Help Your Team Grow in Their Careers

🎡 The Yearly, Monthly, Weekly goal setting cycle

A recent study about Facebook employees revealed that many people leave jobs because they don’t have support for their professional growth. But even when your team members want to develop their careers, they may not know how! 

Learning how to set goals and break them down can help keep your team motivated and engaged. Jay Signorello is a 2x co-founder, former VP of Engineering at Zillow, and current CTO of Backstory. How did he get there? With a structured goal setting cycle.

⭐️ Yearly

At the start of the year (or cycle), carve out time in a 1:1 and help your team member to prepare in advance by providing some prompts. Ask them to consider:

What do you want your career to look like in the future? Imagine someone you admire who has the type of job you'd like to have... • What do you want to do more of in your day-to-day? • What would you like to do less of? • What kind of projects give you energy?

This will be the foundation for their yearly goals. For example, let’s say your team member wants to become the team’s Product Lead.

🌟 Monthly

At the beginning of each month, work together to set sub-goals to work toward their yearly goals. If your team member’s big yearly goal is to become the Product Lead, they might set a monthly goal that looks like this:

1. Gather qualitative feedback from the team on my leadership skills
2. Have 2 mentoring sessions from an experienced Product Lead
3. Improve on one area or skill

✨ Weekly

On Monday mornings, carve out time for the whole team to reflect on their development plan and prioritize the week’s tasks. Maybe their weekly benchmarks would look like this:

1. Set up regular 1:1s with at least 3 team members
2. Document and reflect on the week's biggest challenges
3. Find articles, reach out to network, and dig into personal development

They may want to focus on one of their monthly goal each week, or be more flexible and budget time blocks for each monthly goal throughout the week. The idea is that their weekly schedule will help them reach their sub-goals by the end of the month.

🧑‍🍳 The key ingredient

Your team will look to you to create space and time for rest - Jay says this is the most important way to support your team while they're reaching for the stars. Help them schedule time to recharge:

1. Clarify off-hours messaging expectations (ex. on a weekend or after core hours, schedule the message to send later)
2. Block hours throughout the week for recharge time
3. Mark the meetings and calls that need to be taken at a computer, and which can be joined during a walk

Keep getting to know your team's needs, and asking them what would help them feel more energized!

💫 Onward and upward

Team members who feel they are valued and have room and resources to grow are more likely to stay - even when you hit hurdles or road bumps.

In your future 1:1s, check in with your team members about their development plans. Taking the time to support your team members in their career progression shows that you care about their future and motivations. Plus, it can be a natural energizer for your team!