Moving beyond piecemeal training to build thriving individuals, teams, and organizations

Most organizations approach development like they're throwing ingredients into a pot without a recipe. A leadership workshop here, a skills training there, maybe some team building if there's budget left over. The result? A lot of effort with limited lasting impact.

What if there was a better way? What if we could approach growth with the same intentionality that a chef brings to creating a memorable meal?

Introducing the Growth Mix

The Growth Mix is a framework that recognizes four essential ingredients for healthy, adaptive organizations: Personal, Professional, Leadership, and Team development. Like any good recipe, it's not just about having the right ingredients—it's about understanding how they work together to create something greater than the sum of their parts.

Why Traditional Development Falls Short

Walk into most organizations and you'll find development efforts that look something like this:

Professional training gets the lion's share of attention and budget
Personal growth is treated as "nice to have" or left to individual initiative
Leadership development happens by accident or only for senior roles
Team health is assumed to emerge naturally from good people doing good work

This fragmented approach explains why so many development initiatives feel like checking boxes rather than driving real change. We're missing the connections that make growth stick.

The Four Essential Ingredients

Personal – Your Inner Work This is the foundation: intentional reflection and mindset work that shapes how you show up everywhere—at work, in community, in life. It includes self-awareness, emotional regulation, values clarification, and resilience building. Without this inner work, other development efforts often remain surface-level.

Professional – What You Can Do
These are the technical skills, knowledge, and competencies you need to excel in your role and advance your craft. This is what most organizations focus on exclusively, but it's just one piece of the puzzle.

Leadership – Building Skills & Practice Whether you manage people or not, this ingredient develops the mindsets, skills, and habits that create conditions for others to thrive. It's about influence, facilitation, systems thinking, and creating psychological safety.

Team – How We Work Together This focuses on the trust, communication patterns, shared rhythms, and culture that transform a collection of individuals into a cohesive, resilient unit capable of navigating complexity together.

Where the Magic Happens

The Growth Mix works because these ingredients are deeply interconnected. Personal growth creates the self-awareness that fuels authentic leadership. Strong leadership creates the conditions where teams can flourish. Healthy teams provide the psychological safety where new professional skills can be practiced and refined.

The binding agents that hold it all together? Connection, shared learning, and peer support. These create the social fabric that allows growth to become embedded rather than episodic.

From Framework to Action: The Growth Mix Recipe Tool

Frameworks are useful, but only if they lead to action. That's why we created the Growth Mix Recipe—a practical planning tool that transforms these concepts into concrete development goals.

How the Recipe Works

The tool is designed as a one-page template (available in fillable or printable formats) that guides you through six key steps:

Name Your Why – Articulate what motivates your growth journey this year
Choose Focus Areas – Select 1-2 priorities within each of the four ingredients
Add Strategies & Practices – Define specific habits, learning opportunities, or experiments
Set 30-60-90 Goals – Create short-term milestones that build momentum
Identify Your Connections – Map the mentors, peers, and colleagues who will support you
Establish Check-In Rhythms – Decide how often you'll reflect, adapt, and course-correct

Download the Full Growth Mix Tool Here 👇

A Recipe in Action

Here's what this might look like for someone focused on building their advocacy and delegation skills:

Personal Focus: Build Resilience

Strategy: Weekly journaling plus one unplugged hour every Friday
30-day goal: Complete 4 journal entries
60-day goal: Share insights with mentor
90-day goal: Drop one energy-draining commitment

Professional Focus: Advocacy Skills

Strategy: Read 5 resources, attend 1 event, conduct peer interviews
30-day goal: Build resource list
60-day goal: Draft advocacy strategy map
90-day goal: Present first advocacy idea to leadership

Leadership Focus: Delegation

Strategy: Weekly delegation reviews plus reading Multipliers
30-day goal: Identify 2 tasks to delegate
60-day goal: Have retrospective conversation with team
90-day goal: Hand off complete project with success metrics

Team Focus: Meeting Culture

Strategy: Add check-in/closing rituals, run monthly retrospectives
30-day goal: Pilot new meeting check-in process
60-day goal: Collect team feedback on changes
90-day goal: Document and share new team meeting rhythm

Why This Approach Works

The Growth Mix Recipe succeeds where other development approaches fall short for several reasons:

It's holistic without being overwhelming. By organizing growth into four clear areas, it ensures nothing gets forgotten while remaining manageable.

It creates momentum through short cycles. The 30-60-90 day structure prevents the "someday" syndrome that kills most development goals.

It builds in accountability and connection. By identifying support people and check-in rhythms upfront, it creates the social scaffolding that sustains change.

It adapts to your context. Whether you're an individual contributor, team leader, or organizational changemaker, you can customize the recipe to fit your role and aspirations.

It recognizes that growth is both individual and collective. The framework works whether you're planning personal development or designing growth experiences for entire teams.

Getting Started

The beauty of the Growth Mix is its simplicity. You don't need approval from above or a big budget to begin. You just need clarity about where you want to grow and the discipline to take small, consistent steps.

Start by asking yourself: What would be possible if I approached my development with the same intentionality I bring to my most important projects?

The answer might just transform not only how you grow, but how your team and organization evolve alongside you.

The Growth Mix: A Recipe for Transformational Development