*Note: This is not a direct transcript of the video. Content was edited for length and clarity. Watch the webinar for the original content or continue reading for the recap.
A meaningful development plan (or IDP) is so important when it comes to taking charge of your career and creating the career experience you truly want. We are incredibly passionate about it because we believe that it’s an underdeveloped skill for leaders and individuals to actually know what to do to grow themselves and their capability in order to project their career how they would like. When that happens, they win AND organizations win.
A Little About WinningWise
WinningWise is an organization and talent development company. We care about growth. We’re passionate about growing leaders inside organizations to be able to lead the way their organizations dream of. We also help build their leadership bench so they can focus on things like succession planning. But growing people is more than just the leaders – it’s the rest of the talent too. We focus on career development and talent practices to make that happen. We also do organizational consulting to help companies grow and transform around culture, strategy, and especially, change.
Career Dilemmas
There are a few career dilemmas we hear about often from our clients. Here are 4 examples:
1. Promotion
You want a promotion, but you were told you’re not quite ready. How do you get ready? You’re not clear on exactly what you need to do.
2. Not Enough Feedback
You receive very little feedback from your manager, if any. You don’t have a lot of clarity around where you stand or what you need to do to advance. You’re unsure what to do next.
3. Tough Feedback
You were told if you don’t improve in a certain area, you won’t be able to keep your current role or move into a future role.
4. One Role Left
You’re at the end of your career and you feel you have one big role or leap left. You want to better understand what you can achieve or how to make the most out of this opportunity.
The common theme between these situations is people who have a challenge, don’t have a lot of direction, and don’t feel they have much control over their future. We believe the answer to all of these dilemmas is to create a strong, meaningful development plan that empowers you to take charge and move forward.
Benefits of a Strong Development Plan
Everyone wins with meaningful development plans: the individual/leader and the organization.
Benefits for Individuals
Individuals with strong development plans feel like they’re ready to take on bigger opportunities. They can have a bigger impact and feel like they’re making a difference by contributing more. They’re happier, have increased satisfaction and feel in control. Knowing what you want and the actions to take empowers you and allows you to have a greater sense of control over your future.
Benefits for Organizations
From an organizational standpoint, development plans help maximize performance, i.e., stronger engagement, stronger leadership, and functions are stronger. Organizations feel as though they can add more value and grow talent capability for today and in the future. Leadership benches are strengthened, so people are ready for higher-level roles. There are succession plans in place that are meaningful and actually add value to the organization. The culture improves, so you can attract and retain the best talent. Ultimately, all of this prepares the organization for growth and further achievement.
What Makes an IDP Meaningful?
The question is: What makes a development plan meaningful? We often hear that everyone wants to grow, yet no one wants to change.
People will say they know 2 things:
1) Where they are now (e.g., new boss, new team, new structure, market change, bigger goals, higher expectations) and their current abilities (e.g., strengths, capabilities, development opportunities, etc.)
2) Where they want to go (e.g., promotion, better communication, more executive presence)
The challenge is there’s a gap between those two things. And people don’t know how to bridge the gap from where they are now to where they want to go in the future. We believe that personal change is the bridge.
What really is personal change?
Personal change is changing me to be more effective and shift to new thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that unlock sought-after results. It ultimately closes the gap between where we are now and where we’re going.
Here’s an example: A couple years ago, a client came to me because her manager said she needed to be more open and flexible in meetings. She was going to be managing a larger team, so she knew she had to figure this out. The problem was she didn’t understand what it meant to be more open and flexible. So, every time she would go to meetings, she thought she was being open and flexible. The problem was that no one else thought it, and she didn’t understand how to grow in order to achieve that goal. Through coaching and some of our work together, she ultimately learned that she needed to balance her needs with the needs of others in the room. And openness and flexibility for her meant greater negotiation skills internally. It wasn’t until she was able to identify how she needed to change that she could achieve that goal.
Ultimately, when we focus on personal change, we’re empowering individuals through their development plans to bridge that gap between where we are today and the future we want to achieve.
How Development Planning Works
In order to bridge the gap, development plans need to focus on personal change. They do that by answering 3 questions:
1. Where am I now? (Self-reflection and understanding your present state.)
2. Where am I going? (Making a decision about the best path forward.)
3. How do I get there? (Creating a plan to put that in place.)
Driving Career Success – Shared SuccessTM
Growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Driving career success requires a partnership between individuals and organizations. We strongly believe it’s a partnership, not a solo act. We use this idea of Shared Success. This means aligning the individual’s needs and offer with the organization’s needs and offer. When you have that alignment, you have greater success because there’s a partnership.
When we focus on increasing our individual offer, we’re able to have more growth and opportunity. This is what I can offer to the organization, and I can increase my results by better meeting the organization’s needs. If I know what the organization needs from me, I can better meet those needs. Then, I can have more happiness by understanding what I need at work to achieve and feel happy and successful. And, ultimately, I can have greater satisfaction in my role by understanding what the organization has to offer me in terms of development opportunities, promotion pathways, rewards and benefits. When all of that aligns, we have Shared Success.
Understanding My Own Needs – Individual Needs
A strong development plan starts with understanding your own needs. When we start with what we need, we can ultimately achieve happiness in our work.
There are 8 researched and validated individual needs, and they fit into 4 categories:
1. Work – Mastery and Meaningful Work
2. Relationships – Connection and Autonomy
3. Future Value – Personal Growth and Career Achievement
4. Current Value – Lifestyle and Rewards & Recognition
WORK
Mastery: Am I good at what I do? Do people seek me out as an expert in my field? Do I feel like I’m creating value?
Meaningful Work: Do I find meaning in the work that I do? “Meaningful” can mean something different to different people, but it’s about finding balance between mastery and doing work that is meaningful.
RELATIONSHIPS
Connection: Togetherness. Do I have the relationships that I need, whether that’s peers or bosses? Do I feel like I belong?
Autonomy: Independence. Do I feel like I have the right balance of independence to make decisions and create my own direction? Again, the balance is different for everyone between having the right connections and the right amount of independence to feel successful in your work.
FUTURE VALUE
Personal Growth: Do I feel like I’m growing in my career? Am I progressing? Am I learning?
Career Achievement: Do I feel like there are open pathways? Do I feel in control? Am I finding the right balance and feeling optimistic about my future?
CURRENT VALUE
Lifestyle: Do I have the right lifestyle that works for me at this point in my life?
Rewards & Recognition: Am I being recognized? Am I being rewarded in a way that makes sense for me?
Once you’re able to understand what your needs are, you can figure out what it will take to meet your needs.
Embracing Personal Change – Winning Action StrategiesTM
How do you make a development plan meaningful? By being sure that it connects to your individual needs andwhat the organization is looking for. Let’s look at some really good options for personal change that can actually make those two things happen.
The 9 Winning Action Strategies
These nine strategies help people drive their careers and their lives forward. It’s so important to think about what can make a difference in terms of the goals, ambitions and desires that you have and that the company has.
Often, when people (especially managers) are focused on development planning, they try to fix what’s bothering them. And that can be very different than what would actually create readiness inside a company or address the challenges people have and things they can grow in order to make a difference in achieving their ambitions.
These 9 strategies break down into 3 categories:
1. Achievement – Be Essential, Push Yourself, Exercise Confidence
2. Connection – Build a Fan Base, Practice Regular Self-Reflection, Give Back
3. Social Influence – Negotiate for Success, Always Always Have a Plan, Understand the Game
ACHIEVEMENT
To do or achieve more; make a bigger, personal impact.
Be Essential: Producing results that demonstrate value. Showing up 100% engaged. Beware: A lot of people think that having a long to-do list means you’re essential. But just because you’re busy, doesn’t mean you’re essential. There are people who are surprised every day because most people think they’re more essential than they are.
Push Yourself: Getting outside of your comfort zone. Raising the bar in yourself. Making sure you’re moving forward. Being resilient and bouncing back. Working past obstacles even when it seems difficult. Putting resilience together with tenacity.
Exercise Confidence: Projecting an executive presence. It can be two (potentially confusing) things: 1) Do I feel confident enough to bring my voice and be bold and courageous in decision making? 2) Do other people view me as confident enough to take on higher-level roles? So, there’s an internal and external view of confidence. In development, it drives people crazy because they feel confident, but then they receive feedback that executives don’t feel confident in them for that higher role. So that’s important to understand and work on.
CONNECTION
When you’re trying to move up, relationships matter. We own our careers, but we don’t make all the decisions about our careers. They’re driven by the people and systems around us, and the talent practices and people who make those decisions.
Build a Fan Base: Because relationships matter so much, we recommend building a fan base. It’s important to have a nucleus of supporters, people who are in your camp. Be authentic and trustworthy and invest in those relationships.
Practice Regular Self-Reflection: Increasing self-awareness. According to Tasha Eurich, most people think they’re self-aware, but when they ask other people if they’re self-aware, others say that isn’t the case. So, most of us are probably much less self-aware than we think. It’s important to understand how you’re experienced by others and how others experience themselves when they’re with you.
Give Back: Having an enterprise-wide view. Serving others, exceeding expectations, being willing to share knowledge and information. Coaching and developing others. Leaving the place better than how you found it. Having a wider perspective can help you grow and go further in organizations.
SOCIAL INFLUENCE
To have a strong influence and make a bigger impact.
Negotiate for Success: Everything in life is negotiated, from project deadlines to roles to conflicts about resources, etc. Choosing your battles carefully, seeking a balanced perspective and being really good at navigating conflict are what negotiation is all about.
Always, Always Have a Plan: Having direction matters, especially if you’re interested in a leadership role. Being really good at setting up the ambition and vision. Creating a clear path, bringing discipline and accountability.
Understand the Game: Operating effectively in complex systems (i.e., organizations). There are many stakeholders involved in decision making. Navigating that well matters. Knowing what matters at your company, being informed of strategy and priorities, and knowing how to apply that to your decision making. Knowing who the players are and what makes them tick. Figuring things out and knowing where you can make an impact.
Those are the 9 Winning Action Strategies, and they’re all based on how you change or grow yourself in order to be able to achieve what’s important.
The Motivation for Personal Change
Now, let’s show how it all fits together with individual needs.
The dark gray outside bar (the backwards L) are the Individual Needs we just covered: Mastery, Connection, Meaningful Work, Autonomy, Career Achievement, Personal Growth, Rewards & Recognition, and Lifestyle. These are what motivate us – what gets us out of bed in the morning. We’re driven to meet our needs. So, if we want to make personal change meaningful, we have to connect our needs to our development/growth. If you can play tic-tac-toe, you can play.
How this Works
Let’s say you want more Rewards & Recognition in the work that you do. Then, we suggest you take a good look at that path (i.e., Be Essential, Build a Fan Base or Negotiate for Success). People who get more Rewards & Recognition in an organization are essential. They add value and people rely on them and trust them. People who get more Rewards & Recognition have a fan base. People want to work with you and help you. And people who get more Rewards & Recognition tend to negotiate well. They’re better at navigating the landscape of what the organization needs and what they need and how to put that together.
We don’t recommend that you try to develop in all three. Pick one and dive into it. Most people can see this framework and know really fast which one they should pick relative to what they want. This is a great way to discover how you can grow: think about what you want, what you really care about, and then what will drive that to happen. It’s a very meaningful way to approach development.
Identifying Your Development Focus
There are actually a few ways to figure out your development focus.
1) Individual Needs
We just covered this in pretty good detail.
2) Feedback
We don’t work alone in these organizations. We don’t make all the decisions about our careers. If people have feedback for you, I’d recommend you listen and try to figure out what it means. See how it aligns with your development and then adjust and adapt accordingly. When you do that and you communicate, others can see you making progress in the feedback. If you don’t talk about it, it’s really hard for them to be able to see that you’ve made progress. That can sometimes be a deal breaker.
3) Behaviors
Another thing you can do is assess your own behaviors. When you look at those nine strategies, what do you think you could be better at? Do any jump out at you that’d be good to pay attention to? Then, you can see if it lines up with your needs.
4) Organization Needs
You can look at two things that companies expect from you: 1) Achievement goals, i.e. performance management. You talk with your leader and figure out what you’re going to be doing next year. Those are achievement goals. Things you do to add value and to justify your work and your role. 2) Expectations or competencies. Most organizations have some kind of competency framework. They might call it competencies or leadership behaviors or values. The mistake that a lot of organizations make is using competencies to try to grow people. They might say, “You need to be a lot more strategic.” We call these the three dreaded words of development: Be more strategic. It drives people crazy because they don’t know what that means or what to do. You can’t just wake up and be strategic. But what could you do that would help them to see you as more strategic? You could exercise greater confidence and show up with a bigger voice or have courage and push yourself to take on bigger problems. Or maybe you need to understand the game a little bit better and really see how the marketplace and the company all work together.
Development Planning: My Winning Action Plan for GrowthTM
We use a form that follows the 3 questions we mentioned earlier: Where am I now? Where am I going? How do I get there? If your company has a specific tool, it’s really easy to make the connections and plug in the answers from here.
Where am I now?
First, you need to have a really good idea of what’s important to you, what’s important to the company and have some feedback or knowledge around your strengths and weaknesses compared to those expectations.
Where am I going?
Then, you move on to making a decision. You look at 3 things:
- Your ambition. Look to the future and think about what in the world you want to do. How different is it than what you’re doing today? Ambition plays a role because you have to get ready for what you want to do.
- Your personal change. This is whichever Winning Action Strategy you choose, such as Be Essential, Always Have a Plan or Understand the Game. Choose 1.
- Defining the win. Ask yourself things like: If I were to “Always Have a Plan,” what would look different? What would success look like? Having a definition of success is what makes the actions you take make sense.
How do I get there?
Now, you think about your plan. What are some actions you can take to get to that vision for success? Think about practical, concrete actions. Then, think about how you know you’re making progress. And if you need any help or resources to make it happen.
Tips for Self-Reflection (Where am I now?)
Look at it from two angles: 1) Your point of view, and 2) Other’s point of view.
From your point of view: What do you believe to be true? What are your needs and strengths from your perspective?
From the other’s point of view: Feedback is helpful to listen to. Understand the expectations and competencies desired for you.
Tips for Making a Decision (Where am I going?)
When you’re defining the win, think about: What are the new behaviors, experiences, feelings, competencies, outcomes that you expect? All of that makes up your vision. What will you be doing, thinking or feeling differently than today? What better outcomes could you achieve and what would be your impact on others?
Tips for Action Planning (How do I get there?)
When you’re in the action planning stage, think about what you do, think or feel. Personal development isn’t a checklist. It’s not about doing more. It’s about doing what you do differently, showing up in a different way. Your steps need to reflect that. Make sure your vision aligns with your actions.
Less is more. Don’t overwhelm yourself with too many things. Your development plan can be short. Sometimes shorter is better because you can remember and work on it more easily.
Be specific on the things that you can do. Leverage your strengths, but just enough. Don’t overextend them. That can end up hurting you.
Revise your plan a lot. Development planning is not something you do once a year. Development can take a year, it can take a month, it could take 2 years! Be flexible, look at and revise your plan often.
Think about your roadblocks. Is there anything that might get in the way and how can you accommodate for that?
Sample Development Plan
Here’s a sample plan for someone working on Exercising Confidence:
To see more sample development plans, download our free complementary resources here: Resources. The resources will also include some of the content from the webinar.
A Little About GrowWiseTM
We obviously think development planning is so important. It’s really hard to move ahead without knowing how you can grow yourself. We use this content with groups and in sessions, but we’ve also developed an online tool that is a career and leadership development experience. It’s called GrowWise, and it’s a personal growth lab that enables everyone to build meaningful development plans.
It’s modular and self-paced, all based on self-discovery. It’s filled with assessments, exercises, games, activities, readings and character videos that go through some of those same career dilemmas. It really gives people a chance to figure out what their needs are, their strengths, values, etc. There’s lots of journaling and a huge resource library that enables people to have even more content and information to help them grow themselves and the careers of others.
Reach out if you are interested in a demo or have any other questions for us. We’d love to hear from you!