I was recently participating in managers workshop at my current company Mash. One of the learnings was about employee development plans. Please find below the key points that in my opinion should be always considered when crating development plans.
Not everyone needs a development plan
Many employees may feel good at they current position. It is not always appropriate to push for more. People may want to specialize at their current role and may be doing a great job in this role. Managers should not be pushing for “next” levels. Especially if it requires to change focus to other things. Not everyone who is a great engineer would be a great team leader or great designer. Adding new responsibilities may affect ability to continue the great work that given person is currently doing.
There are moments in career that people may actually want to change something and this is a proper moment to have a development plan which would support employee in reaching next personal goals. But it most cases it is far more important for employee to be able to fully engage in the current role. Development plans should be not a replacement for that.
Where the development happens?
If everything is working well in our workplace, here is where learning happens:
- 70% of the learning comes from everyday tasks
- 20% from colleagues (peers or mentors/leaders)
- 10% from external sources like formal training, conferences or books – that are great ways to get some initial knowledge but what makes an expert is practice and solving real problems, not reading articles.
This division should be also considered when designing development plan. Employee may spend many days at conferences but if everyday work is not giving opportunities to develop and use that knowledge – then development activities are far from being effective.
Who needs a development plan?
When preparing development plans, first think about poor performers. They may need extra attention to help them reaching expectations. Employees may perform below expectations because they did not have enough internal training and knowledge sharing to be able to carry on assigned tasks. If all the necessary knowledge sharing was done and there is still no improvement, then employee improvement plan should be discussed instead of development plan.
Also remember about your “rocks stars”. They usually also need extra attention to make sure that they have enough challenges to grow even bigger.
The most important is to listen to your team members to know what they really need. Development plans should be an outcome of real needs and expectations. As all other things in teamwork – it should not be based on assumptions.