Building a Growth Plan
This is where assessment turns into action. You have found the two or three gaps that matter (Identifying Growth Areas), and now you build the plan that closes them. I use one structure. It is deliberately small, and it has survived every team I have run it on.
#The structure: 3 growth areas, 3 small tasks each
Pick your 3 growth areas (the load-bearing gaps). Under each, define 3 small, concrete tasks, for nine in total. Each task is something you can do and finish, with a way to tell it happened.
| Task 1 | Task 2 | Task 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Growth Area 1 | … | … | … |
| Growth Area 2 | … | … | … |
| Growth Area 3 | … | … | … |
Three by three is not arbitrary. Three areas is the most a person can hold attention on while doing their actual job. Three tasks each is enough to build a habit without becoming a second full-time role. Nine items feels small, and small is exactly why it gets done, where the ambitious twenty-item plan dies in week two.
#My rules for a task that actually works
The structure is easy. The discipline is in the tasks. A bad task is a vague intention. A good one is concrete, bounded, and evidence-producing.
- It's a behavior, not an outcome you don't control. "Get promoted" isn't a task. "Lead the spec review for the Q3 launch and get sign-off in one pass" is, and it demonstrates the spec competency you are growing.
- It's small enough to finish in weeks, not quarters. If it's big, it's a project, not a task. Break it down until each piece is a single, schedulable action.
- It produces evidence. This is the rule I push hardest. Every task should leave a trace you can point to in a review: a doc you wrote, a meeting you ran, a metric you moved. No evidence, no growth you can prove.
- It's tied to your real work, not extra work. The best growth tasks are reframings of things you were going to do anyway. You have to ship the feature regardless, so the task is shipping it in the way that builds the gap skill.
"Read three books on strategy" is activity, and activity is the favorite disguise of fake progress. "Write and defend a one-page strategy for my area, and have my manager poke holes in it" is outcome-based, because it ends in a thing that either holds up or doesn't. Books are inputs. A defended artifact is evidence. Always prefer the artifact.
#Worked shape (a pattern, not a real plan)
Say your gap is Strategic Impact. The three tasks might be: (1) write a one-page narrative connecting your area to a company objective; (2) present it to your skip-level and capture their pushback; (3) revise the roadmap to reflect the strongest objection. Each one is small, each leaves a trace, and each is real work you would do anyway, now aimed at the gap.
#Running the plan over time
A plan you write once and never revisit is theater. I review growth plans on the same cadence as 1:1s. It is light-touch, a "where are we on the nine," not a re-litigation. The manager's job here is coaching: unblock, give feedback on the evidence as it lands, and adjust tasks that turned out wrong. When all nine are done, you reassess (The Competency Self-Assessment) and write the next plan. That loop, assess and plan and do and reassess, is what deliberate growth actually is. There is no shortcut around the reps.
If I write the plan for someone, they don't own it and it dies. My job is to coach them to write a good one and then hold them to it. Ownership is the difference between a development plan and a to-do list someone resents.
#Continue Reading
- Identifying Growth Areas for choosing the 3 areas this plan is built on.
- The Manager as Coach for the coaching that makes a plan stick.
- Giving and Receiving Feedback for the feedback loop that keeps it honest.
- The Six Stages of Mastery for the progression each plan moves you along.
- Running a Performance Review for where the evidence from the plan gets surfaced.