Using Stretch Goals

In the chapter on “Setting Clear Expectations,” we talked about the need to set clear and reasonably objective expectations so that your employees knew what was expected of them. This is important for setting a baseline of expected performance, but when you’re looking to develop and grow your team, you’ll also want to have some goals that stretch beyond just what’s expected, and push your employees out of their comfort zone.

Embrace the snake! As a leader-of-leaders, I once had a team leader of a research/prototype project who came to us with little to no technical background. She’d always wanted to explore programming, but never really had the support to do so. Curious, and wanting to see if I could find a few like minds, I found that on my team no less than four other people—including one of our developer advocates, a technology community manager, and my administrative assistant—all wanted to learn something about programming. The stage was set, all I had to do was push the players onto it, so I did: I used company funds to buy each of them a copy of a book on Python, set them up with subscriptions to an online educational system to give them a formal class outline to follow, had them set an hour aside every week to meet and talk about the language, and then met with each of them once a week to find out how it was going. As of this writing (long after I’ve left the company), I’m happy to report that all of them now have some level of Python skill, and it’s helping open doors for each of them in ways that they hadn’t anticipated.

As a manager, you are in the perfect position to set some “stretch goals” for each of your employees that will ...