How to Build Powerful, Personal Development Plans for Managers
Updated
by
Amy Thomas
A personal development plan (PDP) is a manager’s roadmap to a higher-performing team, and significant skill (and career) improvement.
Effective PDPs include...
- Self-Assessment: Identifying strengths, growth areas, and career aspirations.
- Goal Setting: A small number (fewer than 3) of clear goals that align with both personal career aspirations and organizational needs, and that use a proven goal framework (e.g. SMART or OKR).
- Action Plan: A clear committed action plan that defines specific steps you will do, learning activities, and timelines (deadlines).
- Support System: Identify the people in your support network and the specific support you need from them. Think about roles they can play (e.g. sounding board, accountability buddy, personal motivator, ideas person, etc) and make sure to consider the amount of time they realistically can offer.
- Review and Adjust: Setting regular intervals for reviewing progress and making necessary adjustments to the plan.
Managers build valuable PDPs when they have a repeatable process for getting feedback, reflecting and discussing this feedback with their team and their managers, and practicing improving in narrow areas of focus for fixed (fairly short) periods of time.
This practice should ideally be built around consistent, focused, narrow development plans. These plans are ideally built frequently based on the input and needs of the teams they lead.
Steps for building powerful PDPs with Develop
- Introduce the Develop platform and TEAM model to your leaders.
- Explain that regularly getting team member input on how the team is performing on the 17 core dimensions of high-performing teams is a key to accurate self-assessment, action planning, and reviewing and adjusting.
- Create a team or teams in the platform for the managers you will be training.
- Launch TEAMscans with the managers.
- Encourage the managers to self-reflect on their results and then to hold a team discussion.
- The goal of these is to build an action plan for narrow focus. This action plan is shorter-term than the manager’s personal development plan. While the PDP may be set annually and then adjusted quarterly, the action plans are generally 2-8 weeks in length.
- Establish and commit to a process for reviewing this PDP and integrating the TEAMscan and Coachbot chats with Coach Bo into this process.
