Audit your goals: skill gap or sense-making gap?

Sort your development goals into what more knowledge would fix and what a different way of seeing would fix.

Perché funziona

Petrie defines horizontal development as more information, skills and competencies, and vertical development as more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking, and recommends checking whether an organization is over-focused on the first. Applied to one person, the audit separates goals that a course would solve from goals where you already know what to do and still cannot do it — a sign the limit is in how you make sense of the situation.

Come farlo

1. List your current development goals, or the three situations at work you handle worst.
2. For each, ask: "If someone gave me the perfect checklist, would this be solved?"
3. Mark yes as horizontal and plan the learning. Mark no as vertical.
4. For each vertical item, write the belief or reaction that takes over in that situation, and bring it to one of the other practices on this page.

Prove scientifiche

The horizontal–vertical distinction and the recommendation to check the balance between them are from Petrie (2015). Using it as a personal goal audit is an application of his program-level advice, and it has not been tested as an intervention. (mechanistic)

Petrie notes that several experts he interviewed saw horizontal and vertical as two sides of the same coin that often develop together; the sort is a thinking aid, not a clean division.

Fonti

• Petrie, N. (2015). The How-To of Vertical Leadership Development–Part 2: 30 Experts, 3 Conditions, and 15 Approaches. Center for Creative Leadership white paper.

Errore comune

Labeling every hard goal "vertical" because it sounds deeper. Plenty of struggles are plain skill gaps, and treating them as identity work wastes time a course would save.