Conjoined objectives ☯

This is the 29th petal snapshot of spring 2024, and today I want to talk about an idea that I'm calling conjoined objectives. So this week I've been having a couple of conversations with people that I managed around their objectives, their personal objectives, that they want to use to grow and extend their skills, and ideally with some goals at the end of it. I've been looking at some frameworks that we use to kind of organize our thoughts into a structured, smart or smarter objective. There's some nice simple exercises that you can take away. Do it in your own time and come back, or you can do it together. Most people prefer the idea of doing it their own time, so I give themselves a goal and a mini objective to have that ready. And on a meta level, I've got myself an objective to get all my direct reports with at least one structured objective documented to start with. So anyway, the conjoined objective idea is where I've realized as a manager that some people have similar objectives, that they've come up with themselves. So I'm in those one to ones and I'm talking to them about what they want to achieve, generally around their own personal development. But actually it's quite interesting to see, like their passion projects and the areas that they want to address within their day job. These are things that might not necessarily be part of the plan or on a project or anything like that, but it's something that they've got an eye on. They're like, I really want to try and get this into place for us all to benefit from. In our software engineering teams, for example, we've got a new system that we're using to check the maturity of our services, and it gives us some nice visual reports to understand where we're doing well and where there needs to be improvements made. And the amount of engineers that really want to get behind this as a concept and as an objective is fantastic, but only through their own conversations that I'm having with them. And then yesterday I had a really interesting conversation with two people that were both on a very similar page. They both had an idea that they want to improve something technically and themselves. But when I was talking to them, I was like, actually you do realize that person has a very similar goal. And you know, you've got the same output from this, but you've both got slightly different angles of looking at this. This is where the idea of a conjoined objective comes together. You've got your own personal goal, your own personal reason to do this. But the outcome is very similar and they kind of overlap in the output, but in different ways using different methods and skills to get to that fair point. Is this something you could probably look at with your own teams as well? It's not something that should be limited to software engineering or tech or where I work. If you've got multiple people that have similar goals but they have slightly different ways of looking at it, put them together, it's more likely that they're going to succeed by doing it together because they can hold each other accountable, they can make sure that they're having those conversations. And at the line manager, I can check in independently with both of them or if I have to pull them together briefly just to sort of go look, how are we going to do this? It's a really interesting concept to think about, I think, and one that I'd recommend most line managers to have a think about when they are having those objective conversations. That's it from today. I'll be back on Monday with another petals snapshot.