How to use wheel of life for professional development
I work in IT, with software development teams as a Scrum Master. Coaching is a significant part of my job. I would like to show you how I modified and used the wheel of life, which is a basic coaching tool in my professional environment. The following example is based on software development team, but the with some modification could be applicable to any areas of business and to any kind of teams. I will use a tiny story based on real life conversations to demonstrate the efficiency of the tool.
Wheel of life
Wheel of life is widely used during life coaching sessions as a visual tool or worksheet to help quickly understand how balanced the client’s life at the moment. It contains 5 to 10 slices representing the important areas of life. The client rates these areas on a scale based on their satisfaction. After the rating the client sees right away which areas needs improvement. These areas could be a subject of the further coaching sessions. There are many articles on the internet, if you’d like to read more about this tool, for instance this one: https://www.thecoachingtoolscompany.com/wheel-of-life-complete-guide-everything-you-need-to-know/
Wheel of life for 1:1s: Professional development
One aspect to use wheel of life is to use it for professional development. This could be a great tool to use as a manager. It could be incorporated with KPIs or personal OKR system. I use quarterly OKRs for professional development of my team members. This exercise is a great help to define Objectives and Key results. We fill out the wheel in every quarter, and use it as a visualised input for personal OKR creation. Since we use this system the OKR creation is way faster and it helps to define meaningful item.
Little modification is necessary in the wheel. You should define key areas which are needed to fulfill the job. These areas could differ for each role, for example for testers, developers, UX, PO you’ll have a wheel with different categories. My team contains 5 Java developers, a tester and a PO. It required some preparation from my side. I collected the necessary skills and created the wheels. Let’s see the developer as an example, the categories I used: Java skills, database knowledge, build & release system knowledge, testing skills, cloud infra, soft skills and customer collaboration. The categories should be created based on the required skill set of the employee. An example of the chart could be seen below.
The first time we did this exercise there were many questions raised. I was surprised when I took a look at my inbox and slack messages and saw the amount of questions regarding the process. Since we have a good relationship with my team, and good managers always respond to concerns and questions ASAP, we held a Q&A session which took about 45 minutes.
I had a developer, Bob, who was very loud and sceptical about introducing a new tool. “It’s yet another stuff we have to do instead of development” — he said. Bob is an extroverted person with great communication and presentations skills and 10+ years of java development experience. He has a strong opinion, but with good reasoning and with some facts he could be convinced. He does what he feels he is best in and doesn’t like distractions. I wasn’t able to convince Bob during the Q&A session, but we agreed to give it a try and if it doesn’t work for him we’ll never use this exercise again.
I sent out a very simple questionnaire, but it could be anything from a simple grading system to a collection of questions. The individuals did the exercise and gave the grading before our 1:1 session. During the session we discussed the results. I sat down with Bob and took a look at his chart together:
“All right”, — I said — “so you have a decent knowledge of Java, databases, testing and your communication skills are obviously amazing.” He nodded towards me. I continued, “As I can see the build & release, cloud infra and customer collaboration could be subject of improvement.” He crossed his legs and said: “Yes, maybe.” “So, what bothers you the most regarding the build and release system.” I asked.
Bob lean forward and started to raise his hands to express his feelings more. “You know, I push my changes and press the build button, because I want to see if everything integrates properly and my tests are green. There are many many times when I see the build pipeline turning red. I dig into the logs, you know, to see what I missed. But I can’t figure it out what’s wrong. I suspect it’s not my code made the pipeline red again. It’s really devastating. And I have to ask Tom, who is the only one who knows this system. At least we have him, but he is always busy. Which is understandable, I know sometimes I could be pushy to get what I need. But sometimes I have to wait hours and hours for him to fix the pipeline. That’s nonsense…”
That was great, we can work with that — I thought. “Look, I feel you.” I took over. “That’s a situation we have to do something about. So your objective for this quarter could be something like: I’m being able to fix the build system related issues in order to reduce dependency on other team members. Correct?” I looked straight into his eyes.
“Exactly!” He replied with enthusiasm. “And I know there are many resources regarding the system, and there are few guys like Tom at the company who know it well. It just takes time to dig into this and learn how it works. There are more important stuff to do.”
“I know,” — I continued — “there is always something more important. But if we don’t allocate time to this, the waiting for others will consume significantly more time and cause frustration for you.” He nodded. “So let’s make your key results. You said there are plenty of materials about the system. The first KR could be: I read all the build & release system related internal materials. The next one could be to ask Tom to give you a training. Maybe there are others in the team who’d like to learn more about this. I’ll ask around. After the training you could try to fix a few issues together with Tom. Let’s see, like 5. And the last KR could be that you are able to fix 5 issues by yourself without any help. How do you feel about that?”
“That would be awesome…” he replied with some desperation in his voice. “But…. it won’t work, you know. We’ll see what reality brings. I don’t know if we’ll have time for this due to our deadlines.”
“There is always a risk.” — I said. “I see it’s really stretching. We’ll check the progress in our further 1:1s, and you should ask my help if you feel stuck, or you need to allocate more time for this. I’ll talk with the PM to allocate time for you to learn this. I see this is a great long term investment for everyone.”
He stood up. “We’ll see about that. Anyways, we have my OKRs, it took like 20 minutes. This tool might be useful, but we’ll see about that in the next quarter. Thanks for the session.”
“Thanks, Bob.” I stood up and walked back to our team space.
So this session took about 20 minutes, and we had the OKRs up and running. This way it was much faster to create meaningful OKRs, what really matter.
Few months passed. I had a chat with the PM, about allocating time for Bob to learn about the Build and release system. I prepared with exact data, to show the return of the time invested. He agreed. I asked around among the team, and it turned out more people would like to learn a bit about the build process. I provided some help in organising the workshop. The time has come to evaluate the quarter and to create the next OKRs. I sent out the questionnaire again, and sit down with everyone.
I sat down with Bob. “So, how did this quarter went? Let’s grade your OKRs.”
He started explaining. “Well, I read all the materials. We had the workshop, you know. We did 5 pair working session with Tom. So I guess these could be marked 100%.”
“All right.” I said.
He lean forward and starts explaining. “About the last one. I know more and more about this system, but now I realise how much I don’t know. I have tried to fix issues by myself, I have succeeded like 2–3 times. Otherwise I was not able to figure out what the heck those error messages mean. I passed it over to Tom.”
“Well, that’s an improvement, 2–3 is more than 0. Let’s mark it as a 50%. Now let’s take a look at the chart for this quarter and figure out new OKRs.”
Bob presented the following chart:
“As you can see I feel more confident with the build system, but I see a lot of room for improvement. Many times I still need Tom’s help.”
“Ok.” I interrupted. “So let’s keep your previous objective: I’m being able to fix the build system related issues in order to reduce dependency on other team members. If you feel there are still more issues you don’t understand, you could collect those and ask Tom for an advanced training. These could be formulated to nice key results.”
I saw some confusion in Bob’s eyes, so I stopped to let him speak. “Well, I don’t know about collecting would make sense though. Anyway, I see the value of an advanced training. Maybe I could solve more issues by myself after that.”
“Exactly,” — I took over — “so let’s keep the I am able to fix 5 issues regarding to the build system without any help.“
“Cool.” He nodded with a tiny smile.
“Maybe you’ll the one who’ll give trainings about the build infra soon.”
He laughed. “We’ll see about that.”
“Anyway.” He continued. “As you can see from the chart, I gave a tiny score for the cloud infra. I used AWS for my pet projects, I understand when the guys talk about it, but I wouldn’t be able to work efficiently if it comes to that. Thankfully Peter and Rachel do all the cloud related work.”
“Yes, but it would be nice if you could help out them, or jump in if one of them is sick.” — I nodded.
“I see your point.” He said. “Maybe with a lot of pair work I could gather the knowledge.”
I stopped him. “That would be great, however due to our current deadlines and your previous objective, I don’t believe the team could afford that in this quarter. Do you have any other idea how to improve?”
He nodded. “Well, i could watch some online trainings to understand the concept better, in order to make the pair work smoother in the next quarter.”
“Excellent… “I smiled and we kept talking and creating an improvement plan for the quarter.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I believe one-on-one meetings are really important for employee engagement and for professional development. A manager who can conduct great 1:1s, using coaching techniques can elevate the individuals and the team to a next level. The wheel of life and it’s modifications are great visual tools, and an excellent conversation starters. It could set the stage to create KPIs, OKRs, and retrospectives. By filling out the wheel the areas of improvement are visualised. It’s much more efficient to develop meaningful goals if there is a visualisation given upfront.
