I’ve blogged before about my user manual, which describes as much my motivations & goals as my preferred working styles. It’s important when supporting people through their personal development to focus as much on their professional identity and personality as their skills.
How do you describe your professional identity?
- Ask five different people to describe what you do well and how you work
- Synthesise these and turn them into a statement that describes your professional identity
Then reflect in a 121 with your manager or with someone else in the team:
- What strengths have other people noticed in you that you didn’t realise? What strengths do you have that other people haven’t noticed?
- What does this feedback from others suggest about your values and style?
- How could you develop your professional identity?
I’ve done this in my user manual in terms of the value I bring to teams.
I’ve also blogged about how you develop a mission statement for your team so you can best support your organisation.
The next step is to align people’s personal development objectives and the team’s value proposition and objectives so that each person is contributing and developing themselves in a way that contributes to the impact the team is focused on creating, and that the way the team does that reflects the different personalities of the people who are part of it.
This means that in people’s personal development, they should outline what their career goals are, what they want to achieve over the next 3–6–12 months to progress in those goals and to help the team progress in its goals, and what skills they need to consolidate, stretch and share.
To help people develop their career goals, you could ask:
- When you are at your best, what are you doing that helps people, how do you work, how do collaborate with people?
- If you were in your ideal role, what would you do that helps people, how would you work, how would you collaborate with people?
- What experiences and skills do you need to get to be the best you could be?
For me, for example, I’m at my best when I’m energising people from different teams to work together to tackle a complex challenge and put into practice creative solutions that have a visible impact on the ground and get other people to get involved and make that positive change.
In my ideal next role, I’m leading a service that brings together different teams & partner organisations with different skills who do that and show how you can deliver visible impact on the ground and put in the building blocks to make change stick, in a way that spreads across organisations and a local area.
To help people identify what their speciality is or could be:
Ask people:
- How would people describe the work you are especially good at doing?
- What skill are you particularly good at?
- What could you do to become the leader in that skill?
Then, ask people
- What is the type of work or skill that you most need to develop to support the team and develop your own career?
- What could you do to stretch yourself in that skill? How far out of your comfort zone could you go? What would happen if you want beyond your comfort zone
Then have the conversation about when the team is at its best or could be at its best. Use these individual conversations and synthesise these to have a team conversation about how the team could develop.
They also need to improve the day to day experience they have with the teams’ key customers:
- How they help them
- How they sustain relationships with them
- Who they collaborate with to meet the need
