Team Development Cards

A great way to capture development needs and mentoring potential within a design team

How to do it

1. Prime your design team with various Shaping Design exercises and make sure you end with the Skittle Map, or similar.
2. Get designers to write cards for any competencies that they want to grow in — describing how they would want to develop and want to learn
3. Get designers to write cards for any competencies that they could help develop others with
4. Group the cards into similar categories
5. Capture the card detail and the users’ codes
6. Analyse the data and create an internal development initiative
7. Invest in external training where there are gaps

An extension to Skittle Mapping

Some example skittle maps

In my early Shaping Workshops, I would close the sessions with the Skittles Map exercise.

Designers developed their own personal map describing the competencies that matter to them. They also had identified areas in which they could grow. And areas in which they could help others.

In a conference workshop, where you might not be with a colleague, this was a valuable output to take away. For me to collect useful category and development data. For the designer to take away back to their personal planning or line management session.

As I started doing more team workshops, I realised that I could go a step further.

Inspiration from Steve Portigal

The legendary and lovely Steve Portigal

I was inspired by stories of a workshop that fellow Human, Steve Portigal, used to run around soft skills. I don’t know the full story but from what I remembered he and others describing, he used to do the following:

1. Get people to generate the soft skills that they needed to develop
2. Then identify the soft skills that they could help others on
3. He would then encourage the attendees to pair up those that wanted to develop in an area with those that could develop others

I may have this account completely wrong, but either way it was a good launchpad for my own exercises.

The skittles maps had helped people identify development areas and areas they could help others. There was also a large difference in how quickly people would create their maps. After I noticed people finishing up, I started introducing the new final exercise.

Writing mentee and mentor cards

Simple cards for capturing team development needs and mentoring potential

They would have to take an area of development and write a card about what they would want to know or how they would want to improve. Once they’ve done that, they would pick another until they had done all of the areas of their own development.

Next, they would take the areas that they could help others with. They would then write cards for them as well.

Organising the supply and demand

When everyone was done, we then took the cards and organised them into columns.

From this quick view, you could see where there was demand for certain competencies. And where there were potential mentors within the design team. The delta between those was fascinating.

You can see two columns above where there is a huge delta between orange (mentor) and blue (mentee)

For example, in the image above, there were a lot of designers who could help mentor others on visual UI design. But only one or two that actually wanted to develop in that area.

Whereas, the strategy area was almost a polar opposite. Lots of demand, very little supply.

Rich and pragmatic development areas

An early categorisation of what attendees chose in their skittles maps

With more time, I would sometimes analyse the data more thoroughly. I would capture the actual suggestions of how someone could help others. Or be helped themselves.

An example snippet of some of the captured cards froma workshop

Aside from capturing the development demand and mentoring potential in the team. And the deltas between. I was delighted to see the ways how someone wanted to develop, or mentor others.

An example translation of skittles to scoring

They were surprisingly pragmatic and potentially more effective. It wasn’t all about expensive training courses. It was more supportive. Shadowing. Critiquing. Observing.

This was all powerful data for a team. It could help drive much more focused training and development initiatives. It could help create a stronger supportive culture across the team. It could help better retain staff and help them grow in their roles.

Want to find out more, follow the series

If you want to learn more about the Shaping Workshops I run, and what I have learned over the years, follow me, or read some other articles in the Medium Publication.

Keep your eyes peeled for another post tomorrow.