Project Update
This week, we did more outreach to external stakeholders and got a few promising leads. I continued to analyze some of the data from the external stakeholder interviews we did. The manager journey project is starting to come to a close–we’ll see if we can get any more external stakeholders to do interviews with us, but if not, we’ll wrap things up here and deliver our findings.
Readings
I’m continuing my investigation into value-sensitive design’s applications by considering the values I might want to center, and how the existing system supports/does not support them.
Value Consideration
As it stands, the platform does support the direct report’s privacy by allowing them to keep goals on the leadership development roadmap private. However, it does very little to enable/support their autonomy and flexibility. As our research shows, there are many situations in which direct reports do make their goals visible to their manager in order to receive their manager’s feedback. However, they often do not receive it. Our research also shows that managers have a desire to invest in and support their direct reports’ career and personal development, but seem to be uncertain about how they should be using the Sounding Board platform to do so. Typically, conversations between managers and direct reports surrounding growth and development are taking place outside of the context of the Sounding Board platform.
In order to support both a coachee’s privacy and autonomy, the solution we implement must be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of coachees with a variety of relationships to their managers. Some coachees may have positive relationships with their managers, and may actively desire their feedback and advice throughout their coaching journey. Others may have strained relationships with their managers, and might feel as though involving their manager in their coaching engagement would be detrimental to their growth. Some coachees might have positive relationships with their managers, but still may not feel ready to bring their manager into the fold—this is especially true for nascent manager-direct report relationships.
Ultimately, our solution must allow coachees to specify and communicate the level of manager involvement they desire, so that all direct stakeholders—the coach, coachee, and manager—have a clear understanding of the role the manager will play in the coaching engagement.
Sources
Friedman, B., Hendry, D. G., & Borning, A. (2017). A Survey of Value Sensitive Design Methods. Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction, 11(2), 63–125. https://doi.org/10.1561/1100000015