The most important metric no one is measuring

This week we said goodbye to one of our employees at Neu21. She has been with us for about two years, and, after this time, she has decided to pursue some other professional goals and projects. 

During the zoom call where we said goodbye to her, it struck me that we didn’t talk about any of the “work achievements” that she had accomplished during her time with us. Instead, we spent a lot of time talking about the “personal growth” she had experienced in these two years. We talked about how much she had grown developmentally rather than how many projects she had participated in.
 
Now, this particular person was talking about her growth in self-belief, in confidence and in dealing better with ambiguity. In fact, I remember when we were interviewing her for the role, how she called us through the process to say she was pulling out of it because she couldn’t deal with the uncertainty of not knowing if she was going to get the role combined with her fear of feeling not good enough to be part of our team. We talked to her and asked her to sit for a while through that uncertainty and she ended up joining us. 
 
What a wonderful story for me this is, that two years later the same person is able to leave a “secure job” and launch herself into a more uncertain professional project backing herself up through the process and believing in what she will do. This is not an uncommon story for us; we have had other people in Neu21 who have gone and set up successful businesses after working with us for a period of time. 
 
The reason for this, in my mind, stems from the deliberate focus we have in individual or developmental growth in the organisation. A few years ago, Dr. Richard Harmer introduced us to this concept of Developmental Agility and how the success of an organisation does not reside on how good we are at setting strategy or executing on it; but it relies on the responsiveness of the organisation and its people to grow faster than the complexity of the work being undertaken by the organisation. In other words, are our people developing and growing fast enough to deal with highest levels of complexity of today’s world? And if the answer is yes, we will be better equipped as an organisation to succeed regardless of the market conditions. 
 
Dr. Harmer helped us set a process where we actively and deliberately worked on making sure we were all “growing vertically”, and I don’t mean height wise. I mean we were working on HOW we see the world and how we could deal with highest levels of complexity; instead of just working on “growing horizontally”, which is what many organisations do, and it is just about adding “more things or skills” to our repertoire. 
 
This made me think that probably the most important metric in organisations is the one that, as far as I am concerned, no one is measuring. How much are our employees growing and developing; not in skills or WHAT we know = horizontal development, but in HOW we know and see the world = vertical development. 
Are you measuring the vertical growth of your team? Are you growing in your organisation?

Let me know if any of this resonates with you.