192 CHAPTER 7 Nurturing the Team was passing and the user needed to be induced to wait until a menu became avail- able. The critique resulted in an even more flexible indicator that could be applied to many situations and carried an aesthetic that fit within the design language that had been developed for the operating system. In addition to the obvious benefits for improving the innovation, quality, and effectiveness of the design, there were other benefits as well. The process of bring- ing the team together for charrettes and critiques drove more consistency across the team's design, and grounded it in common user assumptions. It helped unite the team in how it thought about all of our designs. It bonded the team as a team, and reinforced the values that were common to the team. It also educated stakeholders by exposing the design process to them, and indeed giving them experience in being a part of the process and exercising their own design-thinking skills. It made the design a creative collaboration. grOWINg perFOrMANCe ANd CAreerS Coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximize his or her own performance. It is helping him or her to learn rather than teaching them. timothy gallwey You have several tools as a manager or lead that you can use to raise the level of individual performance and to grow performance and impact growing careers. Much of the year you are working with individuals one-on-one, or as part of a team to motivate, guide, and support them. You have the portfolio of recognition tools avail- able in your organization and that you have created. You have career discussions and various feedback tools that can be used to refine performance. And of course you have formal and informal performance reviews that build on the other interactions. Together they are all aspects of the coaching function of leadership -- the growing of the individual talent on your team that results in growing your overall team. Setting Commitments Next to understanding what motivates the individual, the most important thing you can do with each individual is to have clarity around your expectations, the goals the person is working toward, and how they will be measured. Companies take different approaches to how the goals or objectives are framed. At Ameritech the objectives were to be aligned along a golden thread, where an individual's objec- tives mapped to their boss' objectives, which mapped to their boss' objectives and so on, up to the business model for the organization. Each individual's activi- ties should clearly be aligned with how value is delivered. At other companies the commitments are more focused on the impact the individual plans to have, and as a manager your job is to ensure that the various commitments across the team allow