Developing a Career Goals Framework: G.R.O.W.S.
As Design Director for Funsize, I developed a career goal setting framework and facilitated its use to help my team set better growth goals and create more actionable plans to accomplish them.
My Role: Design Manager
My Direct Reports: Product Designer, Sr. Product Designer, Staff Product Designer, and 2 Associate Design Directors (each managing 2-3 designers of their own)
The Need
Setting career goals is tough. It’s an arduous process and there’s so much emotion and identity tied up in what we want to do in this life and career. It’s a crucial part of the career growth process, but few people really enjoys it.
Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of anxiety about goal setting from my teams. I get questions like “Will choosing the wrong goal throw my career off-course?” Or, “Does getting get paid more for doing the same thing count as a goal?” As a people leader, I wanted to help.
Cross-referencing data from my 1:1s and some internal survey research, it was clear that, while folks felt like they were learning a lot in their day-to day, they didn’t feel like they were growing in their career as fast or in the ways they really wanted. Since goal setting was a fairly informal process at Funsize, I saw an opportunity to help my team get more serious about it. We were also just wrapping up a 360 review cycle, so it was the perfect time to reintroduce goal setting.
Developing G.R.O.W.S.
Research
I researched existing frameworks, and found quite a few, but none really seemed like the right fit for the people on my team. I was already a fan of S.M.A.R.T. goals, and I wanted to incorporate them, but they’re pretty hard to write and they’re really hard to follow through on. So, I experimented with making my own. I decided to adapt the G.R.O.W. model and integrate S.M.A.R.T. along the way. I like to stand on the shoulders of giants, if I can get a better view.
Adapting an existing model: G.R.O.W.→G.R.O.W.S.
Developed by Sir John Whitmore for Performance Consultants International, G.R.O.W. is a useful coaching model that asks you to answer 4 questions:
Goal: What do you want?
Reality: Where are you now?
Options: What could you do?
Will: What will you do?
On the whole, it’s a useful coaching framework, and it definitely helps get you from goal to action, but I felt that, on its own, it wasn’t quite what my team needed.
First, I wrote new prompts to make them more direct and concrete. I also added a time boundary to help frame the goals and make them SMARTer. E.g. I rewrote “What do you want” as “What do you want to be true on X date?”. It turned out that 6 months was the most useful timeframe for my team.
I decided to reframe the “R” and “O” sections too. The original “Where are you now?” and “What could you do?” questions weren’t doing enough work for our purpose. In my experience, to actually reach a goal, you need to predict and adapt to obstacles while also taking advantage of opportunities. It’s about removing blockers and greasing the tracks. So, I reframed “Realities” to focus on predicting obstacles and turned “Options” into “Opportunities” and focused on ways to boost progress.
Finally, I added an “S” at the end for “Support needed”. I often tell my team that they are the captains of their own career; I’m just the first mate, here to help them read the wind and chart their course. Looking at the original GROW model, I realized it’s missing that layer of external support. Not only do I, as manager, want to know where I can advocate for and help my team succeed, I also want my folks to practice thinking about what support they need, and to get more comfortable asking for it. It’s a win-win!
The new G.R.O.W.S. Framework
G.R.O.W.S. In Action
The Process
Though the framework doesn’t require a guide, I designed a mini workshop I could facilitate with each team member. I created a FigJam board for each person to use as their personal career growth canvas, and added each step as an activity.
Some folks jumped right into the workshop structure with excitement. Others wanted to work through the prompts on their own and then talk me through their thinking later. Both methods resulted in rich, thoughtful conversation and really great goals. It generally took ~1.5 hrs to get all the way through the first pass, and ~30 minutes in a follow up session to revise the goals to be more S.M.A.R.T., and to fill any gaps we missed along the way.
Reflection
Below are a few things I learned that will help me the next time I use G.R.O.W.S:
Color coding the stickies helped draw a visual through-line from each Goal through the subsequent sections tying the actions and contexts to each specific goal. Duplicating stickies that apply to multiple goals was helpful too.
G.R.O.W.S. should be paired with some career management system where folks can enter their goals, “commit” to them and track their progress. The Figjam Canvas quickly becomes an unwieldy tracking tool.
Talking through the Realities section was a buzzkill. But in unpacking the challenges ahead, folks naturally started problem solving for those future blockers and got excited again.
Talking through the Opportunities section, was a mood booster. One person reported that their goals started to feel more attainable when they aligned each Goal with Opportunities. Also, folks seemed to translate Opportunities into Will actions pretty naturally.
To spark ideas for the Opportunities section, it’s helpful to have resources available about what opportunities for learning exist in- and outside of the company. E.g. conference list, skill-based mentor list, available courses, vetted book list for each discipline area, etc.