Personal development at Oda

In this post we will talk about how we approach personal development in Oda, and give you a peak into our Personal development framework - Compass.

We will also tell you how personal development is key to our core behaviours;
we care about people ❤️, we shoot for the stars 🚀 , and we are here to stay ♾.

Personal development

Personal development or personal growth, career development, professional development — it has many names. Personal development has been a part of companies processes and our work life for a long time and in different forms. Stemming from a world where knowledge professions were less common, it used to be focused on measuring how well you met specific goals and achievements, and less so on how much each person improve their skillsets to prepare them for more challenges.

People’s sentiment towards personal development put in process tends to be split. Some like it and find it to be a way to get help growing themselves and getting feedback on their progress, while others might find it uncomfortable and a distraction.

Overall though, we think people see that it provides value. But it needs to be as natural and little intrusive as possible. Finding the right balance on the rigidity of the process to cater to all individuals, no matter how they feel about personal development, is crucial.

As with any other support tooling, such as documentation tools, issue tracking tools, it only gets as good as you make it. Hence, no matter how good the tool for personal development is, it still often ends up being a recurring chore for both managers and the individual imposed by the system.

Why we created Compass

At Oda, we believe that the collective personal development and growth of our colleagues will help us to live up to our behaviour of shooting for the stars🚀 (known from the early days as “All we do is win” 😉). Therefore, we want a way to both help, encourage and recognise people who grow and develop.

To optimise our chances for success with personal development, we wanted a framework that is more of a guiding light as to what skills, traits, behaviours and values that we believe will help bring us forward towards the ambitious targets we have set for ourselves as a company for the long term — after all, “we are here to stay” ♾. It should be lightweight, but still meaningful. Flexible enough for everyone to find meaningful paths to grow. It should encourage, normalise and enable conversations between managers and their team members around personal skills — both soft and hard skills.

We found Compass to be a fitting name for what we were trying to create — not only for the direct association with the navigation tool, but also its original latin meaning — com- (“together”) + passus (“a pace, step, way, route”).

Our goal is ultimately to encourage personal development in many shapes and forms for all our employees, and at the same time provide some guidance as to what we think can help an individual have a greater impact here at Oda.

There are many companies out there that are good at personal development, and Compass is not revolutionising the space. But to achieve our goals with Compass, we believe it is crucial that it has the touch and feel of Oda, which is why we have mixed and matched the best parts of other frameworks, with our own Oda sprinkles on top … voila we have Compass!

What is Compass?

In essence Compass is a collection of our most desired skills, traits, behaviours and values (we call them expectations), all put into a context that fits the individual.

The context that determines your set of expectations is:

• Your discipline of expertise
• Your experience and personal / professional growth so far
• Your leadership ambitions
• To some extent your current role

We call those contextualised collections of expectations steps, and the different directions paths.

As you probably have figured out already the expectations is not all directly connected to your discipline. Instead, the expectations on each step are divided into three dimensions.

• The Results & Strategy dimension encourages you to incorporate our strategy in your daily work, and guide your work and decisions based on expected results and acquired insight.
• The People & Organisation dimension encourages you to focus on supporting your colleagues, represent Oda in an inspiring way in public and contribute to grow our culture and our ambitions for diversity.
• The Discipline & Expertise dimension focuses more on your craft and discipline’s hard skills.

There are enough expectations at every step in every path to make sure that no two individuals have the exact same profile of strengths and weaknesses.
This also reflects how we as human beings all have unique abilities, interests and natural talents, and we want people to grow in the direction that motivates them as much possible. As opposed to forcing people into a mold and create an army of clones. We both hire and grow for diversity.

How does it work?

Although you might define some specific areas of desired personal development that you and your manager put extra attention on, we also want to discuss your skills development in the other expectations in your step.

Change is the only constant in our business, and having static personal goals that deviate too much from what you feel would be the best for your team at any given point could potentially put you in a tough spot of having to choose between personal development or team success.

As mentioned above, traditional personal development assessments have often been about whether you were able to reach certain binary goals. Although we encourage setting goals, in Compass we rather assess how working towards these goals improves you and your abilities to grow and take on new challenges.

As an example: Instead of “Able to launch feature Y at time X” we will instead evaluate “Is known among colleagues for their ability to deliver on time and on specification”. The evaluation is done in the form of regularity, ranging from Rarely to Consistently.

Because Compass covers such a wide spectrum of skills and traits that are all relevant to become an important contributor in Oda, you will always have the possibility to improve and grow no matter what challenges your day-to-day work throws at you. This means there is also always relevant follow ups, coaching and discussions to be had in the regular 1:1 sessions.

In addition, we do at least two in-depth sessions a year with everyone. Before these sessions both the leader and the team member will prepare by pointing out strong and weak spots within the step and share with each other, to give both time to reflect and to collect extra input if needed.

Once you excel at a majority of expectations in your current step and perhaps also having moved into a new role, been given more responsibilities or other changes that alters your context, you will jump to a different step.

Final words

Compass is currently used in all our Product & Technology disciplines, and will gradually be used more widely in Oda. As with everything we do, we believe in continuous improvement. Compass is by no means finished, and we will keep iterating and improving it forever. At some future point we also hope to be able to share the framework openly outside the company.

Stay tuned!

PS. If this resonates with your thinking about your own professional & personal development, go ahead and check out our open positions.