Writing goals without having to write them

This is a repost of an article I posted to LinkedIn on October 2nd 2023

Writing goals without writing them.

There’s little I care about more than finding ways to help the people in my team get better and better as humans. I’ve worked in many manager roles where I’ve been tasked with providing ‘growth’ and ‘personal development’ to my reports. Few of these roles have provided me with any or all of the help I need to do this properly.

A large part of my decision to join MindGym was around the potential of leveraging their own methodologies and tools in my team so they can be more effective.

First, a disclaimer…

I’m going to be a bit circumspect about details of the tools I have access to, this is MindGyms IP after all. However I don’t think this will detract from the value I can give. Ultimately it’s the broader methodology that’s the point.

Also, if you find value in this post, then consider looking further into what MindGym could do for your business. MindGym translates behavioural science principles into a unique set of experiences, products and tools that slip into your people’s days, hands and minds - creating company-wide behaviour change.

The Problem

Every ‘x’ units of time you are asked to measure and score your performance. Your manager is also asked to measure and score your performance. These scores are compared and the size of the difference is directly proportional to the difficulty of the conversation. Just to add extra weight, your score often dictates salary reviews, bonus payouts and/or promotion.

Then you’re asked to define what you want to achieve in the next unit of time. Repeat till fade.

Knowing how you’re doing is difficult, we are often our own worst judge. Knowing what to do next is also difficult; did I do everything I was supposed to do last cycle? What does progress or success look like?

When you’re the manager there’s even more dimensions to consider; am I measuring each person against their past self? I am comparing them all against each other?

It’s a problem without dimensions or boundaries.

The Actual Problem

There’s a few fundamental things missing from the model outlined above: A clear expectation of what is expected from you in your job, a path from where you are to other roles that can bring you both achievement and satisfaction, and an outline of what those roles expect of you.

These are the things that provide context for current performance and future potential.

Providing all of this context is the ‘What’ in the question of development. Unsurprisingly it’s not that simple though…

What is What?

Every software engineering organisation that doesn’t have a clear expectation for it’s job roles starts in the same place; they build a list of technical competencies that are considered inviolable and sacrosanct. This places your career progression at the mercy of your use of whitespace and ability to name functions and variables.

If you’re in the middle of defining such a list please stop now.

The ‘What of expectation’ is broader than just the possession of technical mastery. Likewise the ‘What of self’ is nothing to do with the outputs or behaviours people see.

The standard ‘What’ questions you’re asked are:

• What did you do right this year?

• What could you have done better?

• What are your goals for next year?

These are either impossible to answer with the understanding you have or are the wrong questions to ask to get the answer you need.

I would propose that the three ‘What’ questions you need to ask of yourself are:

• ‘What do I do when I act without conscious direction?’

• ‘What do I care about?’

• ‘What perceptions do people have of me?’

Use of weapons

It turns out these questions, though ultimately more helpful in their responses, aren’t any easier to answer. However we have computers and frameworks for this stuff right? Well yes, yes we do. But you have to choose the weapon to use carefully.

In my humble experience, it’s better to find some established and proven tools rather than think you can workshop your way to victory. The truth is that as special and unique as you believe your organisation is, the problems you’re looking to solve are universal.

Look for a tool or tools to surface information on these three areas:

• A psychometric assessment of your innate actions, tendencies and beliefs. This is your self-knowledge.

• A map of your motivations, the things in your life that move you to action.

• A comprehensive survey of the perceptions and observations of the people who work with and around you.

It’s equally important that you use the ‘factors’ that these tools employ (especially the last one on behavioural perception) to inform your map of expectations for each role in your team or org.

Knowing what the measures are means you know what to measure, which makes it easier to chart the progress through seniority and across roles so that you know the levels for each role. You then have a reference from which you can generate anything related to a role: Job descriptions for hiring, 360º feedback surveys, performance improvement plans. They will all be aligned and compatible if the material behind them comes from the same measures used by the tools you’ve sourced.

These three tools, psychometric, motivational and behavioural measurement, mean you don’t need to wrack your brain to answer the ‘What’ questions. The tools will surface the answers for you. That means you can focus on the important bit. How are you going to go about enacting all this change?

<insert witty title about the How here>

Now you know what your innate responses and comfort levels are for a defined set of criteria, and you know what type of activity gets you sitting upright behind a keyboard each day and lastly you also know what behaviour of yours paints a picture in your colleagues mind about your competency at a defined set of criteria. So… what are you going to do with all that ‘What’ data?

Answer: You’re going to talk it through with your manager, who at last can become useful to you. Let’s look at a single performance factor that could easily be considered likely to be found in a well-formed development framework…

Composure - Do you have composure? Are you level-headed in interactions? Are you a calming influence in discussions? Does your emotional reaction come before your thinking response? Do you take constructive feedback personally.

In light of this factor, let’s imagine the ‘What’ measures for an example individual and then consider the ‘How’ that is generated.

Preference

From personality assessment, it turns out that our exemplar is a person of strong feelings and passionate beliefs, which can often result in emotional responses to challenges to those beliefs and loss of objectivity. Their tendency to be able to demonstrate composure is LOW

Motivation

Conversation with our example person shows that they have a strong drive for social good. They are energised by improving the connections between people and by supporting others to succeed. So their motivation is HIGH

Expectation

The description of their role indicates a lot of collaborative working, discussion and the accommodation of different, sometimes paradoxical viewpoints. Therefore the expectation for their performance, as outlined in the company career progression and performance framework is that they demonstrate a HIGH level of composure in their behaviour.

Reality

From a recent collection of feedback from a broad section of colleagues, our example person shows that their ability to remain composed in times of disagreement varies considerable based on the people involved and the subject. There’s no strong thread indicating a high or low competency, rather there’s inconsistency which projects uncertainty as to how they will react and undermines the confidence people have in them. Overall, even with positive intent, the best we could rate them at is having LOW to MEDIUM competence.

Deriving a How

To summarise the above 4 data points; this is a person of deep emotions who cares about the people around them and gets a sense of achievement from helping them move forward together to achieve results. They are hampered by a tendency to let the energy of care decay into frustration and a loss of objectivity. The role they are in expects that they demonstrate more skill here than they currently are perceived as doing.

So the Objective we enter into the HR system is simple: “Display a more consistently supportive attitude”.

The ‘How’ centres on the gap between the Expectation and the Reality, and the difficulty or energy required to change perception is a factor of the gap between their innate Preference and the goal that they set themselves with their Motivation.

In this instance there’s a pretty wide gulf between the expectation and reality and so it’s worth painting a realistic picture that this objective is quite significant and so you should perhaps stick to just this one objective for now. The difficulty, the energy required is therefore also large. However their motivation for a positive result is ALSO high and therefore the way forward is to use the Preference and the Motivation in contrast to inform a different behaviour in the moment, we could have them ask themselves:

”If I am in a conversation and notice my emotions rising: is it more important that I am RIGHT or that we move forward TOGETHER? Is there a way to do BOTH?”

We could ask them to note down the circumstance they were in, how they felt, and how they answered the question they posed themselves. This is HOW they will make change. Identifying the issue in the moment, reflecting and choosing a better way forward.

Relative energy levels required to make change to behaviour in terms of innate tendency, the change required to alter people’s perception of the behaviour, the expectation of it in your role and your motivation to do so.

Conclusion

Using proven tools to provide information on you, your drives and your perception in the world, you can generate relevant personal objectives and define measurable outcomes. This makes participating in the process of review and improvement more transparent, more tangible and easier to communicate.

Let the data lead the way and do the work for you in defining your goals.

Summary*

This blog post discusses the challenge of providing growth and personal development to team members and proposes a solution that involves using established and proven tools to surface information on innate actions, tendencies, beliefs, motivations, and perceptions. By using these tools, managers can focus on enacting change rather than wracking their brains to answer the "What" questions. The post provides an example of how to use the data generated by these tools to derive objectives and develop strategies for achieving them.

*this summary was generated using the AI tools in Notion.