I like ambitious goals for people.
Not vague career aspirations, or the kind of development objective that gets written down once a year because the process requires it. I mean something closer to a Big Hairy Audacious Goal: a future version of someone’s career that’s far enough away from their current position that reaching it would require meaningful growth.
That might be moving into leadership. It might be becoming a principal engineer, changing specialism, speaking publicly, or becoming the person others trust with the hardest problems.
The value of that kind of goal is that it gives direction in the form of a North Star. What it doesn’t give is a complete plan.
If someone already knows every step between where they are now and where they want to be, the goal probably isn’t that ambitious. The work is in understanding where they currently are, then finding the next thing that moves them closer.
Turning Direction into Evidence
How do you eat an Elephant? One bite at a time. It’s a cliché, but it’s useful here.
A big career goal can be paralysing if we stare at it as a single thing. “Become a senior leader” or “operate at staff level” is too large to act on directly. It can quickly become either intimidating or meaningless.
So we need to try to break it down.
What behaviour would we expect to see from someone already operating at that level? What experience is missing? What judgement needs to develop? What evidence would make the next conversation easier?
The answer usually isn’t a grand career plan. It’s a smaller piece of work, a new kind of responsibility, a difficult conversation to lead, or a chance to practise something before the stakes are higher.
That matters because growth needs evidence. Not performative evidence for a promotion packet, but real evidence that the person is becoming more capable in the direction they care about.
The immediate step should be small enough to start and meaningful enough to teach us something.
Reviewing the Direction
Development plans go stale if nobody looks at them. A regular review cadence matters because people change, roles change, and sometimes the goal itself turns out to be less appealing once someone gets closer to it.
You’d want the short-term steps reviewed fairly often. Are they creating the right opportunities and moving you in the right direction? Is the person learning what we expected? Have we made the next step too vague to be useful?
The larger goal needs reviewing as well, just less frequently.
A BHAG shouldn’t become a trap. If someone once said they wanted to move into management, that doesn’t mean every future conversation has to assume management is still the right path. They may have learnt more about what the role actually involves. They may have discovered that the part they wanted was influence rather than line management.
It’s important to frame this as information, rather than failure. One of my responsibilities as a manager is to help people notice when their stated goal no longer matches what they actually want.
When Progress Goes Sideways
People don’t develop in a straight line.
They’ll take on something that should stretch them and find it harder than expected. They’ll get feedback that stings. They’ll realise they’re missing a skill they thought they had. Sometimes life outside work will make an otherwise reasonable development plan completely unrealistic for a while.
Setbacks need handling carefully.
If every setback is treated as evidence that someone isn’t ready, people will avoid stretching themselves. They’ll choose safer work, hide the messy parts, and wait until they’re certain before trying anything that might expose a gap.
When something goes off course, I want to understand what happened. Was the step too large? Did I fail to provide enough support? Did the person misunderstand what was expected? Has the goal changed, or have we simply found one of the harder parts of getting there?
Sometimes the right answer is to slow down. Sometimes it’s to try a different route. Sometimes the setback shows us that the goal is still right, but the next bite was too big.
In Practice
Theory is fine, but the real world rarely offers a clean run at something truly audacious.
I have worked with people who had a broad ambition to move into leadership, but with no obvious next step. The useful move was not to create a grand development plan. It was to find a smaller piece of evidence: giving them ownership of something that signaled intent and capability.
What that is can depend on the goal, the situation and the people around the team.
It might be a tricky stakeholder conversation, asking them to lead a difficult piece of alignment, or creating space for them to practise judgement before the stakes get higher.
Those steps did not prove the whole goal. They creating information, and often opened up more opportunities to move on to.
The Manager’s Part
I can’t want someone’s goal more than they do.
That’s an important limit. I can help them think, create opportunities, give feedback, protect space, and challenge them when they’re drifting. I can’t manufacture ambition on their behalf.
But when someone does have a direction they care about, I think I owe them more than a yearly development form.
I owe them honest conversations about where they are now. I owe them opportunities that move them closer, not just work that keeps them useful to me. I owe them enough review that we notice when the plan isn’t working.
The big goal gives the direction, the work is helping someone find the next meaningful step towards it.