Where can we really make a difference when we develop people? The Circles of Growth are the model we use in Making Others Great to answer that question. Five circles, from Me to World, show where growth begins, how it travels, how the circles influence one another, and where Making Others Great does its work.

Five circles, five verbs

World Read Organization Shape Us Build You Develop Me Model
Five circles, one center. Making Others Great lives at the heart of the model, in Me and You, and reaches into Us and beyond. The closer a ring sits to the middle, the more directly we act there. The organization we help shape, and the wider world we learn to read.

Me: Model. How we show up. Our questions, our patience, the advice we hold back. The person we can change most directly is ourselves. People tend to copy what we do faster than what we say.¹

You: Develop. The person in front of us. Their growth belongs to them. What we can develop is our skill to help. In a good development conversation, people find their own solutions, and we support rather than prescribe. Growth starts right here, in tiny leaps. We call the ones worth noticing and celebrating Small Greats.²

Us: Build. The team. Here we build trust and shared habits, and growth gets more dynamic: a team follows its own rules, and different people are driven by different things. Where people feel safe to speak up, they learn more together.³

Organization: Shape. Peers, our own manager, senior leadership. We shape through example, good arguments and relationships, and we raise concerns with the people who decide.⁴

World: Read. Markets, customers, technology, regulation. We read it carefully and translate it calmly for our people.

Outside in, inside out

Understanding flows inward: the market shapes the organization, the organization shapes the team, and the team shapes many of the conversations we have. Influence flows outward: clear leaders hold better conversations, better conversations build stronger teams, and strong teams can change how an organization works.

Act from the inside out Me You Us Organization World ModelDevelopBuildShapeRead Understand from the outside in
The same five circles, rolled out flat. Red asks: where do I start? Sand asks: what do I need to know?

Grow their circle

The two arrows give us two lines. The model adds a third. In the second circle, our influence does the most good when it widens the other person's circle of influence: the range of things they can decide and solve on their own. People often reshape their own work: the tasks they take on, the relationships they build, the way they see their role.⁵ Our job is to make room for that. A team member who solves something she would have escalated last month has a bigger circle today. That is the moment we look for.

The whole model fits in three lines: Understand from the outside in. Act from the inside out. Grow their circle.

In good company

The family resemblance is easy to see. The Stoics drew the line between what is up to us and what is not.⁶ The Serenity Prayer asks for the courage to change what we can.⁷ And Stephen Covey gave the idea a popular modern form with his circles of concern and influence.⁸ The Circles of Growth add the question we care about most: how does the other person's circle of influence grow?

Talent Takeaway

  • Write down what keeps you and your team busy.
  • Place each item in one of the five circles.
  • For the outer two, ask: what does this mean for my people, and what can I do in Me, You or Us?
  • Pick one person and ask them: what could you decide on your own?
  • Watch for the first Small Great, and name it out loud.

¹ Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice Hall.

² Weick, K. E. (1984). Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems. American Psychologist, 39(1), 40–49. Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The progress principle: Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work. Harvard Business Review Press. Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218 Small Greats is our own term in Making Others Great; this research inspired it.

³ Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

⁴ Dutton, J. E., & Ashford, S. J. (1993). Selling issues to top management. Academy of Management Review, 18(3), 397–428. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1993.9309035145

⁵ Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179–201. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2001.4378011

⁶ Epictetus. Enchiridion, ch. 1. https://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

⁷ The popular version of the Serenity Prayer is traditionally attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose own wording differs slightly. Versions circulated from the 1930s and 1940s, and its early history has been debated.

⁸ Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 habits of highly effective people. Free Press.

Further reading: Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Harvard University Press.