Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of Developer Team.
My name is Jonathan Cottrell.
My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective and purpose in their careers.
In today's episode, I want to talk a little bit about self-assessment and skills, because so much of your career is about figuring out what you are uniquely good at.
And this evaluation, this assessment, this determination of what you're good at is not as simple as a single list.
Part of the difficulty here is that we're not just talking about figuring out what you're good at now.
We're not talking about figuring out what you've done that you were good at before.
And we're not just talking about what might you be good at in the future.
It's all of those things all put together.
And we want to determine this through the lens of what you are energized by.
So there's another aspect to this evaluation that's not as simple as what are you capable of?
What can you do well?
Because we want to look at a sustainable, long-term picture of what keeps you engaged, what you actually care about doing.
This is the purpose part of the discussion for you, right?
So The truth is that if you have never done an exercise like this, then I'm excited especially for you, because this exercise, what we're going to do today, is going to give you some of the vocabulary that you'll use.
It may give you vocabulary if you decide to go into management, for example, to help your reports as well, to help them figure out the same kinds of questions they may have in their career.
You know, a lot of the time what we are trying to figure out with the kinds of assessments, for example, if you ever have done something like StrengthsFinder or, you know, a less popular one, but is growing in popularity is Working Genius.
It's a Pat Lencioni book called Working Genius.
You know, there's a lot of unscientific ones out there.
There's a lot that are more scientific.
There's all of these kinds of things, you know, these products that you can go buy, and assessments you can take, and the disk profile.
All this stuff is trying to paint a picture to help you determine what you can do.
What you can do and what you can do well, with the kind of least input right.
The least amount of energy and effort on your part, And I want to give you a simplified version of this.
All right,
This is not going to be a list of questions that asks you what is your first thought when you wake up and try to extrapolate from that what your career should look like.
Those, in my opinion, are kind of fraught with a lot of potential problems.
They may lead you down pathways that you don't even really care about going down, all right?
And take all of those assessments with a grain of salt.
There are some that are better than others.
And personally, I enjoy some of the insights I've gained from StrengthsFinder, for example.
All right.
The CliftonStrengths.
If you go and look at that it may give you some angle on this.
But to translate those things into something actual useful, practical is a little bit harder to do, right.
It's a little bit harder to just go straight from that list of strengths into something that you could put on a resume or go and act on at work.
All right.
So a Let's look at a slightly different kind of tool for this.
And this is a classic management tool.
It's called the nine block.
Right.
The nine block.
I'm not going to go into excruciating detail and listing all nine.
You know parts of this, of this exercise.
But imagine that it's on the X axis and the Y axis.
You have this kind of map.
Right.
And that, you know, if you were to draw like a tic-tac-toe box that would have nine blocks in it.
So for each X and Y you might have a low, medium and high to get to your nine distinct boxes, right?
And so if you were to imagine, the top left box on the X axis might be low but it might be high on the Y axis right.
That's the visual that you're kind of looking at with the nine block.
And so on the x-axis is one of these two.
Let's just pick one.
On the x-axis is performance, right?
You could consider this your current skill, your current ability.
How well are you doing in this particular thing, right?
So...
You can imagine that if you are extraordinarily good at something, let's say that you're delivering code to production.
We're going to pick a really easy one, right?
You're very good at that.
And you're excelling at that.
You're maybe a level or two above where your job says you should be.
You're doing really well at this.
Then on your x-axis, you may have all the way to the right.
You're a high performer.
And now on the y-axis, we're going to talk about potential.
Potential for going to the next level.
So as we already mentioned, you're outperforming maybe all of your peers.
But let's imagine that your manager does this nine block and they evaluate you as you kind of have topped out here, right?
You're.
You're not necessarily going to stall out completely, but we don't see you really.
You know expanding drastically beyond where you are right now.
Then you might get a medium.
You know you might put that, that y-axis at the medium level for potential right.
So so on the nine block you would be all the way over to the right and one up.
So that's the visual you can imagine here.
This visual is useful.
Sometimes, you know, it's kind of used in maybe less than useful ways, right?
So you know, trying to put a person, all of their skills and everything altogether, a single dot on this matrix, I think that could lead you down some bad pathways as a manager.
But if you're trying to evaluate specific skills or specific areas of skill, You could imagine like an area of skill might be.
You know system design right.
That might be something that you, as an engineer, you might practice system design.
You know, trying to evaluate where on the nine block are you, should you be placed for system design may be a useful exercise for you.
Because, as you go through this list of skills, skill areas, domains that make up parts of your career, you may recognize some new insights through this nine block exercise.
Okay, so that's kind of the traditional version of the nine block, but I want to add some more nuance to this, because what it could lead you to do is list out a million skills, right.
Or let's just say 30, 40 skills, right?
And try to place yourself on the nine block for all of those skills and try to do the rest of this exercise with that many.
The truth is that if you're looking at what you're truly good at, what people are going to know you for, what you really enjoy doing, the things that you want to kind of make the keystone of your career, what kind of value you bring to the table that others can recognize, that energizes you, that has an extraordinary impact on the company that you work for, on the domain, on the industry.
How long is that list really going to be?
And the truth of this kind of exercise is that there is a missing component.
If you just did the nine block for all of your skills.
And the missing component is a third dimension of energy.
So the amount of energy that you're putting into each of these skills.
And what I mean by energy in this frame is not the energy that you get from it.
It's much more like the cost to you.
So one way that you could practice this is to limit the number of skills that you're allowed to put onto the nine block.
So imagine that you actually draw out the tic-tac-toe boxes and you give yourself a handful of coins.
Maybe even make them different sizes.
So you can pick the top one, for example.
You have a quarter for the top one and a dime for the next one, etc.
And the idea here is to reckon with the fact that you can't practice or develop an endless number of skills.
It wouldn't even necessarily be a great idea to do that from a career development perspective, because people don't hire you for 30 skills.
They hire you for a compelling, much smaller subset of those, right?
So if you're looking at your... Let's play out an example of this.
If you did a nine block...
And you're looking at the, you know a list of skills that you've placed down and you have.
You know one skill.
Let's say again, we'll go back to systems design.
Let's say that you're performing kind of medium, right?
This is something you're still learning.
You're doing decently well, but you have, you believe that you have a high aptitude here.
You have high potential, right?
So you're one over and all the way up at the top for potential, right?
And so, you know, you're not really having to do a lot for this.
You're kind of absorbing, you know, this information from other people.
You know, it's not really difficult for you.
It's not taking a lot of your energy.
OK, so this third dimension, you know, however you might want to write this out.
Of course, we can't.
It's harder to do these exercises in true three dimensions.
You could write next to that dot on your on your matrix that you've built.
You could write, you know, maybe a one to five, right?
Or five is this is the maximum energy.
This is taking a lot for me.
And one is I'm kind of on autopilot for this.
OK.
And what you may recognize is that you have a very high potential thing, that maybe you're on the lower side of performance, but you're not putting a lot of energy into it.
So hopefully, if you're listening closely here, you can recognize that's an opportunity because you have a high potential and you're not necessarily putting a lot towards it.
So if you were to put more towards it, then perhaps that potential would be realized sooner.
You would move from lower performance or medium performance, maybe up to high performance.
So this is a way to kind of clear log jams.
It's a way to recognize that, you know, some opportunities that you may have in your skillset.
Of course there's other questions to answer, like does the company value that particular thing right?
So you know, if you have a high potential in that skillset, the company doesn't value it, then are you actually kind of fit for the role that you're in?
It's another question you may want to ask at that point.
Because if you have a high potential, if you're really well kind of established, you know you're excited about that particular skill but you're not able to practice it, it's not really something that is needed for your role then that potential ends up being kind of lost, right.
It's not completely lost, but...
You know it's harder for you to leverage this thing that you have high potential in, that you have a lot of energy for if it's not valued right.
It's not going to have a leverage, you know, positive leverage on your career.
But the best case scenarios, right?
The best case scenarios is there's two kind of good scenarios you can find yourself in.
One where you have a lower performance, but a high potential and a low energy score, right?
So, in other words, you're not putting a lot into it, but you feel like it's something that you can do well.
And there's a lot of ways that you can evaluate that.
Right now, we're just kind of going on kind of a non-scientific self-evaluation.
How well do you think you can pick up on this skill?
Are you kind of naturally predisposed to doing that thing when you've put some energy into it?
Do you see, do you get positive feedback?
Those are the kinds of things that we're using for that particular evaluation.
So that's an opportunity flag, right?
If you are currently not really putting a lot into it, but...
When you do put energy into it, you see like a lot of positive gain, right?
You see a lot of growth where you get a lot of positive feedback.
Then there's a high potential for improvement there, right?
There's a high potential for improvement with the least input.
So that's situation number one.
Situation number two is if you have an area, and we're going to add a fourth dimension here.
So stick with me for a second.
If you have an area where you currently are a medium performer, maybe a low performer, or even if you are a high performer, this may still apply.
But it's taking a lot of energy.
You don't have a lot of aptitude potential in that area.
In other words, the more energy you add, it feels like you're kind of hitting a wall.
You're not really growing any in that way in that particular area.
Maybe you're not interested in it, but the potential for you to grow towards that thing is really low right.
You're not likely to get significantly better at it.
And then the fourth dimension.
This is an important one for this particular evaluation is it's a low risk to drop.
If you were to look at all your dots again, we only need to do three or four.
So adding an energy and a risk to the dots is probably not that hard.
Just say a one to five risk, right.
Where five is I absolutely cannot let this go.
I must have this skill.
I can't, I can't drop it.
Maybe it's the critical thing that, you know, that you're very good at that people rely on you for.
If you're a software engineer, probably one of your five risk level skills is delivery of software.
It's very unlikely that you can just drop that skill and get by and continue to succeed in your career, because it is a fundamental skill to have.
If you're looking at your skills though, And you recognize this kind of like hitting a wall type skill right.
It matches that profile where you're really putting a lot of energy into it, but your performance is not improving really that much.
You don't expect it to.
You're not really interested or excited in that thing.
It's kind of hitting a wall, right?
And hopefully intuitively this makes sense.
If you have like a two or three risk score on that, especially if you have a one, but a two or three even.
What would happen if you were to redirect that energy right?
Redirect what you're spending on this thing that you keep hitting a wall on towards something that has higher potential.
So this is the counterintuitive part of this and what you need to talk to your manager about.
You need to talk to, you know, whoever is going to help you kind of carve out this path, right?
You know, talk to peers about it as well.
The counterintuitive thing is that you may be a medium to high performer in that area.
You may be doing something that you're pretty good at actually, but you're not going to get much better at it.
The risk of dropping it is pretty low and you have something else you could be doing that you do have a high potential in right
That currently you're a lower performer in.
So the counterintuitive part is that you're dropping something that you're traditionally.
You would say that you're good at it.
You're dropping that in order to do something that you're not as good at.
This evaluation is something you have to be careful with, because the bet that you're making is that the value that you get out of doing the thing that you have a high potential to do, the high growth potential in, is going to exceed whatever the marginal value is in the thing that you are already doing well, that you have a high performance in.
And that the risks are not going to catch up to you.
So this is again, this is a skill management skill portfolio thing.
Right.
The reason why we're doing this as a part of the career growth accelerator series is because there's probably a list of skills that you can't drop.
Let's set those aside.
Let's not even talk about it.
You don't even need to put them on your on your nine block.
Right, there's another list of skills that you wish you could do, that are invigorating, exciting to you, that you kind of connect to naturally, that you have a high potential for.
And then there's kind of an overlap there, right?
The kind of middle skills where you are already doing this thing and you need to evaluate whether you can drop it right.
Evaluate whether this high energy skill the thing that's taking a lot from you, that you're not getting much better at maybe you're pretty good at it.
Could you drop it?
Could you move to another skill?
Why does all this matter for the career growth accelerator?
Because how you spend your time and your growth potential, right?
Your growth potential.
If you are stalled out, it's likely that the thing that you are banging your head against the wall trying to improve at that.
You need to change something right.
And this is, you're essentially looking at a map, right?
Trying to decide which of these things should I change, right?
You're looking at your nine block.
You're trying to say this is the thing that I could adjust, that I could change, that I could shift.
Maybe I need to put more energy into this thing, right?
Maybe I should swap this thing out for another thing.
And you don't have to look at these as like traditional skills that you put on your resume, okay?
The skill here may be something as simple as spending time developing relationships with your peers.
It may be something like improving your communication skills, your public speaking skills.
There could be a whole list of things that fit on this nine block.
Again, we're not going to say that you can have 30 or 40 here.
But if you're getting more granular, then you could have more, right?
Because improving your public speaking skills is not necessarily going to be a keystone skill in your career per se.
So you might see 10 or 15 on this exercise.
If you can pick skills that you have high potential, right?
And then go and invest four or five level energy into them And make the trade-offs that are necessary to do that.
Don't delude yourself into believing that you can just do this on top of everything that you already do.
This is kind of a key point that I want to make here.
You must do this trade-off.
If you have stalled out, it's very likely that that you have to do a trade-off.
You can't simply pick something up new, something that you're going to invest a lot in.
That's probably not going to work, right?
Instead, you're going to look at something that you're already investing in.
Can you reduce that investment?
What is the risk associated with that?
Is there potential in that other thing that I need to protect, that I need to still tap into?
Have I really been investing in those things?
Those are the kinds of questions you need to ask yourself.
And this isn't a simple step-by-step process, right?
This model is helpful, but it's not any kind of special magic, right?
Really, this is a way to prioritize the things that are most likely to help break the log jam.
The only real counterintuitive thing that you may not have encountered before is the idea of switching out something that you're good at for something that you're not good at.
Right, or switching out something that you're good at for another thing that you're good at, but the other thing is more valuable.
It's giving you more positive value in your career or positive personal value.
There are ways that you can kind of adjust this list of activities and skills that you're developing and strengths that you're focused on to fit your career in a more in a more advantageous way, right.
Again, we're not getting into how you determine your potential or your current performance level.
Those are things that are kind of left up as exercises for you.
Instead, the model is what I want you to think about, right?
The model, the idea that your current performance is not static, right?
That potential matters, right?
That's the first insight from the nine block that your past performance doesn't necessarily dictate your current performance.
You could be rusty, right?
Like it's a dynamic picture.
And so when I as a manager, when your manager is looking at you, know what are the kind of skill sets of my, of my reports.
I'm not just looking at their current performance. position.
I'm not just looking at the last quarter of their performance.
I'm also looking at where are they headed?
Where are they going?
What's next for them?
Are they growing and in what ways?
If you're not thinking about that, then you should be the person who's thinking the most about your own growth.
If your manager is thinking more about your growth than you are, today is the day to fix that right.
So do the nine block.
Look at those dimensions of current performance level Potential that's going to place you on the nine block.
Right.
And then the other two aspects were your your energy level, the energy required.
Right.
One to five.
And then the final aspect is the risk.
Risk or criticality may be another way to think about it.
If this is a high-risk thing to drop, then it's a five.
If it's a very low-risk thing, nobody would even know that you stopped doing it, then it's a one.
If you were to map out this picture and we've already talked about a couple of these options there are ways to identify right away things that you can just drop off with almost no issue.
If you are low potential, low performance and low risk, for example, you should take that off of your nine block and never do it again, probably.
So there's insights that you can gain in these categories on this nine block that...
You know, there's kind of groupings of categories that you should pay a lot of attention to.
That one is a simple example.
Another simple example might be your bread and butter skills.
These are things that are not necessarily going to you know, make or break your career, but they are helpful as like a fallback for when you're in the midst of a project, right.
And it's a way to show reliability, right?
These are skills that are kind of, everything is down the middle, right?
So your energy level is kind of like I put some I put some energy towards that.
The risk level is right down the middle.
So like it's kind of risky, but wouldn't totally destroy your career.
You probably want to consider keeping it, though.
So, you know, risk is straight down the middle.
Your performance is straight down the middle.
Another engineer could do this.
Right.
Somebody else could do it.
Um, you know some.
Some things that might fit into this category is things like code review of the average.
You know MRPR right.
Another engineer could do that.
There's something that's important for you to do.
Most likely, um, you know, any given review may be helpful to the other engineer.
It may be important to catch uh, you know um, some kind of security flaw, but you're unlikely to key your entire career on that kind of bread and butter skill.
It just comes along with the territory of the job.
So those are not the kind of skills that you say oh, I'm just going to go and pour a bunch more energy into that right.
That's the kind of insight that you can get out of this nine block.
Hopefully this is helpful and Really, there's not any one kind of light bulb moment necessarily that you'll get out of this.
Some people might, but most of the time this is just getting to know your own skill sets better and trying to spend your time and your energy in more fruitful ways, right?
Ways that are going to pay you back, either in your personal satisfaction or in the value that you generate for your role.
Thank you.
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Thank you so much for listening.
And until next time, enjoy your tea.
