Promote individual development paths with T-Models

They are called annual performance appraisals, feedback sessions or development dialogues: the usually annual conversations between managers and their employees. The more people a manager is responsible for, the shorter and/or more superficial they often are - unfortunately.

During my time as a team leader, I placed a lot of emphasis on regular 1:1 exchanges. I wanted to challenge the ambitious as well as encourage those who were less motivated and needed more inspiration to step out of their comfort zone.

For the individual development of each employee, we therefore created a personal development plan together. Based on this plan, we regularly discussed the successes and milestones achieved as well as the appropriate measures for the targeted sub-goals in the development conversations. In order to continuously improve and update the development plans, we worked with the so-called T-Model.

?A Management 3.0 article about work profiles and a related blog post brought the Toyota T-Model to my attention. This method was used in the experiment conducted there to create informal job titles. We did that in a second part. In our case, the use of the T-Model also served primarily to think about one' s own career and personal development and to enrich our development plans. This was our template:

In the first part we analysed our individual strengths and interests and proceeded as follows:

1.?????Each person used an A4 sheet and structured it according to the template.

2.?????Each one has looked back into the past.

Left side - LIKE:

• What competences distinguished me?
• What did I specialise in?
• What was I particularly interested in?

Right side - DISLIKE:

• What did my original career look like, but what did I consciously not want to continue?
• Which topics or tasks did I enjoy less than others?

3.?????Each one has thought about the present and the future.

Left side - LIKE:

• What are -as of today- my competences that I want to develop further?
• In which areas do I see my strengths? What specialisation would I like to pursue?
• What particularly interests me, where do I want to go deeper?

Right side - DISLIKE:

• What do I focus on but don't see a future in?
• Which topics do I not want to delve into further in the future?
• Which tasks/activities do I have less desire for?

We later used all the resulting T-models as a basis for the next development conversation.

In the second, creative part, we used the T-Models to give ourselves our own individual job titles. We implemented this in one of our team meetings:

1.?????Everyone brought their completed T-Model and we passed it clockwise to a teammate.

2.?????We read the skills on the paper and then suggested an individual (preferably very creative) personal title consisting of 2, 3 or 4 words that we wrote on a post-it.

Helpful and useful tips for this task are:

• Personal competence should come out strongly enough without neglecting the big picture.
• It is difficult to reduce someone to something because you might feel limited.
• Career levels like junior, senior, manager, chief ... we want to avoid.
• When proposing, do not use a generator (like "fancy job title").
• A word cloud can be helpful to have suggestions in front of your eyes

3.?????We returned the paper and our suggestion. Everyone has the possibility to take over, change or add to the proposal they received.

4.?????We all put our personal titles on the flipchart and were delighted with the results.

In the end, these were our individual job titles (translated from German):

It was impressive how diverse our jobs as consultants in the same team can be. The realisation after this exercise with the T-models and the personal job titles derived from them was:

We value and respect each other, because as different as we may be, we all have our individual strengths and competences in the team.