How to grow as an engineer with Freshworks leadership competencies
To prioritize comprehensive growth, the Freshworks leadership team drafted a set of competencies and behaviors known as the Freshworks Leadership Competencies.
One of my teachers in school used to say that students either seek the heavenly bliss of knowledge or the earthly pleasure of grades. As we grow up, I believe we start working for both. We expect our work to be fulfilling and add value to our company and society— while offering us earthly gains of money and promotion.
For an engineer, growth implies not just a change in designation but also in stature. Growth in size and stature comes from a plethora of sources, but mainly through peer recognition — from their team members and industry peers across the globe. Often, this recognition translates to job title changes from engineer to distinguished engineer, and of course, there is a corresponding gain in monetary compensation.
Growth requires multidimensional development—understanding and solving technical complexities is one such dimension. Other equally important areas are communication skills, the ability to prioritize, balance the abstract and the concrete, groom other engineers, and so on.
We developed these competencies to enable our engineers to succeed through a systematic process of multifaceted development.
About Freshworks Leadership Competencies
We have identified twelve core skillsets as part of Freshworks Leadership Competencies (FLC). These behaviors guide us in performing our jobs while creating a common language. We have further divided these competencies into behaviors customized to each organizational level. For example, one of the competencies is collaboration, and the expected behaviors are outlined in the following image.
The twelve skills that constitute the Freshworks Leadership Competencies are listed in the following table.
| Freshworks Leadership Competencies |
|---|
| Adaptive |
| Collaborative |
| Customer Focused |
| Develops Talent |
| Drives Results |
| Drives Vision and Purpose |
| Energizes and Engages |
| Ensures Accountability |
| Innovative |
| Provides Clarity |
| Strategic Minded |
| Values Differences |
Freshworks Leadership Competencies help engineers and their managers agree on a shared set of behaviors and measurements that allow employees to thrive and succeed.
What constitutes an individual development plan (IDP)?
We can understand what IDP is in Freshworks by knowing what it is not.
- IDPs are not quarterly or yearly objectives. Objectives have binary outcomes. You either achieve them, or you do not. Development is a journey. Objectives can get stuck due to reasons outside the employee’s control. But the journey is never-ending.
- IDPs are not a checklist for promotion. Often managers and employees miss the spirit of IDPs and focus on the letter. The spirit of IDP is for the engineer to grow; it should not be used as a checklist of items that can be used to make a promotion case.
- IDPs are not static. Like any journey, the IDP is ever-changing. As we approach a destination, we plan the next leg of the journey. Every day here is a chance to reflect on the idea of growth and plan the next steps in our journey.
In short, IDP is like a personal diary. My IDP reflects the journey that I have made and my reflection on all the hits and misses during the period.
Documenting and reflecting on the misses is the core essence of the IDP. Growth and learning always come from the misses and the mistakes we make.
“Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world,” says Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian philosopher.
Who can create and review individual development plans?
It seems natural that the employee owns the IDP. However, in our experience, most engineers freeze up creating their IDPs. Therefore, we have made the IDPs a joint initiative by the engineer and their manager. We hope that eventually, every engineer will be the owner of their own career and the IDP. For now, we maintain shared ownership.
Inputs to the IDP come from the employee’s aspirations and performance in the last few quarters. The critical enabler, though, is the engineer’s self-reflection.
At Freshworks, we use Lattice to manage and develop the IDPs. IDPs manifest as the “GROW” module in Lattice. The following screenshot is a hypothetical example from an engineer in the Machine Learning team.
Lattice allows for IDPs to be created by either the manager or the engineer. Lattice encourages everyone to break down the IDP into smaller, achievable goals. The manager and the engineer track the progress of these goals during 1:1s.
How do we review individual development plans?
As discussed earlier, IDPs are not objectives. Thus a review of IDPs should be different from that of objectives. In every one-on-one, if we review IDPs, we focus on three things.
- Is the IDP relevant? Given the ever-changing business priorities, reviewing an IDP periodically to ensure it is still relevant is always a good idea. For instance, an engineer might move from a tech architect track to a people manager path for various reasons. Therefore, the IDP must be altered to include more team and people management aspects rather than only technical intricacies.
- We then look at the overall development objective: We review what the engineer has been doing for the past few weeks or months to grow in a particular direction. The manager must examine and remove blockers, if any.
- The last but most crucial aspect of an IDP is introducing a new growth area. At Freshworks, adding new elements to the IDP is an ongoing process. Every IDP we add follows the same template that we have described earlier. Based on inputs from the reviews, FLCs, and the engineer’s aspirations, the manager helps identify new growth areas that can be added to the IDP.
How we define success with Freshworks leadership competencies
As an employee, you are in the driver’s seat of your career.
The main success of this program is for the engineers to take charge of their careers. The IDP process is successful if the employee grows. In our experience, we have seen that IDPs drive engineers to better reflect on their aspirations, successes, and misses. We want to see our engineers succeed, and the IDP puts career discussions at the center of every one-on-one.
“You can expect certain benefits from your meditation. The initial ones are practical things; the later stages are profoundly transcendental. They run together from the simple to the sublime,” says Henepola Gunaratana.
We are still early in our adoption of the IDP process. We see some early benefits of adopting the process. We eagerly await the more profound benefits for everyone in the organization.
