This is how I assess development goals

This is a long read for a blog article. I will discuss trees, effective assessment of development goals and other topics I find interesting. I hope also to answer the simple question “how do I assess development goals?”

Looking at trees

When you see a magnificent tree in the forest, it is obvious that the tree has spent many years growing. It did not go from being a small sapling to a mighty oak tree overnight.

Year in and year out, each large tree must have focused on achieving two things – surviving another year and growing towards greatness.

Few trees grow perfectly, so we can often see the remains of broken branches, scars or burn marks, all of which mark where various setbacks occurred along the way.

Few trees grow consistently each year either, so we can see the growth rings on the timber that comes from a great tree. Some years the tree grew a lot, while in other years there was very little growth.

All trees, though, have been persistently pursuing their growth, year in and year out, no matter what else has been going on around them.

If I had the same relentless focus on my own growth, I believe that I would be truly extraordinary by now. Similarly if a team leader could encourage their team members to absorb even 10% of the tree’s clarity in its goal of growing each year, that leader’s team would be absolutely exceptional.

Yet even in relatively high performing teams, it can be surprisingly hard for a leader to help the people in their crew to set and pursue meaningful development goals.

Why is it so hard?

In theory, people find the pursuit of mastery to be highly motivating (and this theory is backed with a lot of research). In theory, people want meaningful careers rather than getting burnt out, or getting stuck in a rut where every day is the same.

My experience, however, does not match the theory as well as it should.

I have worked with a lot of good people who seem to neglect their own needs, even while focus on driving real value for customers, or tackling mind-bendingly complex puzzles at work.

I don’t think the problem is a lack of motivation, nor a fixed mindset, nor even a lack of options for growth.

I think that the greatest obstacle is the lack of visibility in setting out what we want to achieve and then progressing towards growth. While a tree probably knows nothing but survival and growth, we humans have many things competing for our attention.

So while the competing needs of our work may be visible to us, our own growth can go unnoticed. And if something is not visible to us on a frequent and compelling basis, then it is hard for it to attract our attention at all.

Development goals are one of the best tools we have to make our development needs and opportunities visible. But even if we can set a reasonable goal, then it can rapidly fall out of our attention space and wait quietly in the shadows until we have time to come back to it if we don’t review our progress and act on what we learn.

So assessing our development goals is how we help the goal to keep seizing our attention.

Of course, like a tree that is growing, we will experience the setbacks that leave broken branches and we will experience a inconsistent rate of growth. Even then though, by measuring our growth we can appreciate both the setbacks that mark our growth and the variable “growth circles” that show our rate of growth.

So what should we do?

You might guess that I am going to suggest that we set a goal and then find a way to make it measurable.

I am going to say that, but I am also going to say that assessing our development goals is a little different to assessing a performance objective or assessing customer success through something like pirate metrics or other known aspects of success.

So lets walk through assessing goals once step at a time and I will hope to explain how I think we can successfully assess our development goals.

Creating a goal like “improve my coaching” is not going to create something that wins the war for my attention.

Setting a goal that is clear and compelling is going to be much better, so it can be tempting to start with a SMART goal, like we might do in other areas.

I agree that development should be measurable, both so we can manage our teams and, more importantly, so we can all see the impact of our efforts toward personal growth. As a result, I am not against SMART goals but I do think that the word “Measurable” should be applied a little differently for a development goal.

Let’s start then by jumping to a SMART-ish goal and then work backwards to uncover what I think good assessment of out goal will look like.

Let’s say we have a team member called James:

• James wants to get better at communication. Unfortunately “good at communication” can mean many things, so we help him to become more concrete in what he wants to achieve.
• After some angst, James makes this goal more concrete. The goal is now
  • “to gain an average of 8 on participant feedback with respect to the question ‘How clear were you on what you needed to do when the facilitator set individual or group activities?’.”
  • The current baseline is 6 and we will review this in 3 months.
• We can easily measure this by looking at customer/student feedback after each workshop or training session that James runs.

I believe that there are two problems with this seemingly clear measure, that diminish its usefulness:

• The longer the delay between when we take an action, and the feedback we get on how it went, the less useful that feedback is in identifying improvements that we could have made in taking the action. If we only look at measure once a month, it will be hard to see where there was a good/bad action that received a rating; and
• Giving a score of 9 out of 10 provides a measure of success, but provides little or no guidance on what the employee can repeat, stop or change in order to better apply what they are learning.

So how do I actually “assess development goals”

In education, teachers ladder multiple assessments together to form a picture of learning and I think we can do the same thing at work.

Summative assessment – outcome based scoring

When I was at school, I had exams that assessed whether I had learned enough to pass a course and progress to the next one. The result was a letter (A, B, C+, C, F) or a number (51%, 85%).

I learned later that this is called a “summative” assessment, or a high stakes assessment. These assessments are there to measure whether I learned to topics I was studying at a level that was considered sufficient, or even excellent.

In development planning at work I think we can use a summative assessment for development. For example

• If my goal is to get better at communication then I can periodically review whether I am getting a score of 8 in the feedback provided by my customers.
  • This provides a benchmark against which I can see progress.
  • It does not provide the useful feedback that I also as I experiment or practice with my new skill, but we will come back to that.
• If my goal is to move into a role as an Engineering Manager, then it is really helpful to be given clarity around the competency I must demonstrate to fluent in the role.
  • Here we might say “good at communication” but better would be “Demonstrates clear expectation setting with the team and stakeholders”.
  • The more specific and relevant we can make this goal, the easier it is to identify whether I hit the baseline needed.

So far so good, but teachers also use two more types of assessment in order to support learning and laddering them together is where the growth comes from.

Diagnostic assessment – creating a baseline

My daughter is moving from junior school (grade 6) to high school (grade 7) next year.

Her current teacher knows her and is probably clear on her proficiency in each subject. Indeed he gives us a report card each term (ie a summative assessment).

But in order for my daughter and her cohort to enter year 7, they have just had to do a battery of tests, hold the equivalent of a job interview and work in teams with other kids during an orientation. This seems excessive, given that she has already been accepted to the class.

But this package of diagnostic testing is no about whether my daughter will get an A in mathematics. These assessments are about forming a baseline across all subjects (and in this case all students in the cohort).

Equipped with a large dataset, the teachers who are designing the classes for year 7 can compare where all the kids are at, to the expectations of the curriculum for both entering and thriving in year 7.

This is the equivalent of someone in a team (or a cohort of people in a team) asking about how to become an engineering manager (or agile coach, or accountant, or member of the orchestra).

Rather than just setting a single development goal and adding a summative assessment, we can define the competency expectations of multiple roles and then allow someone to compare where they are at now, with our expectations about where they need to be if they enter a new role or ask for a more senior role.

Diagnostic assessments are different to “summative ones” because:

• The measure precedes the goal.
  • With diagnostic testing we do an assessment in order to identify a gap and then set a goal.
  • Diagnostic testing can lead to streaming people into the right development class or funnel or it can be used to identify multiple options for growth before deciding on a specific on to focus on first.
• The diagnostic assessment is time consuming and would not be worth doing too often if we already have specific goals.
  • We might redo the diagnostic assessment when a milestone has been reached (Beginning high school, reaching a sufficient level of competence in one area and then looking to find new development areas).
  • We would not set 10 development goals for a quarter and then ask someone to sit down for a completed diagnosis again at the end of the quarter. That might be suitable for patients to assess their overall health but it is not suitable for a person wanting to set a specific, achievable goal for their development.

So a potential development goal might be – to “perform a competency assessment against the competencies needed to be an engineering manager and bring the results to a 1-1 meeting by the end of October.”

This goal is easy to measure because it is a concreate action that is done or not done. Thus our “summative assessment” is a bit redundant.

The more useful assessment is the review of the results. This diagnostic assessment then informs the next development discussion, at which the original development goal is replaced by a new one.

So when I talk about assessing development goals I actually mean two different things, depending on the context. I will add these two things to a table once I explain the third kind of assessment that teachers use.

Formative assessment – useful feedback for learning

While my daughter only experiences diagnostic testing at key milestones and only sees the result of “high stakes, summative” at the point she is expected to have met a learning objective (development goal), she gets continuous assessment every day while she learns.

This final type of assessment is called low stakes, or formative assessment and it is there so facilitate learning rather than to assess whether a student has attained a sufficient level of proficiency to be called proficient.

So low stakes assessment is there for the student to learn and for the teacher to adjust their approach to teaching in the moment. This low stakes assessment is very specific and is immediate, rather than delayed.

As such the assessment is often delivered as feedback to the student as the student does the work or once a small attempt has been made to apply the learning. The student then (hopefully) takes on the feedback, adjusts their actions and seeks more feedback.

Low stakes feedback must involve actionable feedback and may become redundant once the feedback has been acted on. It is poorly suited to summarising the feedback at the end of the quarter (or semester) but it is ideally suited to experiential learning.

Let’s come back to my two examples:

• Getting better at communication; and
• Becoming an engineering manager

In pursuing these goals, I might agree to specific development tasks, experience or habits and when I do so the low stakes feedback should be built into the activity itself. For example I might set goals to:

• Work on my communication by being more deliberate in inquiring into the ideas of others before advocating for my own views. I will attempt this in the OKR session this week and get feedback from my manager and a peer (who has agreed) at the end of the session.
• Continue to work on my technical leadership in order to become an EM. Specifically I will facilitate the team estimates for 2 stories in each sprint and then get feedback from the engineering manager. Specifically I would love feedback on whether I use the team’s time effectively and whether I asked the right questions to uncover the most important assumptions and risks.

Based on the feedback I get, I might set a new goal after only a week or I might keep going with “deliberate practice” until I master something.

Combining periodic measures of progress (summative assessments) with continuous feedback as I practice (formative feedback) is as close as I think we can get to the relentless focus on growth that a tree has.

Like a tree, we will experience bursts of growth alongside periods of apparent stagnation. We will also be able to see the fallen branches and the marks of our setbacks or wrong turns. But we will also be able to see our real growth and thus be able to maintain our attention on that growth.

Of course I never see trees commute to work, so it appears that all they have to do each day is continue to grow. We have a lot more competing needs that distract us from our growth.

If I had to focus only on the must haves for growing my team, then I would start with some rough goals with a lot of formative assessment (Automated testing, peer review, manager giving specific feedback in 1-1’s). I think this alone can drive a commitment to real growth, just as a tree grows through continuously getting sunshine , water and nutrients.

Approaching development goals like this will mean that the look messier than they might otherwise, with multiple goals that have their own assessments.

Some of the goals will last a long time because they are about achieving a standard that is hard to reach, while others will be there fore only a short time and will consist of some activities that have assessments built in without any long term record of the result of those assessments.

Evolving development goals

So when I say “assess our development goals” I mean that we build our goals iteratively over time and that we use assessment to evaluate the learning (or career progression) that we achieve AND to support the learning that is happening.

It might look like this, with an initial goal that sets the scene and then has other goals either supersede it or support it, like the roots and branches of a tree:

I want to be better at communication

Development goal	Measure	Type
Improve my ability to get my message across to non-technical people	Attend the Toastmaster events	Task completion
	Get feedback	Formative
	Present at every 2nd team showcase	Task completion
	Feedback from PM and manager	Formative
Achieve a score of 8 out of 10 in “communication clarity”	Send survey to team and 2 stakeholders on 30/11. Current baseline is “no baseline”	Summative

I want to be an Engineering Manager

Development goal	Measure	Type
Initial goal – Explore the role of Eng. Mgr.	Complete competency assessment by 31/10	Task completion
	Manager and Employee review the results in a one on one meeting. Based on the results we discuss potential focus areas	Diagnostic
Demonstrate the ability to calculate ROI on technical work	Complete 2 estimates by 30/11 where the estimate is accepted as the final estimate by the Eng. Mgr	Summative
Present a draft ROI calculation	Present a first draft estimate for the proposed API rewrite and get feedback form the Eng Mgr and solution arch.	Formative

Where does that leave us?

I discussed the topics of trees, effective assessment of development goals, and answered the question of how to assess development goals

I believe that setting good goals with effective assessment brings is a very effective way to bring our capability and career development to our attention so we can give it the focus it deserves.

But I don’t think a single good SMART goal with a single “summative” measure is either easy to achieve or particularly useful.

Instead I say that we should treat our development goals as the anchor for an ongoing conversation. This conversation will likely cause the goal itself to grow, sprout branches and have dead limbs trimmed from it.

What makes the conversation (and the goal) real is the combination of assessments that teachers apply to learning – Summative, Formative and sometimes Diagnostic.

So when I say “assess development goals” I find it hard to explain what I mean by assessment without having quite a long discussion. The most import thing though is to get started and build some feedback or other assessments in early.

We will never achieve the single minded focus on growth that a tree has, but we will see surprising growth and satisfaction if we use a combination of different assessments to assist our development.