A framework for professional (and personal) growth

This is a guest post from my friend Arnav Gupta, you might know him as @championswimmer from Twitter or from his hugely popular Scaler Pod. He's not just a hardcore nerd but also a seasoned manager and keeps dropping gems on Twitter. One of which is reproduced below.

This post is not just for developers, it is also a useful framework for managers looking to upskill their team.

Everyone wants to grow

It is interesting to see the various ways people approach the concept of "growth", especially since I have to discuss this topic as a manager, and also when mentoring people.

People always want to "grow", but aren't often aware how to exactly do that.

In a formal manager relationship I often encounter a situation where someone wants to be given task they have never done before, and want to prove they can do it, and it's the easiest idea in most people's minds on how to "grow".

It is not wrong. Growing is doing new things.

In more informal mentoring relationships, I see a different aspect of it.

People tell me how they look up to seniors/peers who are doing things 10x faster than them, or doing 10 different things which they cannot fathom how to learn and do so many things so well.

The three concentric circles

I have found that putting it into the following framework helps figure things out much better.

Imagine 3 concentric circles (from small to big)

• capacity
• capability
• potential

Everything that you do on a regular basis (and everyone considers you really good at i.e. you do it provably well) is inside the innermost circle.

Apart from this, there are also things that you are 'capable' of doing, but not necessarily have the 'capacity' to do.

The key things to understand is that, as your role 'grows', you not only become capable of doing more kinds of things, you also reduce the time/effort required to the things you were already doing to make space for capacity for the other
things you are capable of.

There are two ways of this happening.

1. For things inside the capacity circle, you need to find ways to automate/delegate so that they take up less of your capacity
2. Practice doing something that you are capable of enough that it can be absorbed into your circle of capacity.

You might be doing 1 and 2 parallelly for different kinds of skills/abilities. It is always an evolving process.

But, is 'capacity' finite or infinite?

I feel there is no good answer to it. It surely is a bit plastic and elastic. Definitely not entirely infinite.

For example, not writing code hands-on for a few years will make it fall out of the capacity circle. Shipping of couple of side projects to dust yourself off can bring it in.

Capacity can be sometimes temporarily increased by paying in other currencies (like cutting down on sleep, travel).

Or can be increased very directly by paying money to get someone to do your work for you (hiring an EA, or outsourcing your social media to a ghostwriter)

But more often than not, what seems like increased capacity from outside, is just one of these things

• leveraging better tools (ChatGPT, Copilot)
• leveraging delegation (getting to hire people in your team)
• improved time management
• practicing it enough to get really fast+good at doing it (fun gif to illustrate)

i.e. reducing the capacity-per-task

That brings us to another type of skill/ability that lies in the circle of "potential" but outside the circle of "capability"

Often looking at a task, it is easy to see it is outside the green circle, but hard to admit, even to yourself, if it is orange or purple.

I have a few 'tests' for figuring out if something is in your capability zone or potential zone.

• if you watch someone else do something, and understand everything but are wondering how they did it so fast/easily, then you are capable, you just need practice
• if you watch someone do it, and have to note down a bunch of things you need to learn/figure out, or are unable to understand some parts of how they did it, you might not be capable, but you might have the potential to be
• if you have no clue how something is done, or feel it is physically impossible, it might be outside your "potential" circle too

Which circle to grow ?

Coming back to the original scenario I mention, I face often as a manager,
is that someone asks to be given a responsibility outside their 'capacity' zone

And that's great way to grow

But, if you don't know whether it is in the capability circle or potential one, you'll fail.

You'll fail because you will not grow the correct circle.

Growth comes from increasing the size of all the three circles, by the way, if that was not clear so far.

Increasing capabilities is also growth, and in fact, so is improving potential.

More often than not, you also can expect to grow the "capacity" circle on your employer's dime, but not the "capability" circle. You may be using learning budgets for it, or doing side projects in your spare time to achieve it, but you cannot bring "capability development" into a perf cycle easily. Your manager can only show your "jobs done" upwards, and not your "skills learnt"

Increasing capacity can be most easily

• demonstrated
• asked for increased compensation against

If you too tightly benchmark your next appraisal cycle to growth instead of more long term development, you will over-index on only enlarging the green circle.

But you cannot keep optimising for enlarging the green circle all the time.
It can lead to burn out. Or it can lead to undertaking responsibilities you'll fail to deliver on.

Because, even if capacity is somewhat plastic and elastic, it is not 'infinite'.

And hence, we must also focus on growing the capability and potential circles too.

Growing your potential is least helpful in terms of more immediate appraisals / promotions / interviews, but it is what poises you best to grab more opportunities in the future, when they come!

Common mistakes with 'capacity' growth

Also more senior people succeed in growing better by being strategic about their capacity and capability

Imagine Bob who starts off by brute-force expanding their capacity going from
Q1 to Q2 this year, will end up actually looking like an underperformer by Q4

Meanwhile, Alice who started off from a similar situation, take a little different approach.

She moves her 'capacity' circle to different areas of focus, and also gives back responsibilities she felt she wasn't good at.

She ends the year on a high, doing much more!

A few key constraints to keep in mind about these circles.

1. in early stages of your career, the capability and potential circles will always grow bigger, never shrink
2. the capacity circle is elastic, but won't forever grow. it can shrink if you don't practice things too
3. In later stages of career, you may consciously drop things out of capability circle which "you are too old to do"
4. The potential circle becomes harder to grow later into career, as you get increasingly locked into domain specialisations

Using this framework to discover opportunities

The best thing about thinking in this framework also is that shows how you can seek opportunities,
the next time you are on the market looking for jobs.

• green zone: this is 1:1 compatible with your current job
• orange zone: you qualify, but need to change your focus areas to work on it
• purple zone: have to prepare to apply, and work hard to deliver at

That's all for this post. Hope you found it helpful, whether you're a developer or a manager.

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