When we collaborate together, we can achieve so much more than we can alone. We see it in team successes all the time, and in the ways personal goal achievement can be a struggle. Two co-workers and I have been trying to solve this conundrum of personal goals over the last year, and have developed an informal peer coaching framework called Thing Three. We have had great results, and I hope you will learn about it below and try it yourself.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you go far, go together.
-African Proverb
There are three core ingredients for Thing Three:
- You and two Peers
- Weekly personal goals
- A regular place and time
First, you’ll need to pick two peers. Ideally they will be people you connect with and like, but do not work with you directly. You want peers you can trust and share diverse viewpoints. Folks that you would love to work with every day, but don’t share a common team or project. For our Thing Three, we are a Product Manager (me), Agile Coach, and Product Owner. The variety in roles and personalities leads to cross-functional insights and coaching. We offset each others’ biases and gaps in knowledge.
Next, we three create weekly personal goals. We each use the level of formality that matches our personal styles. Personally, I fill out a two-page template to help me think through my opportunities and route to success for each goal. It includes identifying items such as my learning opportunities and those who can help me achieve my goal. Others use a journal to jot down goals, or even just stickies. We set goals for the upcoming week across both home and work, each limiting to just three items in progress. Saying “hell yes” to only three goals, and timeboxing outcomes to just a week, confirms our dedication and responsibility to achieve them.
Finally, we mix these together each Monday for 30 minutes. We’ve found that 10 minutes each is just right to go deeper on one goal and have time for conversation. After sharing each goal, the other two give their Feedforward, or what they would do if they had the same goal. Here’s an example Thing Three session:
- I share my first goal, such as wanting to clean up a crufty backlog I inherited.
- My first fellow Thing Threer shares what she would do in the same situation. For example, she would get the team involved in cleaning it up.
- My second fellow Thing Threer shares what she would to too. Perhaps I should use Kano to assess the current backlog?
- We then repeat with my second goal, getting feedback again.
- Finally, I share my third goal and get feedback. At the end, about 10 minutes are up.
- Now it’s time for my first fellow Thing Threer to repeat steps 1-5 with her three goals. 20 minutes have passed.
- And in conclusion, my second fellow Thing Threer shares her goals and gets feedback. We randomize the order each week to switch it up.
We’ve experimented with variations to this structure, like not meeting weekly or having less than three people, but it always comes back to this process as the right mix of achieving personal responsibility while gaining amazing coaching and insights from others.
Hopefully you take this lightweight framework back to your office and try it yourself. We’ve had amazing results, with all three of us getting promotions this year. Thing Three has begun to spread to others as well, like our Lean In group. Hopefully it brings you both the success of personal responsibility and the joy of peer coaching to achieve results you could never imagine.