Personal Development with LEGO, Skill Cards, Interaction and… FUN!
Background
Working as an IT people/engineering manager now for over a decade, I’ve seen a lot of different approaches from agencies and learning-by-doing to corporations with a lot of documentation, tools, frameworks, and… requirements.
Most of the personal development dialogues I let in the corporation environment, and a permanent challenge is to keep the personal development dialogue personal, focussed on the co-worker, helpful & useful, with a clear feedback and actionable options for personal growths in future — without letting it become a tiresome obligation.
There are some good guidelines and frameworks provided by companies, but there is no focus in keeping it individual — and in best case entertaining!
This is why we started applying gamification to the personal development dialogue, while keeping the dialogue itself serious and focussed.
Skill LEGO Board
First we started assembling the products, techniques, used tool and skills in our team and iconfied them with the help of our great UX/UI designer Franziska Meusel (now Head of UI/UX & A/B Testing at WeltN24 GmbH):
Personal development of engineers is not limited to the mastery of programming languages, technical tools and frameworks; it is undoubtable that engineers limited to those skills will be of limited efficiency in fast moving, agile environments.
Working and communicating with your team, with other teams and stakeholders, taking an active part in defining your role and tasks and actively suggesting and providing solutions to current or upcoming challenges, exceed pure technical skills.
Soft skills like motivation, communication, sparring and coaching, interviewing, recognizing and selecting high potentials in interviews, visualisation and presentation and not at last team spirit are required on the same level in our team, like you may recognize in the icon images above.
Personal Skill Board
Now every team member was provided with a LEGO board, and LEGO plates with icon stickers attached to it, plus additional LEGO bricks.
The briefing for the skill board was:
- Assemble your individual skill board
- Check what is available, what you want and what is required in the team
- Select your personal targets
- Feel your progress year-by-year
Initially the co-worker assembles her personal skill board with later feedback by the manager and agreed adjustments by both sides, to represent the current level of the individual skills.
The skill level for each icon plate brick is represented by the number and height of the LEGO bricks below the plate: zero height for starting a new skill and up to three bricks for skills on expert level.
The team memeber and manager discuss the current levels and the next focus for personal growth.
Revisiting the board each year, the target is being able to add bricks to one or more skill columns — and really see, reflect and feel the personal improvement on several skills throughout the last year — and select the skills to focus on the next year in commitment of both dialogue partners.
Even though one or two co-workers didn’t like this playful approach, all others really loved it — including me. They liked it so much, that most of them still possess their boards, even though we switched later on to a more digital version that you will see later in this article.
And I would not force this to people that see no benefit in it, sticking to the standard process for them instead.
Skill Cards by Rob Saywer
By random, I stumpled upon the Skill Cards approach by Rob Saywer, currently Head of UX & Design at mobile.de GmbH.
The basic idea is pretty similar, but instead of jumping on LEGO, his team choosed a card game.
The goal is to build a hand of cards that make up that person’s most relevant personal growth areas.
To do this, both the people leader and team member start with a deck of the same skill cards each. In private, each goes through this deck and sorts these cards into three stacks: not relevant, good enough, and to improve.
By discussing why each card was placed where, with particular focus on those that do not match, a real, structured, and to-the-point conversation occurs. By focusing on reasoning — what led you to place this card here? — both can develop a shared understanding of the other’s views.
The main event, however, comes in focusing on those cards in “to improve”. To create focus and drive actual impact, these cards are discussed and prioritized. With a clear priority and a shared understanding of the individual aspects of each, tangible actions are crafted that can be taken to grow one’s career.
Thanks for the inspiration, Rob!
Digital, interactive, gamified, personal development dialogue
The LEGO skill board was a fun way to revisit currents skills and plan to improve and gain new skills, and the card game was very inspirational.
Of course, the personal development dialogue is not limited talking about skills, but talking about skills for sure is one component of it.
For Corona and scalability reasons we switched the full dialogue — including the skill board — to a digital version, based on… PowerPoint.
Don’t scream at me, YES: PowerPoint!
PowerPoint is available to all employees and has great half-automated visualization options via SmartArt, plus you can play PowerPoint also interactively with PowerPoint 365 online. It’s just sitting there and does not require programming or setup.
I am still not a big fan of PowerPoint, but it get’s the job done pretty nicely, as you will see in the following paragraphs.
Chronology
After warmup, we start with looking back, what happened throughout the last year: the good, the bad and the ugly.
Via the SmartArt-Text editor you don’t have to work directly with the graphic, but the changes in the text editor will be directly reflected in the graphic.
Best is to start with a prepared chronology, and extending it with missing important events during the discussion.
Of course, in the default case the co-worker will receive instant positive or negative feedback directly after an event happened; positive in feedback public and critics (yes, I am German 😉, but you also might want to learn about Radical Candor) or improvement suggestion in private (reading recommendation: Empowered).
We mark the events that had a negative or positive connotation with different colors, and take notes in the note section of PowerPoint to refer to later.
Listening and asking is the main responsibility of the manager in this part.
360 Degree Feedback
AS National Media Tech also offers a custom-made tool for an optional, annual 360 degree feedback, where you can actively ask for feedback from your manager, employees, colleagues and compare those with your self-assessment.
During this part, we mainly discuss about the main difference between self-assessment and the feedback of the others, to get a more objective overall picture and identify areas of improvement.
The feedback itself might be very subjective and depends to a big part on the questions that are compiled to the feedback result, but having that in mind, it’s a great reflection tool (by the way reflact is the internal name of the tool).
Career Matrix/Tech Expert Track
As a proactive tool, to plan and drive your personal career forward, AS National Media Tech introduced the Tech Expert Track (TET) for engineers.
Basically it describes different areas of growth, and levels of expertise in the different areas. Initially it was a pure Excel sheet, but using a PowerPoint net graphic, retrieving its data from an embedded small Excel sheet made this much more visible and enjoyable!
In distinction to the 360 degree feedback, only the team member and the manager are giving their feedback separately, and the focus is more narrow on the soft and hard skills. Afterwards they exchange about the agreements and separate points of view in this section of the personal development dialogue.
To earn the next overall expertise level, like Junior, Advanced, Senior, Staff or Principal, you have to show the required expertise level in all areas.
Skill Board
Ok, I still love the LEGO skill board, that was described at the beginning of the article, but this didn’t scale. So we had to switch to a digital version.
We ended up using PowerPoint SmartArts with tech and skill icons.
Again the depth is representing the level of expertise in the area, a pink border visualizes the upcoming focus, selected by your team member herself.
The skill boards are separated in platforms and technologies, and services and soft skills, similar to the setup of the LEGO board.
As a manager, I see my role in this part rather passive and supportive than active and pushy; the employee should have the freedom to select and follow his own career path, according to the available options.
Developer KPIs
To cultivate a more objective understanding of a team member’s performance, we incorporate developer KPIs into our development dialogues. These KPIs are not used to compare developers against one another; instead, they serve to track individual progress and evolution over time.
It’s crucial to recognize that not all metrics should consistently increase. As developers advance in their careers, their focus may shift for example rather from creating pull requests more to reviewing pull requests of others.
Code KPIs
- Code Contributions
- Pull Requests
- Reviews
- Feature Lead Activities
- Overview documentations written in Wiki
Hiring KPIs
- Coffee Talks
- Trials Task Reviews
- Interviews
- Onboardings
Coaching KPIs
- Coachees
- Progressions of Coachees
PR KPIs
- Conference Visits
- Active Open Source Projects
- Blog Posts
- Speeches — internal & external
- Events organized
For senior developers, coaching and mentoring become integral parts of their roles, enabling them to elevate their team members to higher levels of expertise and seniority. This holistic approach ensures a balanced and fair assessment of each developer’s growth and contributions.
Definition of Next Steps
With the input of the previous steps, we agree on how me as manager, may I support my team member to achieve her goals. Mainly we define three concrete topics:
Activities on the Job
How can we re-define the role and responsibility description to enable the engineer reaching his goals?
Trainings
Which hard-skill, soft-skill or certification training would make sense to participate?
Conferences
Which conferences would help getting a broader vision on which technologies evolve and how technologies might be used to get the most out of it?
Additional Orientation via Moving Motivators
Sometimes people need additional support to identify what they really want and what motivates them.
A helpful tool, that I would suggest in that case, would be the Moving Motivaters Game, that helps bringing the emotional and rational needs and targets together.
Collection of Open Source Frameworks for Personal Growth
My long-term co-worker Anton Averin brought the service Progression.fyi to my attention, that provides open source career framework collection of different companies like: Apple, Google, Circle CI, Amazon and others.
Career framework inspiration from the world’s best companies.
Progression.fyi is a collection of public and open source career frameworks and templates
Career Framework Tool by Progression
Additionally Progression provides a career framework tool, where you can build roles and career pathways, and provide them to every employee to measure their skills and development and plan their career according the visible options provided.
Define and measure career growth for your team
Build roles and career pathways, share effortlessly and help everyone measure their skills and development.
The visualization of the skill levels with the net graphic, sounds somewhat familiar, doesn't it?
Final words
It was a bit of a work assembling an interactive, gamified version of the personal development dialogue, but looking back, it really was worth it!
Especially if you manage a lot of team members, the effort you put into it, pays back double time: The dialogues themselves get much more fun and productive at the same time, and the employee is much more encouraged to take an active role in her individual career progression.
The documentation of progress grows year by year, and it is always motivating looking back, seeing and feeling where you have been back then, and how you evolved to the current day!
Hope you liked this story and found some inspiration for your next personal development dialogue. If you know some cool tools or frameworks in that area, I would love you to let me know!
Thanks for friendly support by our Head of Organisational Development & Change: Martina Keller, who also granted me the freedom to adopt the official processes, like described in this article.
