how to develop someone who’s doing pretty dang well already

When prepping your one-on-one meetings, in addition to the usual battery of questions about your report’s goals + needs, add a question for yourself: “If this person were to take over for their leader (could be you or someone else), what gaps would show up?”

The actions that fill those gaps are the things you assign that person to unlock their next level of growth.

With this question prepped, I’m always ready to go somewhere new, big, exciting in a meeting if everything’s looking great. The person reporting up / reporting out doesn’t have many questions and there aren’t obvious things to fix in the work they’re already doing. We can cancel the meeting, in this situation.

Or! we can use the time to level this person up with a usefully daunting new assignment. And I’ve already thought about how to do that.

-Ben