them credit to your boss in front of their peers.

Ask them to make a decision and tell them you’d support whatever they decide.

Now you have a quantified baseline of the actions you’ve taken to help that person grow.  With that data in hand, meet with the person and share what you’ve done together over the last six months.  Then, agree on the next installment.  Choose two or three areas where you’d more action over the next six months and come up with a jointly-owned action plan to make it so.

Repeat the process for the other members of your team.

It’s powerful to show people the actions you took to help them grow.  And it’s even more powerful to work with them to co-create the go-forward action plan to help them on their journey.

This list of actions isn’t the definitive list, rather it gives you some examples to help you on your way.  Use the ones that work and leave the rest.  And come up with some better ones.  I believe in you.

Image credit — Irene Steeves

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