People Growth Focused On Impact
A model for diverse career development built around Impact
As a people manager you have to wear many hats. One of your most important jobs is to make sure you are helping your employees grow — both in their profession and as a person. Reflecting on your year and realising how much your people and team have developed is an extremely gratifying experience.
Starting out as an Engineering Manager, I approached career development very one-dimensionally: Every engineer follows a comparable path and goes through the same stages of growth and development. If you have a decent career ladder, this approach might be good enough for the majority of your employees, most likely early in their career.
Career ladders and their problems
Ladders are a promising start, however it will not work for everyone: What happens to those that do not fit the ladder perfectly? What about your employees that have outgrown it? How do you deal with people that like to distribute their focus? In the worst case this will result in some of your best people leaving the company.
A single-track career development framework can be even more problematic when it is tied to a succession of roles and titles. It leads to people chasing titles instead of focusing on how they can be most effective and impactful.
Over the last few months, I have tried to think of a more diverse and flexible way to approach personal growth. This has been greatly influenced by the the work some of my colleagues at Redbubble have done in the last year in regards to how we support the growth of our engineers.
Personal growth results in being more impactful
Let me repeat that headline because it is crucial: Everything you do to improve yourself leads to more impact. As an engineer you could learn about React to be able to help with the new front-end project. A designer skills-up on User Research to build better prototypes. As a people leader you could find a mentor which helps with your one-on-ones.
With that in mind, here is insight number two: through which focus the impact is achieved, is irrelevant. It does not matter whether someone is going to be a people manager, a senior technical person or becomes an expert on team productivity. A company should not have a single career track — it should accommodate all kinds of interests and focuses. If that is not possible, people will look somewhere else for it.
The Impact Radius approach
When talking about impact, I like to think about it in terms of a circle around yourself at the centre. With a very small circle — most likely early on in your career — your impact is confined to yourself. Over time you will be able to influence more and more. Essentially, you increase the radius of impact around you.
Let me demonstrate the concept with an example, which will also highlight how completely different careers can lead to similar impact.
Lily and Ben at Growth Inc
Lily and Ben are starting as software engineers at Growth Inc around the same time. Both of them are very new to the business world, as it is their first job out of university.
Since they are both new to the company, they will need to get up to speed with all the tools, programming languages and processes. This is the first step of career development, and the impact radius they are having is contained on themselves. In other words, they are learning and growing in order to become productive members of their respective teams.
Impact beyond the self
Fast forward one year and Lily and Ben have settled in. They are both respected and fully integrated and helping the company build an amazing product for their customers. However, it is already obvious that they have developed different interests and passions. Lily is very involved in making the team more productive — for example finding the optimal cadence for their regular meetings. Ben on the other hand is fascinated by infrastructure and is influencing the development of a new platform together with his team. Although they have started to take different career paths, they have roughly the same impact radius: their respective team.
Impact beyond the team
A couple of years later and their careers look very different. Lily has continued with her focus on team and people and has taking on more of a managerial role. She is the people manager for the engineers on her team and is coordinating the development of up and coming people leaders across the department.
Ben has also specialised further and is now one of the most influential infrastructure engineers and is overseeing the rollout and adoption of the new platform across all teams. Lily and Ben ended up with two very different careers, but roughly the same impact radius — they are influencing their whole department.
This example illustrates how flexible a people growth model around impact is. It all boils down to what skills people acquire in order to be impactful. The specific direction of their development is not important, only the radius of their impact.
How to use this model as a people manager
The hardest (and best) part of the impact radius model is its flexibility. Instead of having to look at a simple list of roles and responsibilities — like a ladder — you will now have to work a bit harder to develop your people. I hope you can see that it will be worth it though, since by applying an impact model, you will not only grow a diverse set of employees, but it will also make them happier and more fulfilled.
This section warrants a whole article but let me try and sum up my approach very briefly:
- Talk to your people about their long-term goals. Where do they want to be in 3–5 years?
- Translate that in short- to medium-term goals, focused on impact. What can be achieved in the next 3–12 months?
- Allow continuous progress by setting 2–6 week milestones. What are the next steps?
- Do everything in your power to give them opportunities. How can you help?
- Assess how much impact has been achieved. Has the impact radius increased?
- Rinse and repeat. Should we persist or pivot?
Summary
The development of your employees is one of the most important things you and your company can do. However, personal growth done well is not easy. Comparatively simple approaches like career ladders might work early on in careers, but it certainly will not be adequate in todays diverse companies.
The impact radius model tries to give you a better way. It is completely flexible and tailored towards the individual and supports any kind of career path. In addition, it also focuses on having impact which is the best possible outcome for the company.
