🎧 Listen (7.5 min)
How do you know if your efforts to grow are paying off? Have you ever felt unsure where to start with your own development or wondered how to help your team see progress? Growth can feel abstract and overwhelming, but by setting clear progress markers, you can bring both structure and motivation to personal and team development.
Boosts motivation & provides structure: Nothing builds momentum quite like seeing results. When you or your team see tangible progress, it becomes a motivator and it encourages everyone to keep pushing toward the goal. Progress markers also act as a roadmap and add valuable structure to what can sometimes feel like an overwhelming process.
Builds accountability: Regularly measuring progress fosters a sense of accountability, both personally and within teams; this also builds a culture of consistent growth where development becomes part of the normal routine and isn’t simply a checkbox on an annual review.
Redirects the brain to the positives: It’s common for our brains to discount our achievements and consistently focus on what still needs improvement. Progress markers make these milestones visible and allow us to counter this tendency, which builds confidence and resilience.
Helps course-correct earlier: Tracking progress makes it easier to spot potential obstacles or areas of misalignment before they grow into bigger issues.
Essential for self-awareness: Measuring progress encourages essential self-reflection. For leaders, it can reveal patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.
When tracking development, both self-reporting and understanding how others perceive you are essential. Here are some common markers I use with leaders and professionals to track progress:
◼️ Self-rated reporting of listening effectiveness: after each meeting, rate your listening effectiveness on a scale of 1-10 (1=dominated the conversation, minimal listening and 10 = listened actively). Aim to increase this self-rating over time to an average of 8-10.
◼️ Track how often team members need clarification on your instructions or messages. Aim to decrease the number of clarifications needed over time.
◼️ Track new tasks delegated each week or month and aim to increase these over time (from 3 to 6 per month).
◼️ Self-rated comfort level with delegation: rate your comfort with letting go of control on a scale of 1-10 (1 = very uncomfortable) and aim to increase the comfort level over a certain amount of time.
◼️ Perceived autonomy among team members: ask team members to rate how often they feel they have autonomy in their work on a scale of 1-10 (1 = little to no autonomy). Aim to improve these ratings over time.
◼️ Percentage of proposals or ideas accepted or implemented by the team or other stakeholders. Aim to increase this rate over time.
◼️ Self-rated confidence in influencing: after each significant interaction where buy-in was sought, rate your confidence in the effectiveness of your influence on a scale of 1-10 (1=very unsure of your influence and 10 = very confident in your influence). Aim to increase this confidence rating over time to consistently reach 8-10.
◼️ Track how often others proactively seek your input or advice on decisions. Aim to increase these requests over time.
Progress markers are valuable for multiple purposes. You can use them to track your own development, showcase growth in performance reviews to support career progression, and support self-promotion by highlighting your capabilities and strengths. This all works well with data-driven leaders.
This doesn’t only benefit you. Teaching this approach to your team, particularly if they are leaders themselves, extends its benefits across all levels.
Progress markers are a powerful tool in coaching because they provide clear benchmarks for growth and accountability. I like to start by having leaders create their own progress markers, as this encourages deeper buy-in and commitment to their development goals. At the same time, I don’t expect leaders to be experts in training and development, so crafting these markers can sometimes be challenging if they are trying to do this on their own. This initial effort, however, fosters a strong sense of ownership.
Through coaching, we work together to refine these markers as needed. For my perfectionists out there: these markers are not set in stone! They can be modified or updated at any time… you just have to start somewhere.
In some cases, particularly with organizational clients, I’m hired to coach a leader whose development goals are already defined by HR, their boss, or sometimes by the leader themselves. Other times, there’s a general objective to improve leadership effectiveness and we create the goals further into the coaching process.
Some people may feel pressured to come into coaching with specific goals in mind, but there’s no need to have everything figured out beforehand. Uncovering these development areas is actually a key part of the coaching process. Many people aren’t entirely sure what their blind spots are or exactly what they need to work on. Together, we identify these areas through tools like the Hogan assessment, 360 feedback, input from various stakeholders, and my own observations.
Progress markers help build a culture of continuous improvement because how do you know if you’re improving without having evaluation markers? I challenge you to create two progress markers for yourself to track at least through the first half of next year.
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