Self-development Window
MJ recently blogged about identifying one’s own strengths. I thought it would be useful to share a tool that I’ve used over the last seven years as a herder of cats (read: software development manager). I call it the self-development window (or the career development window, as I often use it for that purpose). It looks a bit like this:
(The astute among you will notice some similarities with SWOT Analysis).
To use the window, just fill in something in each of the first three boxes. Don’t worry about filling them in in order, just put them in whatever order occurs to you.
Strengths
This area includes the skills you use on a daily basis, or that people come to you ask questions about. Often (especially with software folks) we think in terms of technical skills - i.e. the skills where we actually do something or produce something, so don’t forget the so-called softer skills: communication, planning, leadership, etc.
Areas for Improvement
Things that you want to get better at. This might be particular skills that you want to learn, or some area of other knowledge you want to acquire. Many people find that they want to improve in many things, so sometimes this area gets crowded - don’t worry, that’s normal.
Goals
Goals differ from Areas for Improvement in that they are things that you can check off to say you’ve accomplished. For example “Learn to program in Objective-C” is an Area for Improvement, but “Write a commercial app in Objective-C and sell a copy to someone I don’t know” is a goal. Also, goals tend to include things that are much longer in time span than Areas for Improvement - e.g. “I want to become CEO of a company with more than 100 employees”. Make sure it’s easy to measure that you’ve accomplished them - ‘checkbox’ style items work best in my experience.
Tasks
Once you’ve finished with the first three sections, put a time frame on the Tasks section (I usually say three months) and then put specific tasks in there that you can accomplish in the next three months. These tasks must help you improve in one of your Areas or help you achieve one of your goals (or both!). Often you use your Strengths to help accomplish these tasks.
OK, so now what?
I get each of my team members to do this every three months. Then every two weeks we have a chat about how things are going (those chats are not solely about this Window, but it does come up - my job is to help them achieve all their tasks) just to make sure there aren’t any roadblocks and that all the tasks still make sense. If you’re doing this for self-development, it’s probably worth looking at this every week to see if you can accomplish any Task in the week, or work on it. Make sure you:
- check off any Task or Goal that gets accomplished
- do the exercise again after your allotted Task time elapses (i.e. every 3 months in my case)
- move Areas for Improvement into Strengths once you’ve learned what you set to learn
- look back over your Windows for the year to see what you’ve accomplished and to help motivate for the next year
I’m not sure if the form-factor of a Window actually makes any difference: it evolved from my need to write it all on a whiteboard. I do think it’s useful to have all four areas up on the board at once because sometimes your mind goes blank and writing other things helps jog your memory.