Development planning as a key skill for managers

Posted by Anne Hamill

If you took a straw poll of your employees, how many would tell you that they felt their development plans aren’t completed or are done poorly? I’m sure it’s more than you’d like, and it’s a wide spread problem – the truth is, most managers are not very good at drawing up development plans.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that the skill gap is often not the fault of the manager. After all, development planning is rarely one of the skills managers are selected for and it’s something which is hard to fix by sending someone on a course or to a seminar. When it’s done right development planning is a highly strategic process which needs the right skills and support to bear fruit.

So with that in mind, it could be natural to conclude that your organisation is better served by focusing it’s resources elsewhere. However, research shows this is not the case.

For instance, consider a 25 year study done by Gallup which investigated the 12 best employee survey questions to identify a high performing organisation. Question six asks “Is there someone at work who encourages your development?”.

And recently, a Forbes article concluded “We also found, for example, that among all the 60+ practices you can implement to drive organizational performance, one of the most valuable of all is development planning.”

So given that development planning is crucial to the success of a high performing organisation, what advice can you give to your managers to help them get the best results? Here’s five of our favourites –

1. Only set one development target at a time. It’s easy to set multiple development goals to be achieved over the next six months, but everyone today is so busy that this just means that none of them receive attention. Our experience is that if you want to tackle three objectives, it’s much more effective to set them one at a time, taking two months to tackle each, rather than setting three goals to be hit over a six-month period.
   
   
2. Make development urgent. Q: When do Development Plans get actioned? A: In the two weeks before appraisal…. Development is usually a ‘I must get around to’ rather than a ‘must do now!’. If the only thing making a Development Plan urgent is their appraisal, it means employees are only getting a couple of weeks of development every 6-12 months. To overcome that, tie development into business activities which can’t be delayed. For example, if an employee needs to develop their presenting skills, get them to commit to a presentation to senior managers. They WILL get better at presentation before the deadline! By making development urgent, you make sure it happens.
   
   
3. Develop people outside the classroom. Busy line managers don’t always have time to coach as much as they would like, and classroom training rarely hits the specific situation and exact skills needed. Consider ‘apprenticing’ and ‘action research’ as alternatives. You can speed up on-the-job development by identifying role models within the business and then set up learning opportunities with those people. You may see more success by training your managers to understand and organise workplace learning than by training them to coach and mentor.
   
   
4. Drive consolidation of learning. Don’t let your employees learn, only to forget just as rapidly! New material only becomes part of how we think when we use it and integrate it into other things we already know. As part of the learning, managers must ask employees to transform their learning into a different form – for example, if they’ve attended a seminar ask them to create a mindmap of the key points or steps, or if they’ve observed a high performer chairing a meeting, they could create a checklist for how to run meetings effectively. If they’ve interviewed someone on how to approach a sales meeting, you could ask them to present their understanding at the next team meeting, and organise a discussion.
   
   
5. Provide opportunities for practice and feedback. Development doesn’t end with a successful intellectual understanding. It’s important that you provide opportunities for the employee to practice and refine their skills over time. How can the manager support them by setting up practice opportunities, and ensure they seek out feedback, report back on it, and change their approach?

Take Away
If you’re keen to become or remain a high performing organisation, development planning is a key skill for managers, but one they’ll likely need to develop. When discussing development plans, impress on managers that they should:

• Set only one development objective at a time. That’s more that enough to work on, besides the day job.
• Assign a business responsibility that means their team member HAS to develop in order to deliver the business result. That way, the business need will make learning urgent.

Interested in getting your line managers equipped to drive workplace learning? Talk to T&P about our new Think Development workshop – part of our Talent Manager training. If you want to find out more about our Talent Manager workshops, click here

Interested in the Personal Development Plan we are developing based on the above principles? Download it here.