As a manager, goal setting should be part of your everyday job, whether it’s for yourself, your team, a tribe, a peer or an individual.

At Treatwell, we began fostering a culture of learning. We created frameworks, started setting personal goals, making L&D a focal part of our day to day and prepped our leaders to take on the challenge of supporting their direct reports on this journey.

Once we had all the pieces in place I thought this would be a breeze. As it turns out not everyone knows exactly what they want to learn, where they want to go in their careers or even what their main interests are. Career ladders or development frameworks are common in most companies and surprisingly I find this is what stunts many people from growing in a meaningful way. Past experiences of dogmatic frameworks that led to little success. Couple that with preconceived ideas of what good should look like in a role and you end up with a fixed idea of how to grow in that space.

This makes goal setting difficult. For me is where understanding the power of self reflection comes into play.

Self reflection isn’t something that comes naturally to most of us. Being open and truly honest with yourself can be uncomfortable, risky and even make you feel vulnerable. Add someone else into the mix like your line manager and those feelings only amplify.

This is a position I have found myself in more than once. So I started thinking, as a manager what could I do to help someone get past those fears and negative feelings? How do you make an exercise in vulnerability, honesty and self reflection safe and enjoyable ?

How do you make an exercise in vulnerability, honesty and self reflection safe and enjoyable ?

With Superman of-course!

This idea originated as a workshop to allow teams to learn about self reflection and goal setting in a safe environment without having to share anything personal. Using a basic canvas as a conversation tool and powerful questions to help them identify motivations, beliefs, aspirations and more. Thanks to the corona virus and lockdowns the idea of a workshop became less appealing, so I adapted the idea for a 121 setting instead.

By the way if you have not come across them before a powerful question is an open ended question with no hidden agenda meant to help the receiver of the question.

The canvas we used is a simple document comprising four quadrants and a centrepiece for a potential goal. Each quadrant focuses on a different area for self reflection.

The quadrants we used are:

What matters to you — What are your values, what’s the most important part of your day, who do you like working with and why, how do you learn best?

The Future — Where does he/she see themselves within the company, beyond their current role, what would they like to achieve in their personal lives

Your Skills — What are the things you think are your best attributes, or things you’re not so great at?

Your Role — Basically this is a job spec of your role, what you like about it, what you dislike, anything and everything about your day to day.

The idea was simple, choose a set of questions for each quadrant and slowly attempt to answer them for the role or person in question. It’s crucial that you create time and space for this activity as the process is just as important as the answers.

The order of the quadrants is irrelevant, there will inevitably be some overlap across them. You also don’t have to complete all the sections or set a goal in the end. The real objective of the canvas is to use powerful questions to encourage self reflection about their values, beliefs and interests and how to use those elements to then shape meaningful personal growth.

To kick things off I set up an extended 121 with one of my team where together we pretended to be the man of steel and started to explore some of the questions in each section.

In this instance the questions were aimed at Superman, but these can be changed for any character, role or individual. Knowing the person you’re doing this with, understanding how they like to go about their work can be helpful when choosing which questions to use.

This is what our completed canvas looked like:

Once we’d painted that picture of Superman, exploring his various motivations, likes and dislikes, we began looking for themes across the quadrants, potential outliers or simply things we felt strongly about. This would form the foundation around which a goal could be created.

We noted themes around normality, family and wanting to protect those closest to him. We settled that what this Superman wanted most is to be seen as normal, to live a life in peace, just like an everyday person and that became our draft goal. In the follow up sessions we eventually iterated on the goal to end up with something like “In the next 2 years I will empower the justice league so that I can live a normal life without being Superman”

The final outcome was much better than I had expected. The process was fun, informative and we both had a good laugh doing it. We followed it up with a repeat of that process, which was much shorter and impactful except this time using their personal canvas and focusing on their own growth. We were able to incorporate the Tech growth framework more effectively and most importantly it led my them to setting a goal for themselves that they truly believed in. We also used the canvas we created for Superman as a reference point for their own canvas as well as for future 121 conversations around personal growth.

I’ve used this format a few times, with different people, in different roles, with different levels of seniority and the outcome has always been positive. So far they’ve all been remote sessions but I think this could work even better in person.

As an added benefit I found the process also gave my team some insight to the thinking I go through as a manager during personal development conversations. And by eliminating the personal side of things it helped to build trust between us while giving me a chance to get to know them better as individuals.

Knowing your role as a manager when it comes to personal development is key and understanding that self reflection can be a daunting, difficult task is extremely valuable. As leaders we should aim to create safe environments to practice, this will encourage learning behaviours like asking questions, seeking feedback and taking risks. Who knows, it might be the thing that transforms your next personal development conversation from good to truly awesome.