I think often people treat “development” as an add-on that’s quite different from their work.

I think it’s better to have the development and the work deeply integrated.

Pick an area to focus on

1. First, you want to have a sense of your strengths and weaknesses.
1. Ask people you work with for feedback
1. Dig into the feedback, particularly bits that keep coming up frequently. Do you really understand it? What might be causing it?
2. Look at any data you can find
3. Draw out themes.
2. Next, try to have a sense of what skills might be important to develop:
1. What is most critical for being great at the work you’re doing?
2. What traits does your organization value?
3. What skills would unlock new opportunities?
3. Then try to generate a long-ish list of things that you could work on developing.

Some tips…

Maybe develop your strengths

Sometimes people take their strengths and weaknesses and automatically assume that they should try to improve their weaknesses.

I think that you should at least consider focusing on strengths instead. You can often create a lot of value by becoming unusually excellent at a few important things, and then finding roles that use those strengths. So going from good to great is worth investing in.

Sometimes it’s good to plug weaknesses, but often you should try to fill those gaps by shifting responsibilities around instead. For instance, if you struggle with client calls but are great at data analysis, try to find a colleague who complements you and shift work around appropriately.

Focus on things that are part of your job

We’ll discuss this more below, but I think it’s vital that if you’re setting a development goal for the next quarter, you pick some skill or task that you’re going anyway be using a lot in the quarter. So, you should avoid setting a development goal that’s like “improve negotiation skills” if you don’t expect that by default you’d be doing a lot of negotiation in the quarter.

Why focus on things you’d do anyway?

• It makes it much easier to find the time to improve: One of the key ways that development goals fail is that they get dropped when real work deadlines come flying at you. Your manager and other team-mates are also more likely to invest in giving you feedback on an important work project than just on your development goal.
• It’s a good check that you’re learning skills that are actually useful: If you’re not going to use a skill (much) in the coming period, it’s a sign that that skill may not be very useful to you.

This extends to sequencing as well: For instance, suppose that you want to improve at onboarding new people and also at giving feedback, and you’ve got 2 new hires starting in Q3 and then a performance review round in Q4. Then your Q3 dev goal should be about onboarding, and your Q4 goal should be focused on giving feedback.

Making a plan

So now you should have a sense of what you want to get better at, and that thing is something that you’d be doing anyway.

Just do your job unreasonably well

To summarize how I think you should approach this is: just do this aspect of your job unreasonably well, by putting locally-unreasonable amounts of time and energy into it.

Like, if you want to get better at giving feedback, and you think that in general you should spend 10 minutes per week writing feedback for everyone you manage, then when this is your development goal you spend 20-30 minutes giving feedback - drafting it, honing it, getting advice on how to give feedback better, tracking how your feedback is changing behaviour, and also some time writing up what you learn, reflecting on patterns, etc. Then once you’re finished with this dev goal, you can go back to spending 10 minutes / week on feedback, but you’ll have a better sense of what really good feedback looks like, and what the key pitfalls are, etc.

70/20/10

In a bit more detail, you could think of this a 70/20/10 model:

• 70% do the work but with more reflection
• For instance: if you’re currently managing someone who is underperforming, that could be a great opportunity to work on “Feedback and evaluation”.
• So a good way to develop would be to lean into doing an unusually-great job of giving them feedback, assessing their performance in depth, etc. Spend more time on this than you otherwise would.
• And spend a bit of extra time trying to draw out general lessons/principles and noticing what thinking patterns are leading you to do well vs. badly.
• 20% get feedback and coaching from someone who is great at the skill: for example, find a manager who is great at feedback and evaluation and ask them to comment on some of the feedback you’ve shared and give you advice.
• 10% reading or formal training - for example, googling around for the obvious advice on the topic, or trying to find any unusually good articles / podcasts on it.

What this might look like in order

As a chronological plan, this might look something like the following (but this varies a lot, so this isn’t a solid rule):

• Up front (this might take an hour or two)
• You might want to do a little bit of googling and reading to get basic tips on how to approach the thing
• You might want to spend 10-30 minutes writing about how you think this skill/domain works: which things are most important about it? What are the sub-skills? What differentiates poor vs good vs excellent performance?
• You also probably want to think about whether there are any good feedback-loops you can build. Are there any metrics that are easy to track, that would give you a sense of how to improve? Any people who can give you feedback?
• You probably want to identify some people who are really good at the skill. And maybe you want to get some initial advice from them at the start - perhaps some feedback on what you’ve just written.
• Do the thing to unreasonably high standards, get feedback, try to extract general lessons from the feedback
• This might add on 50%-150% more work, beyond what you’d do by default
• Briefly review what you’ve learned once you’re finished with this development area, and use this to help you pick future goals