Hey people managers!

Here's a free, practical tip for making your organization more inclusive. It's one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to increase representation of senior level underestimated folk, and improve retention.

It has to do with "Stretch Opportunities."

A stretch opportunity is a project, scope, or responsibility, that as a little bit beyond what someone has done before in your context.

A good stretch opportunity should be challenging, but not overwhelming. You want the person to stretch, not break.

For your team members, growth requires progressive overload. Growing faster requires optimizing this progressive overload.

This is the same as in school. You wouldn't get much smarter in grade school by repeating the same grade over and over, especially if you got straight As.

In school, you can slow your own learning by taking easy classes.

Or, you can optimize your learning by taking harder classes, joining a study group (peers), going to office hours (mentor), and putting in extra effort to master the difficult material (intentional focus).

The same thing happens in the workplace.

A good stretch opportunity will require your team member to apply intentional focus to shore up their "growing edge", may require support from a mentor, and should take place in a supportive environment.

Now, before we get to the tip, and why it's so effective, we have to acknowledge something:

* Men tend to get the lionshare of stretch opportunities - "I believe you can do this new thing!"

* Women tend to get lateral opportunities - "You did it there, you can do it here!"

This has the same effect that you would think discouraging women in school from taking honors science classes would have.

Most of us don't want it to be true that men get most of the stretch opportunities.

In fact, lots of us aren't even sure that this is true...

So here's the tip! Ready?

1. Make a spreadsheet with these column headers:
* name
* self-identified categories if available (e.g. race, gender)
* Stretch opportunity for 2020? (yes/no)
* Description of stretch opportunity (link to doc even better)

Fill it in for team members.

Look at your spreadsheet. Ask yourself. Questions.

E.g. What percentage of your team are women? What percentage of women get stretch opportunities? What percentage of men get stretch opportunities?

Does that match your own expectations for who gets stretch opportunities?

You don't need to share this sheet with anyone! That's not what it's for.

It's only purposes are:

* To help close the gap between what you want the experience on your team to be, and what it really is

* To give you the confidence to know that you are fairly distributing opps

2 years from now, you'll be trying to hire a senior level person, who you hope will be a good fit for your org. You'll be lamenting "pipeline problems."

The best candidate for that position may already be in your company right now, as a talented junior or mid level person.

If that person doesn't get stretch opportunities, they won't grow as fast as equally talented peers who do get them.

They'll become frustrated at their slow rate of progression (minor). Worse, they'll feel frustration at not learning/ growing/progressing as a person (major ).

They will become a "regretted attrition risk." That's corporate speak for "people who peaced out, who we didn't want to peace out."

Their leaving will send a signal to junior and mid level underestimated folk, that progression is impossible for folk like them.

It's all bad.

But if they stay, junior and mid level underestimated folk think that "Progression is not impossible, or harder for underestimated folk. It's just really, really, hard in general!"

Weird, the perception that progression is more *difficult* but more *objective* is motivating?

All these good effects can come from making a silly spreadsheet a few times a year, looking at at, possibly making a few adjustments, and then just deleting it. Seems hard to believe.

You can do the whole exercise in a few hours a year. Time well spent.