People Growth

Caring about people growth is one of the key elements of Agile Lab to be successful.

Making people advance in their career path is a valuable iteration of everyone's professional life and, it contributes to our growth as humans as well. There are many ways to make people grow and here we will discuss how Agile Lab cares about agilers.

Ultimately, the responsibility for one's career path lies with the individual team member, not the coach. The coach can facilitate, assist, and advocate for it, but each person is ultimately responsible for their own growth. You must take ownership of your career path; promotions will not materialize out of thin air or solely because of your coach's influence. See Owning your career section to know more.

The framework

The people growth framework is based on 4 key elements:

• The Career Ladder: a reference framework outlining professions and areas of competence to support the definition of career paths.
• Management policies: the means that consistently guide choices regarding personnel and organizational needs.
• Segmentation: Processes for segmenting the company's population, which allow the identification of targets for designing targeted actions in management, development, and training.
• The Leadership Model: that promotes and values the set of skills necessary to address the challenges of the continuously evolving competitive environment, representing an interpretation of the company's strategy and values and serving as a guiding compass for the daily behaviors of everyone. See Leadership section.

The framework is also defined by a development process unfolding throughout the entire professional lifecycle of resources and is characterized by several phases aimed at supporting growth with distinctive tools and methodologies for each of them.

• Assess and Intercept: It's the phase of the process that allows both the assessment of the level of possession of skills, abilities, performance, and potential of individuals, identifying the best ones, and the planning of targeted actions for professional and managerial development. It also ensures the definition of succession plans for effective coverage of organizational positions, functional to achieving company goals.

This phase is a continuous process happening at first between the coachee and the coach during 1-1 meetings where one of the key topic is the growth. Each coach keeps track of agenda and conversations.

Then twice a year we have the 360 review that is an important moment to exchange feedbacks and do retrospective. 360 reviews are tracked on Sharepoint.

• Development: It is the phase of the process in which the Company operates - through the application of tools, methodologies and approaches - to support and accompany individuals in the journey of acquiring knowledge, technical skills, and abilities that optimally fit their role and/or prepare them for growth into more challenging and complex roles. It acts on engaging individuals in their development, aligning their attitudes and aspirations with contextual needs and opportunities as well as career paths, promoting the implementation of specific Individual Development Plans tailored to different types of impact.

Also the development phase is a continuous one and it is happening during 1-1 meetings. In alternative there could be pivotal moments where specific development actions will be taken to prepare for new challenges, roles or contextual situations. The development phase happens in the context of the ladder climbing and documented by the brag file.

See Growth Development.md to know more.

• Reward and Motivate: It is the process phase aimed at rewarding performance and critical competencies, involving people, guiding their behaviors, and determining positive effects on both individual and company performance.

The reward phase happens twice a year thanks to the Salary Review process where are explained all the principles, steps and roles involved. Also the ladder promotion event is part of this phase of the overall framework.

All these steps are tracked on Sharepoint

• Engage and Communicate: It is the process phase that promotes continuous action of information, listening, and engaging with people, aimed at keeping their active participation in corporate life and strengthening their sense of identity and belonging.

1-1 meetings again are the right place where engagement and communication should happen.They occur every two weeks to keep these frequent and consistent.

Governance

In the people growth framework there are mainly two roles involved:

• CTO: It is responsible for the maintenance and evolution of the framework itself.

• Coach: Everyone in Agile Lab has a reference coach that is responsible for the execution of the process:

  • Assess
  • Development
  • Reward
  • Engage The coach can be a Team Leader (a team can be splitted in sub-teams), a BU lead or an Engineering Director. The coach is responsible for the growth of a set of people he works directly with. The coach should the best equipped people to run the growth framework process. The coach tipically is a person with higher or equal ladder level than his/her coachees. If a person feels has no assigned coach, need to escalate immediately the situation, because this is a crucial condition to growth within the company.

• Engineering Director: Run the execution of 360 review and salary review processes to coordinate with all the coaches and to plan development and reward phases. Take care of properly tracking the process execution, deadlines and results. Engineering director acts as a coach for BU Leads and take the final decision on salary raises.

How the framework evolve

Everyone in Agile Lab can propose modifications and improvements to the framework leveraging the Handbook to make these proposals and conversations transparent, triggering discussions. The final approval of this Handbook section is on the CTO. Every change in the Handbook is versioned, tracked and communicated to the whole company automatically. In case of relevant changes the CTO sends a formal comunication to the whole company explaining the changes and pointing to the merge request.