Personal Development
Building on peoples’ strengths
How can we drive peoples’ personal development based on their strengths?
Intention
As we have grown, it is more important than ever to make sure everyone is clear about their own goals and how they line up with other peoples’. When we were smaller and sat in the same office, it was more likely overlaps would be spotted and addressed. Now there are more of us, we need to be more choiceful in how we share this information.
As such, we have updated everyone’s objectives to determine what they’re trying to achieve and how they might measure that. This has allowed a series of strong discussions across all levels about how people contribute to the team’s impact.
We are now updating everyone’s individual development plans for how they can be better at and happier in their role. We are using the Strengths Finder framework to allow people to build on their areas of excellence, rather than only focussing on their perceived weaknesses for development.
Results
For more recent roles, we have used the B Corp structure to define peoples’ objectives across:
Governance
Team
Community
Environment
Clients / Customers
Everyone has specific objectives around improving William Joseph’s approach to equality and our impact against the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This has led to some interesting conversations about how different people perceive the ways that they can best help through their day to day work.
What’s next?
At the next team retreat, we are bringing all of these objectives, measures and development plans together. We will share where overlaps appear and work out how to best support each other given the team’s areas of strengths.