career, hiring, management

career pivot challenges

In a previous role, I hired Parker[1], who was pivoting from a successful career as a front-end software engineer to a career as a user researcher. Parker had learned about user research when they left a small bootstrapped startup. They got a Senior Engineer role at a big tech company and started meeting their colleagues in functions that their small startup didn’t have. Feeling the pull of user experience, they started learning about user research in their spare time, reading books and articles, and spending as much time as possible with their new user researcher colleagues. They decided that they wanted to pivot from their successful role as a Senior Engineer, and applied to my Associate Junior Researcher opening.

I was excited to hire Parker. I was working on complex enterprise products whose primary users were system administrators and other technical people. Parker’s engineering work was for another enterprise software company, so they understood our complex domain. They had conducted some of their own usability studies in their previous role, and had built a good foundational knowledge of user experience and research methodology. My team was excited to have them join us.

For junior roles, we’re often not looking for a lot of evidence of professional skills like mentoring, managing conflict, or influencing without authority. Those skills usually come later in someone’s career. For those making a career pivot after a successful professional career in another discipline, this can actually represent a challenge. A career switcher who does have those professional skills can be at a disadvantage if they have a short-sighted manager who doesn’t leverage or even value those skills in someone at their level.

I didn’t fully realize this when I hired Parker, but Parker had lots of strong professional skills like mentoring, managing conflict, and dealing with difficult stakeholders. That helped cement their role as a trusted and valuable member of my team because others saw how effective they were. Since then, I’ve mentored other career switchers who, after 3 or 4 years in their new role, are trying to decide if they should stick it out because they feel like no one cares about anything other than the new technical skills that they have built.

However, once the career switcher gets over the hump of proving their foundational technical skills in their new career, which often comes with getting that first Senior title, they often have an accelerated path. Because they have a much stronger foundation for the professional skills needed to differentiate them at the higher levels, they are now at an advantage compared to their similarly-leveled peers. In this case, Parker quickly built their technical skills and earned a Senior title on a fast track. We have both moved on from that company and continued our career trajectories. We caught up recently, where I learned that Parker has recently been promoted to the Principal level at their current company.

In an ideal world, a company will have a robust career ladder that recognizes both technical and professional skills for all levels of their career ladder, and gives managers tools to appropriately evaluate their skills. When a manager only evaluates and values the technical skills and undervalues professional skills, they reduce the ability of individuals and teams to be more effective and more satisfied in the work that they do. They run the risk of losing a career switcher like Parker who brings more to their role and team than just the new technical skills that they’re building.

[1] To maintain privacy, Parker is a pseudonym.

career, leadership

the work you love and the work you don’t

In the current tech jobs market, I’ve talked to a lot of folks who were looking for their next role. Instead of simply diving straight in and looking for something very similar to their previous role, I think it’s worthwhile to take a step back and be thoughtful about what that next role should be. Besides analyzing your day to determine what gives you energy, an exercise from the book Never Search Alone sets out a thoughtful framework for considering what’s next.

In this exercise, you write out the things you love doing at work, and the things you hate doing at work. I think that it’s important to write this out and then let it percolate for a few days. I’ve found that additional items on both lists arise later on, or that I come up with a different way to express something. If you also did the exercise from my previous post about what gives you energy, you might have already identified some of the things you love and some of the things you hate.

For example, here are some items from my list of things that I love doing:

  • Having a deep understanding of our users and our market to create innovative products and services
  • Meeting and exceeding the expectation that a design executive will influence and contribute to product strategy, engineering strategy, and business strategy.
  • Coaching, mentoring, and upskilling my organization in their technical and professional skills. Creating cross-functional mentoring and coaching opportunities.
  • Having processes that work in our environment to make our jobs easier without adding onerous overhead

And here are some items from my list of things that I hate:

  • Working in a feature factory where the only measure is on the number of features we spit out. 
  • Working with people who are jerks: antagonistic, not respectful, not accepting of other backgrounds or experiences, creating unnecessary conflict, unable to give or receive constructive feedback.
  • Decision-making by committee.
  • Working on something that doesn’t make people’s lives better.

The book then has you analyze these two lists and coming up with two more lists: what your next role must have, and (just as importantly!) what your next role must not have.

Here are some of my must-haves:

  • I must work for a company that appropriately invests in its future through product discovery, a deep understanding of its users, and engineering excellence.
  • I must work for a company that understands the value of design as more than just “making things pretty” and expects design to have a role in crafting business strategy.
  • I must have a manager who respects me and the disciplines that I represent, understands how we contribute to the business, and creates opportunities for growth.

And some of my must-nots:

  • I will not work for an asshole again.
  • I must not work for a company that does not value the craft of management.
  • I must not work in a field or on technology that I think makes the world worse.

If you’re searching for a role, these lists are a framework to help you evaluate the opportunities that come your way. You’re probably not going to find a role that meetings all of your must-haves and your must-nots. You can use this to help you decide whether it meets enough of each of them to be worthy to consider. It also can help you negotiate for more things on your must-have list and reduce the things on your must-not list. This is an especially good input into the evaluation of job descriptions that I describe in this post.

I’ve found that I have to pay close attention to my must-not list. I am prone to only looking for the items on my must list, but ignoring the items on my must-not list. Having a complete picture of how well any given role fits what I want and what I don’t then gives me the ability to decide what trade-offs I want to make. It also gives me negotiating points: I can say that I’m really excited by this role, and I would like to work on a way to incorporate something from my must-have list that it’s currently missing so that it’s an even better fit for me.

By doing this reflection, I’m better prepared for interviews about a new role. I can evaluate job descriptions against my lists of must-haves and must-not-haves. Then I can also identify open questions about whether it has additional items on those lists. That gives me prompts for what I should be looking for during the interview process.

career

what gives you energy?

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I’ve had some conversations lately with folks who are feeling stuck and not sure how to move forward. They are getting great feedback from their peers and their boss, and yet they are still feeling exhausted and unable to see a future in which they’re not feeling this way. They might think that they’re flirting with burnout, or are already there.

One of the ways that I have found helps me when I’m in this situation and need to get unstuck is to consider how I am feeling. At the end of my day, do I feel energized or depleted?

The book Designing Your Life outlines a great exercise where you deeply consider how you’re spending your time and how those activities impact your energy. In short, evaluate your calendar. For each meeting or other event that you have on your calendar, think about how you feel before, during, and after it. Some meetings give you energy, while others sap it. Additionally, how you feel about what you’re doing can be impacted by the time of day, your physical body, the seasons, and more. Analyzing what augments your energy and what depletes your energy can help you identify trends that you can then use to help you better manage how you feel overall.

You can complete this exercise by simply doing a retrospective at the end of the day. If that doesn’t feel sufficient, or you think that you need a higher level of granularity, you can do it on a meeting-by-meeting basis instead. If you’d like some more guidance in completing this exercise, the Designing Your Life Workbook walks you through it and all of the other exercises in the book.

For example, if you know you’re not a morning person (hi, that’s me!), you can work to schedule meetings where you need to be fully engaged and in the best possible mood for later in the day. If you realize that there’s a meeting that you dread every week, you can consider whether you might be able to make changes to the meeting itself to make it less dreadful. Alternatively, if you can’t make changes to that meeting, you can brainstorm ways to do things around that meeting so that it’s not combining with other energy-draining meetings or activities. Perhaps you can schedule a meeting that gives you energy immediately before or after it to mitigate its impact. Or maybe that’s the day that you make sure that you go to the gym and burn off your frustration on the treadmill. I have a close friend who struggles in the winter, so they put extra attention on activities that give them energy like planning upcoming milestones.

Overall, this exercise is one in self-awareness. This is information that you can use to better manage yourself and how you spend your time. You can use this information to structure experiments for yourself to help you feel better about the work that you’re doing. You can experiment with new goals that will help you grow. You can set yourself up so that you have many activities that augment your energy. You will probably never get to fully do away with the activities that deplete your energy, but you can learn how to manage that so that you don’t become overwhelmed.

If you find that your time is being disproportionately spent on activities that drain your energy, or that you’re so overwhelmed that everything feels like it is sapping your energy, you might realize that you need to make a bigger change. You might already be burnt out and need to take some time off to start to address that. You might need to find a great coach or therapist to help you find your way through. You could realize that maybe you don’t love your current role even if you’re doing a good job at it. You could learn that, while you have a great team and company, the role you’re in doesn’t give you the growth that you need right now.

Discovering what gives you energy and what depletes your energy gives you better knowledge so that you can move forward from feeling stuck today. In the future, knowing this might help you from getting stuck in the first place.

management, user experience

Elpha: “Leading an effective design organization”

Elpha invited me to write about leading an effective design organization. Here’s what I had to say:

Leading a large organization is a hell of a job.

Sometimes it’s fun and exciting, like when you get to invest in a big project to imagine a new future for healthcare that’s built around the real-world needs of people no matter their socioeconomic status, ethnoracial identity, gender identity, or the intersection of those.

Sometimes it’s empowering, such as when you get to address pay disparities by ethnoracial identity and gender identity within your company.

And sometimes it’s infuriating, like when a peer executive writes off your entire organization’s work as “futzing about with pixels”.

Throughout my career, I’ve established brand-new teams in user experience and design, scaled teams, and led large global organizations. I want to share with you some of what I’ve learned about how to effectively lead a design organization as an executive.

What does it mean for a design org to be effective? To me, it means three things:

  1. The design org has a shared purpose and vision where everyone is empowered to do their best work, there is a lot of support for growth, and high performers are rewarded for their contributions.
  2. Our cross-functional partners know the value that design brings to the products and services that we create and grow, help us ensure that we’ve got what we need to do our work, and hold us accountable for delivering high-quality business results.
  3. We understand both the needs of our users as well as our business objectives and bring them together in a unique way that creates new value.

Each of these three points needs careful tending by the leader of the organization. A shared purpose and vision can feel like it’s been thrown aside, especially during times of uncertainty like our current economic climate. A change in leadership can result in new cross-functional partners who no longer understand the value of design or ensure that design has sufficient resources to be effective. As user needs and business objectives evolve, we have to understand that change and evolve alongside so that we can continue to create new value and not be left in the dust.

Getting all of this right is especially important, and can be especially hard, because design is one of the organizations within a company that has a higher-than-average number of people from historically-excluded backgrounds. We have more people of color, more LGBTQIA+ folks, and more women than many other organizations in a tech company. The diversity of the design team is one of our greatest strengths as we work to build products and services to meet everyone’s needs. However, we’re more likely to have the value of our work questioned or to have our leader under-leveled compared to the leaders of our cross-functional partners. We have to fight not only to have our seat at the table. I’ve learned that getting a seat at the table is only the first step: everything that follows is about using that seat effectively to meet business objectives, meet user goals, and be an effective advocate and ally for historically-excluded groups.

As a design executive, I rely on three things to help me see my way through all of this:

  1. Empathy. In addition to empathy for our users which is one of the most common traits and the best part about being in user experience, I extend my empathy to my cross-functional partners and fellow executives. By better understanding their perspectives, their needs, and their constraints, I’m better able to bring everyone along to reach better decisions.
  2. Love of my craft. I’ve been in user experience for over 20 years. I still love everything about it, from doing the early discovery work before we have product-market fit to understand what needs we must meet, to delivering a product and continuing to iterate on it to make it better meet those needs and whatever new needs emerge. As a leader, I get to create opportunities and remove roadblocks so that the folks who report to me have the space to love their craft and deliver their best results.
  3. Business acumen. By developing a deep understanding of our business environment and objectives, I can align the design org to the most important and most impactful work, partner effectively across the entire company, mitigate risk, and unlock new opportunities for innovation.
leadership, management

managing through layoffs

Layoff. Reduction in force. Redundancy. No matter what word you put on it, a layoff is one of the hardest things for a manager to lead through. It’s natural to feel overwhelmed in this situation, regardless of whether you’re the decision-maker on who is leaving the company. You will have your own feelings about what is happening, at the same time that you’re working to support team members who are leaving and team members who are staying.

When you’re a manager in this terrible situation, give yourself grace. Take time for yourself. Invest heavily in self-care for the next few weeks. (Yes, weeks. The impacts of a layoff are long-lasting. I’m sorry.) If you’ve got a therapist, spend time with them. If you don’t have a therapist, this might be a good time for that. Whatever you do, do not dump your feelings down on your team. Don’t hide that you’ve got feelings, rather don’t dump on them. Your team needs to see you handling this situation empathetically for those who were laid off and those who remain.

While you’re giving grace, make sure to give some to your peer managers. They’re also dealing with lots of difficult things. Check in 1:1. Managers often don’t get a ton of support in a time like this, especially if their team was relatively lightly-impacted, but they’re still dealing with the survivor syndrome of themselves and their team, plus trying to figure out how to move forward. Give your peer managers some space to say the things that they can’t say to their directs, and be vulnerable with trusted peer managers too.

Whenever you talk to your Human Resources business partner (HRBP), give them some extra grace. Layoffs are terrible for HRBPs. They’re dealing with the worst of this situation. If you’ve got a good relationship with your HRBP, offer them some safe space to talk/vent/whatever.

In the weeks after the layoff, you will probably see some problematic behaviors amongst your team and others. Some folks are going to throw themselves into their work to have somewhere to channel their feelings. Some folks are going to throw themselves into their work because they’re terrified of getting laid off next. Some folks are going to disengage for a bit. Be prepared for all of that and do what you can to redirect the unhealthy behavior. If your employer has any benefits like an employee assistance plan (EAP), this is a great time to refer folks to it.

Folks are probably going to be on edge for a few weeks, or even longer. You will probably see an increased amount of interpersonal tension and stress behaviors. Be ready to manage that. Any big internal event or milestone, like a launch or review time, will probably cause more of those emotions and behaviors to bubble up. By being prepared for this, you can help divert behaviors away from unproductive or toxic ones. Many of the folks who remain might be nervous about the future of the company and whether there will be future layoffs. When you’re asked about these, be honest about what you know and what you can share with them.

You might find that your team has reduced trust in you because they believe (rightfully or not) that you must have known something in advance or must have made decisions about who to keep. They might think that you should have done more to prevent the layoff. You will have work to do to regain their trust.

This is one of the awful times of management. You can get through this.

career

identifying what you want in your next role

Finding your next role is a difficult but important challenge. How do you know what you’re looking for? You could simply look for your current job title, or maybe the next job title on the ladder, but that doesn’t help you know whether that’s a good job for you.

When I’m trying to figure out what I’m really looking for in my next role, I spend some time doing a deep review of job descriptions. Here’s my process:

  1. Search for jobs with relevant titles. I like to cast a wide net and look for different titles, different levels, and different size companies. LinkedIn is a great place to start for this search. Collect a good set of JDs. Don’t worry if they don’t look amazing, that’s going to be the next step.
  2. Collate the JDs into a document. Copy the text of these JDs into your favorite word processor. I insert a break or line between them so that they don’t all run together.
  3. Evaluate a JD carefully.
    • Highlight everything that you like about this JD with one color. I use yellow for this.
    • Highlight everything that you don’t like, or that raises a potential red flag for you, about this JD with another color. I use blue for this.
    • Review your good-highlighting and write out a list of what you like.
    • Review your bad-highlighting and write out a list of what you don’t like
    • Write out a list of open questions that you have after reading this JD.
  4. Repeat this process for the rest of the JDs that you’ve created.
  5. Evaluate your lists. What themes do you see emerging in each category?

When I’m first starting a job search, this exercise helps me hone in on what I really want to do in my next role. If I’m considering a role that is somewhat different than what I’ve been targeting, it helps me evaluate whether the role might still move me towards my career goals. This also helps me know what I don’t want in my next role.

After you’ve identified the themes of what you really want and don’t want in your next role, you can use that to help you rank which roles are most interesting to you. For those roles that are most interesting, you can prioritize looking through your network to see if you have a close connection to that role who you can leverage. For those roles that are the least interesting, you can decide whether you want to spend your time on pursuing them at all. Being more focused in your job search will help you manage your time and your resilience better.

leadership

the fine art of delegation

As a leader, delegation is one of the most important things to do. You have to learn how to delegate effectively, what to delegate, how to support someone who you’ve delegated to, and how to hold them accountable. As a recovering perfectionist, I’ve also had to learn how to let go of how I imagine I would do a task if I had infinite time and resources so that I don’t measure success against that.

When I’m trying to decide whether to delegate a task, and what to do if I think the person who I’ve delegated to is having some trouble with it, I ask myself the following questions:

  1. Does this task need my effort where I would (of course) do it flawlessly, or does it need someone’s effort where if they do it to even half as good as I would have done it, it would be good enough?
  2. Does this task need to have more people trained up in how to do it?
  3. Could this task benefit from having someone else do it, who might bring a new perspective or an improvement to it?
  4. Does the person who I’m delegating to need to grow skills in this area, and this task will help them grow, even if there are growing pains?
  5. Does someone else or a team need to learn that I’m not the only competent person available to them, so they have to be comfortable with the work output from other people too?
  6. Do I actually have the time to do it?
  7. Is this actually the thing that is best for me to be spending my time on? ie, what’s the opportunity cost of me doing this task?

This list helps me be mindful of spending my time in the right place, creating opportunities for others on my team to grow their skills, and right-sizing effort and expertise to a task.

leadership, management

evaluating the performance of managers

One of my mentees, a newly-minted director, asked how to evaluate the performance of the managers who now report to them. We were discussing some of the differences as you move from manager to director and how to make the shift in mindset.

Measuring the effectiveness of individual contributors (ICs) is relatively straightforward. Are they getting their work done? Are they helping others get their work done? Are they helping those around them build their skills and be more effective? Are they taking feedback? Are they giving high-quality actionable feedback? Measuring the effectiveness of managers, though, feels a bit harder.

Manager performance questions

These are the questions that I use to help me understand how well a manager who reports to me is performing.

How well are their ICs performing? If their team is performing well, the manager is probably doing pretty well. If their team isn’t performing well, what are they doing to turn it around? Are their ICs performing well only because, or possibly in spite of, the manager micromanaging them?

How is morale on their team? If their team is happy, the manager is probably doing pretty well. If morale is low, what is the manager doing to turn it around? Is the manager keeping morale artificially high, such as by not giving difficult but necessary feedback?

Do their ICs have the right amount of stretch assignments? Is the manager creating the right opportunities for their team to grow their skills?

How well is hiring (if any) going? Are they able to find a great slate of diverse and high-quality candidates for their roles? Are they following best practices in their hiring process?

How well is the manager working with and communicating to peer managers? This is such an important part of their job. What is the feedback that you’re getting from their peer managers?

How well is the manager communicating to their manager? Do you as their manager know what’s going on, at the right level of detail? Are you caught unaware by problems on or with their team?

Is the manager contributing to cross-team initiatives? Besides just getting the work done, you should have cross-team initiatives to help improve your organization and your company. Your manager should be contributing to these?

How well is the manager handling conflicts (within their team, between teams, between themselves and others)? Some days, it can feel like the job of a manager is only to be a mediator between conflicting parties. A good manager is managing those problems, coaching people through them to handle them better themselves, and reducing the risk that a conflict will spiral out of control.

How well is the manager assigning and delegating work? Are they giving the right work to the right members of their team? Are they doing so fairly and equitably? Are they delegating the right work from their list to folks on their team?

How well is the manager dealing with emergencies? There’s always some kind of emergency going on. Sometimes it’s work related, sometimes it’s personal, sometimes one creates the other. When an emergency of some sort comes up, is the manager handling it?

A manager is a force multiplier

What I find most important to think about in manager performance is that they’re a force multiplier. If that force multiplier is being used well, they’re likely doing their job well. If they’re failing in some aspect of their job, they could be a negative force multiplier. For example, a manager whose team is low-performing and they either can’t see it or can’t turn it around is a manager who is a negative force multiplier. It’s your job as a manager-of-managers to understand where your manager is being a positive force multiplier or a negative force multiplier, and coach them as needed.

user experience

the decisions from user research

The most recent episode of the Awkward Silences podcast from User Interviews has a brilliant interview with Holly Hester-Reilly about common mistakes that are made when planning, conducting, analyzing, and sharing user research.

When she discussed planning user research, she talked about needing to understand what decisions would be driven by the user research. This point is one that I see researchers and people conducting research miss frequently.

Knowing what decisions will be made helps you frame your research well and ensure that you’re asking the right research questions. You can always go back to the decisions that need to be made to help you evaluate whether you’re using the right research methodology or you’re applying that methodology well.

Defining the decisions that will be made as a result of the research can be a powerful tool when a team is using research for the wrong reasons. I’ve seen teams become so risk-adverse that they want to test every single thing. I’ve also seen teams become so beholden to a process that they don’t know when or even how to deviate from it. In those cases, defining the decision that will be driven and why that decision matters illuminates the more important problem that needs to be addressed within the team.

When you’ve completed the user research, you can measure its effectiveness by determining whether it actually drove the decision(s) that it needed to. This is especially helpful if you have to cut the proposed scope of a research project due to budget or timeline constraints. If your research successfully answered the question, you learned something about the benefits of a lean research plan. If it helped with some but not all of the decisions that you thought needed to be made, you can then decide what to do to address the remaining decisions to be made.

Another benefit of defining the decisions to be driven by user research is to prioritize research requests. We should invest more time in the research to support those decisions for which we have little data, or little agreement within our teams, or which have a high opportunity cost.

Knowing why you’re doing the research is at least as important as selecting the right methodology, doing a great job of collecting and analyzing the data, and sharing the results in the right ways with the right people. If you have a template that helps you plan your research studies, consider adding this section to improve the usefulness and business value of your user research.

career, leadership

the goal-setting conundrum

Setting career goals is hard, especially when it’s time to do it as part of the usual performance review cycle. As I’ve coached my teams through goal-setting, I’ve observed several different reasons why it can be hard to set goals. These reasons include:

  • Analysis paralysis. “I could work on any number of things, but which ones are the ‘right’ ones to work on?”
  • Future hazy, try again later. “I really don’t know what I want my future to hold, so I’m not sure what goals I should have when I don’t have a three- or five-year plan.”
  • Too much happening right now. “I’m already in a period of personal or professional upheaval and I feel like I am only barely holding on. I can’t think about the future because the present is already too much.”
  • Impostor syndrome. “I don’t think I’m actually any good at what I do today. I can’t set goals to help me address my perceived deficiencies because that would be revealing to someone else that I’m an impostor.”
  • Dreaming about leaving. “I think I want to do something different with my career that isn’t available to me here. I do have goals, but I don’t want to talk about them with you for fear of repercussions.”
  • In the zone. “I’m happy with where I am right now. I do not want to get promoted. I just want to come in, successfully do my job, and get paid fairly for that.”
  • No role model. “I have no idea how to do this because I’ve never seen anyone do it well. I’ve not really tried to do it myself.”
  • No point. “This is just HR bullshit. No one pays attention to my goals. I’m going to write them down today and then no one will look at them again until my next performance review.”

Once you understand the root of what makes writing goals feel difficult, you can use that to help craft the type of goals to set. Here are some strategies to unlock the goal-setting conundrum for the reasons I outlined above:

  • Analysis paralysis: You could make finding the “right” focus your goal. To do this, choose one of your potential goals and work on it for a set period of time, up to a month. If you really can’t choose one yourself, ask a friend or colleague to help, or even pick one randomly. At the end of the month, evaluate your progress, how you’re feeling about it, and what impact it has made. If it’s particularly impactful and you’re feeling great about it, you’ve got your goal. If not, you can choose another goal to try for a time boxed period.
  • Future hazy, try again later: You could make figuring out what you want to do your goal. Outline a handful of options for what your future might hold. Don’t be afraid to dream big! From there, you could have informational interviews with people who have followed that path to leverage what they learned along the way. Or you could create a payout matrix to help you think through which path you might want to take. You could create a set of experiments to help you decide what you want your future to hold.
  • Too much happening right now: Depending on why you have too much going on, you could set a goal to reduce the number of things on your plate. What can you offload so that you’re not so overburdened? If you simply can’t offload things, you could instead set a goal to reflect on your situation and what you’ve learned from it. These types of retrospectives can help you and those around you avoid getting into situations like this, better handle those inevitable times when it feels like everything is going wrong at once, or even simply recognize that this happens and sometimes all you can do is keep on keeping on.
  • Impostor syndrome: Setting goals to help overcome impostor syndrome requires vulnerability and support. You have to be vulnerable in admitting that you feel this way, and you have to have support from a good leader who will help you move past it. If you aren’t sure if you’ve got a good leader or you’re not ready to be vulnerable, one way to sidestep this is to leverage your career ladder. Look at the competencies for the next level. They’re probably the same competencies as your current level, but they have broader scope and impact. You can frame your goals in terms of growing to that next level. You could also set a goal about getting in-depth 360-degree feedback from those around you to help you better understand what you’re great at and what you’re not, if that’s not already part of your performance review. That might help you combat your impostor syndrome, or at least help you decide where to focus your energy.
  • Dreaming about leaving: This is another one that requires vulnerability and support. If you’re ready to be open that you’re thinking about doing something else, you can set goals to make that decision. If you’re certain that you want to move on, you can set goals that help you and your organization be ready to move on, such as ensuring that you’ve wrapped up a key project and fully documented all of that great knowledge that only lives in your head. If you’re still exploring options, you can follow the strategies above for “future hazy, try again later”.
  • In the zone: You could make your goals about cementing your place as a solid contributor. Potential goals include improving documentation, improving processes, or mentoring.
  • No role model: Ask others to share their goals with you. Personally, I like sharing my goals with my team so that they can see what I’m working on.
  • No point: You can choose to treat this exercise as only an HR exercise, or you can choose to treat this exercise as something that you do for yourself. Setting goals is about your professional growth. You have to reframe the exercise for yourself and not let poor implementations of goal-setting get in your way.

As you’re framing your goals, you can use strategies such as SMART goals to help you create meaningful goals that you can make progress on. After you’ve done that hard work, the next step is to create an accountability structure to help you make progress. I like to set up monthly check-ins on my professional goals with someone such as a manager, a coach, or a colleague. That external accountability helps remind me to invest time in my goals, and reflect on what I’ve learned as I’ve worked on them.

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