Second Day
Day 2 was dedicated to Ambitions and Career Model discussions. First we talked about our organization-level ambitions. Some fresh business ideas were shared with Melissa M and Christian W and cannot be disclosed here due to confidentiality reasons. Generally we talked about how to make the solution a real kick-ass. All participants agreed that all team members need to know more about business strategy and goals. According to Kostya L, it is always important to an employee to know the business context in which he/she is doing a job. We will never beat competitors unless we have the whole international team following the same strategic direction and putting focus on the same set of business goals. Oleg R was passionate about providing his input before a strategy or a goal is approved by the organization. Although there was no doubt that business needs are the biggest drivers. The main point was to raise concerns early rather then late in the implementation process and provide decision makers with more information.
Then we got to discuss ambitions of each team and individual team members. Yakov A said he would like us doing something specifically for Ukraine. Yevgen P would like to have more ownership about his team members’ motivation. Irina Pa, Valeriy Z and Vasiliy S were passionate about mentoring fellow team members. Vasiliy S and Iya O would like to take more responsibility for workflow optimization. Vasiliy S was strongly interested in team building aspects. Irina Pi and Iya O would like to have a chance to change their areas of responsibility in the future as Eugenia N had done. Anna K, Dmitriy S, Yakov A and Anton S enjoy making lives of other people easier and more interesting. Olga M shared her passion about making the people in QA team happy. Olga R said she was passionate about making people from different offices work together as a great team. Iya V and Nataly Kob said they would like to create more exciting jobs. Alexey L and Irina Pi are obsessed by the idea of making the teams more self-organized. Olga R said she is focused on keeping our Values. Dmitry K, Olga S and Nataly K talked about the importance of monitoring employees’ expectations and making sure the organization gives all means for success to a person being promoted. Alexey L’s and Elena D’s ambitions were to change the world around them. Dmitry S said we need to provide people with ability to grow personally as well as professionally. Gino T’s passion was to make the whole organization obsessed by Quality. Alex S said our mission was to lead our fellow citizens by example of how our Values make a Success.
We also talked a lot about the importance of collaboration inside and between the teams. We stressed on the need of being flexible and open-minded as IT-industry is one of the most fast-changing. And of course everybody talked about professional growth.
The above discussions got us and to the point when Leonid asked: “Does it all mean we need a Career Model”? It was really a question. We all know that a Career Model implemented in an improper way will add a big risk to the organization. We also know that if a Career Model is good – it will add a huge value to the organization and to the business. So working on a Career Model would be a challenging task. On a side note, we like such tasks, we really like them! Please take a breath here because the following will be really important. We will have our Career Model in place starting January 1, 2008. We are firm about that decision, and we’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen.
During the initial discussion on the Summit, we identified the following key qualities to be measured in the scope of the Career Model:
- Communication
- Innovation
- Ability to Learn
- Maturity
- Problem Solving
- Productivity
- Professional Skills
- Time-/Self-Management
- Collaboration
- Global Thinking
- Accountability
We defined that the Career Model will be multi-dimensional and multi-view. The two views proposed by Olga M and Alex S accordingly were the following:
- View I: Theoretical/Practical/Personal
- View II: General/Professional
We came to a conclusion that to make the Career Model fair, we’ll need to provide specific measurements leading to specific numbers. Each quality will probably have a set of thresholds and a weight. An employee’s performance will be calculated in terms of those thresholds and weights. And that makes the Career Model implementation a very complicated and hard task. The Career Model will apply to each individual in the organization but some of them (the leaders) will take two roles at the same time. They will be evaluated by their managers and at the same time they will evaluate their subordinates. And at the beginning it will be a huge overhead for the leaders. But it will be definitely worth of it!
The time to leave the camp came unexpectedly. We felt like we had many more things to discuss. That feeling makes us start planning the next Summit right away!