The question

how much do you weigh the statement at the top of the milestone (I have observed this person showing a consistent, comfortable, continuous, and clear positive impact ) vs. the examples listed under it when deciding what milestone someone is at?

for example, the ruby ability milestone 2 - if I trust someone to do most of the things listed in the examples, but I don’t think they are at a point to be an active or passive mentor yet, does that mean milestone 1? or is that a sign the examples maybe need to be adjusted?

Response: Blank Page

Short answer: The statements at the top are there to solve the “blank page” problem inherent in creating a growth framework. As such, they can be completely ignored/removed.

I found that if I didn’t put anything there, folks got stuck on making the examples more and more clear… maybe in danger of them becoming a checklist.

The examples are incredibly important, IMO, but they have three things about them you have to seek / avoid:

1. Must be about demonstration of the ability, not prior experience (this is about trying to evaluate the combo of the person AND the environment they are in… not about trying to reduce the person to a set of numbers)
2. Must be about manager’s “I’ve seen them do this, so I would put them in these higher stakes situations”, not a quest to rate the person themselves
3. Must be examples of outcomes (often sentiment based from the perspective of their teammates), and not a checklist of activities

So… remove them if they are not important to that Ability Milestone

But one more thing…

Response: Milestone movement

IMO you are at the lower milestone until we are confident that you have been doing the things for the next milestone long enough.

I don’t want it to be a checklist… so, I hesitate to answer yes to…

if I trust someone to do most of the things listed in the examples, but I don’t think they are at a point to be an active or passive mentor yet

But, if we think that is a critical aspect of M2 of Ruby, then yes… they are still M1 until they demonstrate the mentoring.

However, if “mentoring” others in this ability is not critical and we are confident in the other aspects a lot… sure, make ’em M2.

Unfortunately I have never seen a way to do this without subjectivity.

It is about the manager’s trust. Ideally the idiosynchronicity inherent in one person evaluating people will be smoothed over with three things:

1. Specificity

• The hope is that the Abilities are so specific that the subjectivity is controlled

2. Observation

• Ideally folks will be giving observations and attaching the Aspirations (Values / Principles), Assignment, and/or Abilities to openly shared observations. This way we can all calibrate on what good looks like.

3. Cross-pollination

• Ideally the process of promoting someone from one milestone to another is an Event. By Event with a capital E. There is a tri-force thought here as well:

Panel of 3 agree

Every milestone promotion should be agreed upon by: Direct Manager, Peer, and Manager who has employees who take on that Ability as well

Small celebrations channel

Maybe #keep-growing channel if the person is proud of the movement. a part of the evaluation of growth framework design is if folks are proud of the moment that is an Ability Milestone promotion. If they aren’t, we should ask ourselves why. Is it not clear enough? Not relevant enough?

“Re-printing” of the MAAP

I dream of a world where something like this is so clear, visually pleasing, and important to the employee that every time it changes there is some sort of animation that shows growth. There’s a spider graph that I think will be good for this… but I digress.