Unchain a better you at work with a Growth Model

The team that worked on the Agile Coaches Growth Model, from right to left: Oriol Boix, Juan Antonio Sosa, Paulius Tuzikas and me. Dino Zafirakos isn’t part of this drawing but he also participated in its definition.

“Always better, never best.” — That’s it, 4 words is all that’s needed to capture what a growth mindset is all about.

Our Agile Coaches team at Typeform is driven by one core belief:

We need to continuously explore, fail, learn and grow as individuals in order to become better human beings and better professionals.

We believe that by focusing on our personal growth we will improve our value delivery as a team.

Why we created a Growth Model

More than a year ago, we were in a difficult spot. Not enough people, trying to support every request. We felt we were reactive instead of proactive and strategic.

At one point, we decided to hit the reset button and review our purpose and expected impact as a team.

One of the topics we focused on was how we could grow as Agile Coaches to improve our value delivery. We came up with questions like:

• Where I am right now in my professional development?
• What are the competencies I should consider for my growth?
• What should be my next step to keep growing?
• What are the best actions I can take in a specific area?

As a first step, we started defining our growth model.

The goal of any growth model is to create a way to capture the needed feedback to understand where we are, what to improve next and turn improvement into a positive and key focus for every individual working in a team to deliver value.

There are many approaches to work on personal growth in a professional environment. A while ago, Medium published their Engineering growth framework, and Songkick’s growth framework is another great example of a company working on defining a way to become even better at an engineering job.

Medium’s tool for planning and supporting engineers’ career development.

When it comes to the Agile Coach role, there isn’t any widely used growth model. However, the Agile Coaching Institute defined some years ago the Agile Coaching Competency Framework to understand the different perspectives Agile Coaching can be approached from. It breaks Agile Coaching into eight competencies and it talks about what “spaces” an Agile Coach is standing in or coming from.

The Agile Coaching Competency Framework defined by the Agile Coaching Institute.

We decided to use this framework as a robust foundation to start building our growth model.

Our Agile Coaches growth model

For each of the eight competencies in the Agile Coaches Competency Framework, we defined four different levels of growth: Competent, Proficient, Expert and Master.

Our Agile Coaches Growth Model.

To make sure we treat growth as a never-ending journey, we defined the fourth level to be purely inspirational and based on international references. When defining, for instance, the Master level of the Business Mastery competency, which is focused on agile as a competitive business advantage to innovate in the business domain, we chose Eric Ries and Jeff Gothelf as the references for the competency.

Do you want to get to the Master level in Business Mastery using our growth model? Then you should get to a similar place than the ones who wrote the Lean Startup and the Lean UX books.

Going back to the initial sentence of this blog post, it’s never about being the best at something but always aiming to get better at it.

The fourth level (Master) of our Agile Coaches Growth Model is inspirational and based on international references.

For the other levels in each competency, we have defined the impact that we would observe for someone to reach that specific level. For instance, for someone to reach the Competent level of the Lean/Agile practitioner, the person would need to:

• support a team on a daily basis
• have the needed knowledge to apply the main agile methodologies and practices
• work with no need for external support in day-to-day activities

Diagram of the four Lean/Agile Practitioner levels and their definitions.

You can find all definitions for each level here.

This growth model is only focused on the specific competencies for the Agile Coach role. That’s not enough. There are other essential competencies which you should consider as well and that usually come defined by the values or principles of each company.

A growth model has to help individuals grow in alignment with company values and goals. Adding the company core values to your growth model is an essential step.

At Typeform, we all operate under seven fundamental beliefs that we use as guiding principles for the way we do things. We call it the Chef Pie.

• Collaborate to thrive
• Allow Honesty to move things forward
• Tap into your Entrepreneurial spirit
• Leave space for Fun
• Focus your Passion on solving problems
• Seek to Innovate
• Practice Empathy

Each operating principle defined in the Chef Pie is also part of the model, and we also consider them as part of the competencies we need to grow as Agile Coaches at Typeform.

We consider both the competencies in the Agile Coach Growth Model and Typeform’s core values as areas of growth and continuous improvement.

Everybody working in the same company should be considering the same set of operating principles to assess and define growth opportunities, together with the specific set of skills that define the competencies of each role.

Enable growth at the core of your team

Having a growth model is not enough. In fact, as with any other habit, focusing on growth will only be a reality if we define a way to include it in day-to-day routines. Otherwise, the model will become another thing that we tried and just didn’t work.

This is the set of actions we agreed in order to keep our growth alive in the team:

We assess our impact as Agile Coaches two times per year

We use the growth model to assess every member of the team two times per year. The assessment process works as follows:

• The whole team meets in a room
• We go person by person in the team and we focus on one team member at a time
• For each team member, we assess individually that member using the definitions of the levels for each of the competencies, and the team member also self-assesses at the same time. To assess each competency we always use the same question: What’s the impact this Agile Coach has created around this competency during the last 6 months? Based on the observed contributions the level is then chosen
• Once we’ve covered all the team we go member by member and share feedback by looking at the results and comparing perceptions. We focus on facts and examples to share constructive and actionable feedback to each team member

Once we finish the assessment we process the feedback received and we collaboratively build the final shared assessment for each team member.

Set of steps that we follow for each team member when we use the Growth Model to assess the team.

We end each assessment with an open conversation and an assessment that contains feedback from the whole team. Juanan may have added in his assessment of me a contribution observed that I missed and this can change the way in which I would evaluate one competency. That’s why in the end we take into account everything that has been brought as contributions and observations and we build together the final one.

We keep our growth focus/es shared in a Trello board

At the end of the assessment we define one or two main areas of focus for the following months. This gives us a direction to follow when we define specific actions. These focus areas are a combination of personal interests, team needs and company needs.

All the feedback gathered is used in our Agile Coaches — Personal Growth Trello board, the place where we enable our growth based on the feedback from the assessment.

Our Agile Coaches-Personal Growth Trello board.

The board has a backlog for each team member containing the feedback received. The feedback is translated into growth actions based on the needs detected and the interests of each individual to explore and grow.

We have a weekly catch up to share progress

We have a weekly “Agile Learning / Personal Growth” session on Fridays to look at our progress, help each other define actions and share learnings that can be useful for the team.

The weekly catch up is focused on our Agile Coaches — Personal Growth board. This is an example of a personal backlog containing some improvement actions.

Next steps to improve this growth model

During this journey we have found many things to improve, and we have evolved some of them already. It’s a continuous improvement process with no finish line and these are the things we would like to focus on next:

• Explore better ways to connect the model with a focus on emotional intelligence. For now the Agile Coaches Growth Model only contains the specific competencies connected with the role, and we treat the rest as a separate part of the visual. We would like to improve the way in which we put all the information together
• Improve the description of each level for each competency. We have used the descriptions of each level during the assessments that we celebrate twice per year, and have found some ambiguities when assessing some of them. Improving the descriptions could help us obtain a better refined feedback for each of us
• Improve the inspirational references of the model. We came up with them from the very beginning and haven’t reviewed them since then. Clear references could help us understand better each competency
• Try better ways to understand grey areas between levels. When using the model to assess each team member we found situations in which we couldn’t easily get to a clear result, especially when the discussion was in a grey area between two consecutive levels. Improving the differentiation between levels could help us get to clearer assessments
• Stick to our team agreements. This has probably been the biggest challenge for us. In some periods of the year we’ve been quite overloaded as a team and we haven’t always kept alive the weekly follow-up session to talk about our growth.

We started using the model as soon as we had a first finished version, and we will keep iterating over it.

Try the Growth Model today

Interested in trying this model? here you can find all the information to start using our Agile Coaches Growth Model.

Don’t focus on being the best. Don’t compare yourself to others. Look for like-minded people, embrace a growth mindset and focus on continuously being a better version of yourself.