The Personal Development Plan

Introduction

The Personal Development Plan is one of the main people-management tools I use in my team. It is a document I make with each team member. The ultimate purposes of the plan are:

• Show the team member that their manager and the company care about their development, and more, want it.
• Be a framework to invest in the team member as a reward for their contribution.
• Increase the effectiveness of the workforce by improving the capabilities of each employee.

The following specific purposes contribute to the main aims above:

• Prompt each team member to think about their personal growth and progress beyond simply completing tasks.
• Give the team member structure in developing their skills.
• Help the manager to understand the team member's personal objectives and interests, and therefore allocate work and find opportunities in the best way across the team.
• Track personal development progress, and check this is balanced correctly with other priorities, both for the manager and the team member.
• If progress is not as much as hoped, help to both understand why and remove any blockers.

The first item, thinking about personal growth, is naturally the main focus for some people, others may have never considered it since starting work.

The plans don't have a fixed structure. A plan is primarily designed to support the employee, therefore it makes sense to adapt it to their individual needs and preferences. However, there are some things that have a major benefit, and I recommend to use them almost always. Personal development is often a low priority compared to urgent job tasks. I have found that many team members have trouble progressing with their plan, especially when it is new to them. A theme for many aspects of the plan is to counteract this, first by encouraging the team member to pay attention to it, and second by making it as easy to follow as possible by making it clear and precise, so it doesn't require thinking to progress activities in the plan.

• Structure the plan as a list, of separate areas / goals to develop.

• Each list item should have a scope for completion. Open ended goals have a less concrete outcome and benefit, and expectation for progress, so they are less motivating.

• Each list item should have a target completion date. This makes it clear how progress on the plan compares to the expectation.

There are further recommendations in a following section.

Personal and Professional Development Plans

The Personal Development Plan should be focused on activities that interest the team member and invest in their long term career and personal growth. A related objective is mid-term career progression. Many activities relating to one of these objectives are also relevant to the other, but sometimes they are not. To ensure the clarity of focus of the Personal Development Plan, I sometime create another document, the Professional Development Plan. This formalises various things relevant to mid-term career progression, such as (from the employee view):

1. What my next role (eg. after promotion) will look like.
2. What the criteria for my promotion will be.
3. Achieving the criteria.
4. Creating a promotion case.

This makes the separate focus of the Personal Development Plan very clear. Because there is a large overlap and interaction between the goals, the distinction between the plans can be confusing for team members at first. I find this can lead to a discussion that can be very useful for clarifying the different interests the organisation has in a team member's development, and also helpful to them in thinking about their short and long term career.

This diagram shows some of the overlaps and differences between the personal and professional development plans.

Having two plans can be good to make a clear distinction about the purpose of activities, such as when working towards a specific short term career goal. In other cases, there is a large overlap between the plans and they can feel repetitive. An alternative approach is to tag each item in a single plan as personal, professional, or both. In some cases there may not need to be a distinction at all. I think separating professional development is more useful in organisations with more formal career processes, or when the employee is more focused on career progression.

Difference from business objectives

A critical mistake to guard against is that a Development Plan must not be just business objectives for the employee. Letting the plan become focused on positive outcomes for the organisation is a major risk for undermining its fundamental purpose. If employees perceive the plan as merely repackaging additional business objectives in a more appealing way, it can come across just as a management tactic to increase employee effort. This can feel manipulative, leading to dissatisfaction and ultimately making the effort put into the plan worse than doing nothing.

Of course, the team member's success and the organisation's should be built on each other. The key distinction is that regular business objectives benefit the employee indirectly, as an outcome of their value to the organisation. Conversely, Personal development objectives should focus only on the team member's growth directly. Benefit to the organisation derives from that growth. Outcomes not focused on development should be managed in other ways.

Two principles that can help to ensure this are:

• All objectives in Development Plans should progress the employee. For the Personal Development Plan, all activities should focus on developing new skills. It should not contain any considerations relating to maintaining or exploiting current skills or levels of performance (this should be managed elsewhere). For the Professional Development Plan, all activities should focus on career progression, within a defined, closed-ended plan to the next progression step.

• The objectives in Development Plans should be defined with the employee. Except for a Manager Objectives section of the Personal Development Plan, the objectives should come primarily from the employee. If the organisation has a formal and required career advancement process, this would be an exception, and a Professional Development Plan could be led more by the manager.

A particular consideration relates to Professional Development objectives. Be careful not to confuse them with similar terms or concepts. For example if your organisation has 'professional objectives' that are ultimately for the organisation's performance, you must make sure this distinction is very clear to the team member and any other relevant people in the organisation.

Example Personal Development Plan

This is an example Personal Development Plan. It simple, appropriate for a role or organisation where development is important but not a central focus of the employee.

The plan could be modified to include recommendtions that are described later. A column for tracking progress could be added. As the employee completes objectives, they could be recorded in a following page.

Good practices for Personal Development Plans

Separate lists for employee objectives and manager objectives

The aim of the Personal Development Plan is to help the employee improve. It is good to target areas that the employee sees as important. However, it is also appropriate to include areas where the company (represented by the manager) would like to focus improvement.

For this reason, I like to include sections for Employee Objectives and Manager Objectives in the plan. This ensures that the employee's preferences are protected. It also means the manager can set objectives they feel will be beneficial to the employee, while recognising that this is the manager's direction and not something requested by the employee.

Note that manager and employee objectives are not written by each person separately. They are written together, with the original ideas / objectives themselves coming from the respective person. As a manager it is still appropriate to gently hold the team member to writing a clear objective and significant completion criteria on their items.

Progress summaries for each objective

Tracking the progress of objectives has the same benefits as with regular project management. Less time is needed to determine the current situation. Planning, switching between activities, and returning to development work are faster and easier.

A section for completed objectives

This is a nice thing to reinforce the employee's progress and the value structured work on personal development. If past objectives genuinely came from the team member, being reminded of their success should give some extra motivation for completing current ones.

Scope of Development Plans

Development Plans are intended to ultimately benefit the company and the employee. Especially where there is a separate Professional Development Plan, it may be unclear how closely related the Personal plan must be to work activities. This can depend on the organisation, employee, and situation. A few examples are given here.

It may be that a skill is unlikely ever to relate to the team member's work with their current employer. For example, if a project manager in a machine tools company would like to learn horse riding. An orgnisation may not consider this suitable for a Development Plan. If the company provides development purely as an employee benefit / reward, it could fund activities like this. I am aware of organisations that provide a fixed budget for development that may include activities like this. This runs a risk of losing sight that the most valuable aspect of the plan is the active engagement of the manager and organistion. If this kind of support is provided, I recommend keeping it out of the main plan to avoid devoting staff time to it or intruding into the employee's personal life.

Some general skills can be useful in a wide range of jobs, although may not be directly relevant. For example, foreign languages, mathematical and analysis skills, and computer skills can have some value in a wide range of jobs - teaching, sales, engineering, etc. Some organisations may consider it appropriate to accommodate these in Personal Development Plans (and therefore contribute manager and employee time to them) when an employee has a particular interest, particularly if the organisation has a focus on skill diversity, or employee development as an employee benefit or long term investment.

Some organisations may want to focus Development Plans of skills directly relevant to the current role. For example, a plan could focus on objectives similar to this:

Increase my knowledge of commodities products and make a first sale in this area.

In this case it would likely be appropriate to have a single Personal Development Plan without a separate Professional plan. The company should ensure the good practices in this article are followed to ensure the plan does focus on employee development.

Other uses for the Personal Development Plan

If an employee is comfortable sharing their plan with people beyond their manager, it can be a valuable communication tool. In matrix management situations the development plans of the team members can be very helpful for the team lead to understand the motivations of team members, and adjust their task allocation accordingly.