*Note: This is not a direct transcript. Content was edited for length and clarity. Watch the video for the full webinar or continue reading for the recap. Download the accompanying session materials for more helpful tools and information.
Welcome to Unraveling the IDP Dilemma! Here’s our secret: We don’t actually hate development planning. We love it! It’s one of the things we’re most passionate about, but we know that a lot of people do hate it. So, let’s talk about how to make it a great experience for individuals and leaders and help drive organizations forward in the success and growth they want to achieve.
A Little About WinningWise
Our work focuses on organizational and talent development. We’re very passionate about 3 main areas: 1) Growing leaders so that they’re capable of leading in the way they want to and how you want them to in their roles. 2) Growing people, which is broader than leaders. It’s helping everyone come together and work effectively. It involves really promoting career development. 3) Growing the organization, which is about change and transformation. It’s helping organizations create new strategies, align teams and align people. Change leadership and change management are both a big focus.
Today, we’re going to zero in on individual development planning, which we put in the career development bucket.
And check out our practical tools and resources that complement this webinar here: Resources.
So, why does everyone HATE development planning?
There are 4 challenges we hear most often from our clients:
1. Hard to write and take a lot of time. The IDP is the last thing that gets done on a Friday at 5pm, and it’s the one thing standing between people and their weekend. Resentment builds up because they don’t know how to do it, and it’s getting in the way of things they’d like to do more.
2. Limited support. Employees don’t have the resources for writing effective development plans or support their ongoing growth.
3. Seen as punitive. Often there’s already a mindset that if you have an IDP, then your organization is trying to exit you.
4. Once-a-year compliance task. It’s something you do at the top of the year, get it done, and then no one talks about it again until the beginning of the next year when the cycle starts over. You open your IDP at the end of the year and realize you haven’t done anything.
The list of reasons could go on! But ultimately, we think that everyone hates development planning because they aren’t getting results. A lot of issues, like the ones listed above, can be overcome if people can draw a connection between writing the development plan and seeing how they’re growing and getting results. Investment goes way up when people see results after putting in effort. So, the question ultimately becomes: How do we make those connections clearer for people and be able to build investment both on the employee side and organization side over time?
The Conundrum
As we said before, we are big fans of development plans. Often, we’re brought into organizations because there’s this gap between the employee perspective and the organizational perspective. The irony is that everyone says they hate development planning, yet everyone within an organization still wants to grow. Research shows that lack of development is the No. 1 reason employees cite for leaving organizations. It’s also the No. 2 driver of engagement overall. When development is present, people feel more positive, and when it’s absent, they’re more likely to leave.
Employees have this strong desire to grow, and organizations need people to grow in order to achieve their business objectives. Research indicates that only 42% of critical roles can be filled quickly by internal candidates. And only 23% of HR leaders rate the development plans in their organization as effective. So, there’s an alignment on wanting to grow; the challenge is that it’s not being done well or in a way where the employee and organization can grow together.
The Growth Paradox
The good news is that this problem is fixable. Let’s talk about “the growth paradox.” This is sometimes how IDPs work in organizations.
Organizations have this need to fill future roles and meet future needs. But they say they have no talent bench, they don’t do succession planning and people aren’t ready.
Employees want to grow. They want to do more, learn more and take on more responsibility. There’s an alignment here where people want to grow, and the organization has a need.
The problem is that people are not ready for bigger roles and they don’t know how to get ready. It’s sort of a black box of actions to get ready.
The solution that many organizations come up with is to create development plans and fix the problems they see in people. This is typically ineffective because being told you need to fix something that’s wrong with you is not very personally motivating for employees.
So, what happens is that the development plan is a document that gets done, but there’s no action or change. And the employee becomes increasingly disengaged because they were promised something and told they’re not ready, so they’re disappointed. Ultimately, they’re still not growing and still not ready for the next role. So, everyone is right back at the beginning where they started: There is talent needed, everyone wants to grow, but they’re still not ready.
Solving the Paradox
There are 2 ways to fix this problem: 1) improve the plan, and 2) maximize the process.
Improve the Plan
This means make development plans meaningful, a.k.a., a plan that both the organization and the employee care about. The plan needs to focus on personal change (how someone needs to grow) vs. trying to achieve competencies. Action items should be limited to make sure people are not overcommitting to things they’ll never do.
Maximize the Process
This means thinking about how to create an environment and opportunities for ongoing growth and adjustment. How are you holding managers, employees and the organization accountable for making sure that the IDP is an ongoing, living, breathing document (not just once a year)? And how do you make sure there are conversations happening that support ongoing growth over time?
The cool thing is that doing those 2 things really well will benefit employees, leaders and organizations. Employees are empowered to take charge of their performance and their career. They have a focus for how they need to change and grow with practical action steps to reach those goals. They’re able to connect the dots between where they are now and where they want to be. When employees engage in meaningful development, they feel more motivated and know where they’re headed. This allows them to proactively remove roadblocks and not be stymied by things that get hard.
Leaders can strengthen talent capability. Managers who can grow people earn a positive reputation and people want to work for them. They can also advance organizational goals and contribute to building stronger benches and engagement.
With a culture shift toward focusing on development, organizations can see immediate results with improved performance and engagement, and have a brighter future. This is also a great way to increase equity, diversity and strength in the talent pool.
Improve the Plan
The first thing you can do to improve the plan is to make it meaningful, personal and simple.
Shared SuccessTM
Let’s think about it from a Shared Success perspective.
When you think about how you want to grow as an individual, you need to think about your offer: skills, capabilities, talent, attitudes, etc. These things will help you do two things in your work. The first is meet your needs in order to be happy. You could accomplish this by finding meaning in your current role or just make sure you’re learning and growing in your work. The second is to meet the needs of the organization. If you’re looking for greater opportunity and a brighter future, meeting the organization’s needs motivates and inspires them to support you in your growth with bigger opportunities and more responsibility.
An important note about career development and development planning: Don’t go it alone. It’s a partnership between the employee and the organization, not a solo act. This leads to more growth and opportunity, increased results, greater personal happiness and overall greater satisfaction! While employees are fully responsible for their own growth and development, organizations (and leaders!) play a vital role in facilitating and supporting that.
Organizational Expectations
Most organizations take the time to set expectations, and that makes sense. Generally, this happens in the yearly performance management process. The purpose is to make sure everyone knows what to do, how they’re doing and how they can grow.
The first thing is to set achievement goals. Achievement goals are really clarifying: What do you expect from me? Ideally these goals are cascading from the top and everyone plays a role to help the organization achieve its goals. The second thing is behavior expectations. At your organization, this could be identified as competencies, values, leadership behaviors, etc. These signify how you need to behave or show up. The third part is development, a.k.a., how you can do better or improve.
Many organizations merge together behaviors and development and don’t think clearly or consciously about what the development or improvement might be or how to go about it. And some organizations skip it altogether. The compliance part of performance management means that achievement goals and behaviors get done, but development gets left out. And people struggle.
Achieving Personal Change
People say some version of this to us all the time: “I really want to grow and have a bright future, but I don’t really want to change. Why do I need to change?” Everybody wants to grow, but nobody wants to change. Why? Because change is hard! Especially when you don’t know what, how or where to focus. Real, true development is all about personal change. That’s what matters most.
What is Personal Change?
Personal change is thinking about how you can change how you show up, how you think, how you operate, so that you can be more effective. There are real behaviors that can unlock the results you want to achieve. The change you make will enable you to better demonstrate the behaviors expected of you and achieve the goals expected of you too. It closes the gap between where you are today and where you want to go. That’s what empowers you and gives you the fuel you need to achieve the goals important to you and support the organization and its priorities.
Aligning Expectations
In organizations, it’s important to align expectations, which is why things like achievement goals and behaviors exist. Examples are communication, collaboration or being more strategic. They’re important to clarify and align on. They really represent the WHAT, i.e., what do you want from me so I can deliver in the way you expect?
But they’re not the way people grow and develop. People grow and develop based on personal change, i.e., how can I change myself so I can do the things you expect?
We look at personal change through the Winning Action StrategiesTM. These are 9 really good things people can do to drive themselves and their careers forward. They’re simple and easy to understand, and they apply to different competencies, capabilities and goals in different ways.
The top row is Be Essential, Push Yourself and Exercise Confidence. Those are really good ways people can grow when they want to make a stronger, bigger, better personal impact. Be Essential means adding value, making a difference, or producing something really significant. Push Yourself is getting off plateaus, getting outside your comfort zone, or taking on bigger things, initiatives or responsibilities. Exercise Confidence is bringing a strong presence, a strong voice or bold thinking to work you’re doing. All three play a huge role in being able to make an impact.
The middle row is Build a Fan Base, Practice Regular Self-Reflection and Give Back. These are all about relationships — some people really need their change to be about how they’re engaging with others. Build a Fan Base is making sure you’re developing a followership. Whether you’re in a traditional leader role or an individual contributor role, no one does much alone inside organizations. Everything is in partnership with those around you, so how can you make sure you’re drawing people together so you’re able to accomplish more. When you Build a Fan Base for your career, you end up with champions, advocates and supporters that help you go after the opportunities you want. Not everyone has a fan base in their work. It’s a really important one to think about when it comes to career longevity and success. Practice Regular Self-Reflection is all about self-reflection or self-awareness. It’s important for you to know how other people experience you AND how other people experience themselves when they’re around you. The more people feel big in your presence, the more empowered and capable they are. If they feel small in your presence, then they’ll pull back and hold back. They’re definitely going to feel like they’re not growing in your presence. Give Back is all about giving to the larger enterprise or to others. It could be about sharing knowledge, coaching or making sure everybody is aligned and working together in way that meets the needs of others so that you have a stronger team.
The bottom row is Negotiate for Success, Always Always Have a Plan and Understand the Game. These are about having more personal influence. Negotiate for Success is about resolving conflicts and challenges so that there’s a win on both sides. Every single thing that we do is negotiated. It’s not just for sales people trying to negotiate a deal, it’s for everyone trying to figure out responsibilities, deadlines, etc. Always Have a Plan is for when you need more structure or discipline around execution, or you need to be able to see the big picture of where you’re going and craft plans to make that happen. Understand the Game is for those who want to do better at working inside complex organizations. Organizations are filled with systems and networks, and it’s tough to figure out how decisions are made, who aligns with whom, how you socialize ideas to make things work, and how to find the answers to your goals and objectives.
The Winning Action Strategies are 9 different ways for a person to really change so that they are able to deliver more inside those competencies, values or behaviors and actually achieve the goals they want to achieve. They’re really powerful ways to think about development, and they’re much more meaningful because they very easily connect back to individual needs and organizational needs. They make development planning personal and meaningful.
Personal Change Scenarios
In our work, we often hear about people needing to improve communication, which is a competency. Let’s look at two examples.
Maria, VP of Human Resources
Maria’s manager wants her to work on her communication skills. After asking a few questions, you find out that Maria needs to communicate more clearly and think bigger. The experience others have is that she talks in circles and is a bit confusing in her communication. People leave meetings with her not quite sure what they committed to or what the next steps are. Her peers/team are saying they need more guidance and clarity in terms of where the department is headed. Then, you talk to Maria, and you learn that it isn’t an inability to communicate clearly, but really her lack of confidence holds her back. She gets nervous when she’s communicating with others, she feels judged, she’s in her head, she feels she has to repeat herself. So, ultimately, at the root of her being able to meet this goal of communicating clearly, she needs to exercise more confidence. This will allow her to speak with concision and to say these are the priorities moving forward. Until she understands that, she won’t be able to meet that expectation of having improved communication.
Maria’s Winning Action Strategy: Exercise Confidence
Harry, VP of Product Development
Harry’s manager also wants him to work on communication. He isn’t good at visioning or focusing on the big picture. He gets very in the weeds, so his team doesn’t know the priorities. But when you talk to Harry, you learn that it’s not necessarily this communication issue, it’s that he’s not stepping back, planning, and thinking about the big picture or creating structure in the way he’s communicating. He really needs to have a plan that will enable him to communicate his vision and strategy. Until that’s in place, his communication is not going to improve.
Harry’s Winning Action Strategy: Always, Always Have a Plan
Connecting the Winning Action Strategies to Goals and Competencies
We see opportunities for the Winning Action Strategies to serve an organization’s goals and competencies every day. This chart shows how each Winning Action Strategy connects to some of the most common ones we see.
For example, Negotiating for Success is about how you balance meeting your own needs with the needs of others. So, that shows up in goals and competencies around making better decisions. When someone isn’t great at making decisions, they’re either always meeting someone else’s needs or always thinking about their own needs. If they learn how to negotiate and balance the two, they’ll be better able to make decisions. Another example is Exercise Confidence. Feeling more confident can show up in many different ways, e.g., better communication, being more strategic, having more leadership presence.
It’s important to note that the connection isn’t necessarily one to one. Two people can work on the same competency using different Winning Action Strategies depending on differing context and needs. Winning Action Strategies help you meet your needs, which can impact goals and competencies in different ways.
Defining the Win
Development planning requires a powerful vision. Creating a vision for what success will look like is often the hardest, most overlooked and most important part of the development plan. It’s not easy, but so worth it! When talking with your employees about their development plan, the first question to ask is: What will success look like for you? How will it feel for you? How will you know you’ve reached your goal?
When you think about vision in a development plan, you need to present a compelling picture of future success. For us, it’s your Winning Action Strategy applied in the context of what you hope to achieve. For example, if you’re being essential, how will that feel for you? What will you be doing differently? And how does that lead you to the success you hope to achieve?
When you do this, it inspires commitment, drives action, provides focus, and is clear and simple to understand. This is so important because change is hard. Change requires you to try something out. You might fail, but you learn from failure, and then you get back up and try it again. That process can be incredibly demotivating for people if you don’t have a compelling vision to ground yourself. The interesting thing the research says is if you can create clarity and motivation for yourself, that vision sustains you when things get hard or when you fail because you know exactly where you’re going and what actions you should take to move forward.
An example using Exercise Confidence: “I feel in control and the team respects my work. Others feel my confidence too. I show up with presence and conviction in all my interactions vs. only for big meetings. People believe in me and my leadership; they have trust in my decisions and point of view.”
This vision states what it’s going to look like if you’re exercising confidence. You’re going to feel in control and the team is going to respect your work. Other people will feel your confidence too. And so on. When you have that clarity in your vision, you’re able to understand what you’re going to do. It focuses actions and allows you to feel more in control. And when you struggle, it allows you to understand what you need to try again. Again, these simple questions (What will success look like? What will it feel like? What will you be doing differently? How will you know you achieved it?) go a long way in getting to that stronger vision.
Defining the win is the most game changing part of development planning. Because if leaders can get really good at helping people define the win, the “what do I do about it” becomes really easy to figure out. If we can do one thing as practitioners, it’s helping leaders and people come together around defining the win. The second thing we can do to change the game around development planning is to help to maximize the process.
Maximize the Process
As a practitioner thinking about how to bring development to their organization, it’s important to consider how to make development central to the success of individuals and the organization. There’s work to do from an organizational level.
Why Career Development Matters
The cool thing about career development is that individuals and organizations can follow the same steps to bring career development to life: Discover, Explore, Plan, Grow and Move. The context and scope for each step just changes slightly. We’ve been focusing on the individual side so far, so now let’s focus on the organization side.
For organizations, what’s important in the top two steps (Discover and Explore) in order to create a great career development culture is to make sure the current and future talent needs of the business are covered. Make sure you have the right people in the right roles and plan ahead to make sure the right people are in the right roles in the future. To do that, you have to think about ways people can grow, what opportunities you can create, what paths exist and how to craft roles that become growth experiences. Focus on building strategy (Plan) around the right processes and connecting all talent practices together. The more you bring the right talent practices, strategy and great career development experiences together (Grow), the more readiness you create for employees and managers. And then the greater transparency and accessibility there is too (Move). This is how you grow internal promotion rates, but it won’t happen without development at the center.
Linked Programs Benefit the Long-Term Strategy
Let’s look at examples of talent practices that need to have a strong development component.
Performance Management is where you set expectations and goals and then give people feedback on their performance. Some organizations have a strong growth and development aspect to that and some just use it as a review. The best way to judge is in the conversations that leaders have with their people. Do they spend more time looking back or looking ahead in these conversations? The more they focus on improvement going forward, the more motivating, growth-oriented and development-focused your performance management process will be.
Succession Planning and talent review work together a bit. It’s often talent review that provides the need for succession planning, but they are two different documents. In succession planning, a lot of organizations focus on replacement or who’s going into what role. But do they really know the exact ways people need to grow, the expectations they need to meet, and the changes they need to make to actually be ready? Most of the time, succession plans don’t contain development information and most people aren’t having conversations about it.
Talent Review is very focused on who goes into what box. Then, the high achievers want to know what box you put them in. For most high achievers, unless they’re in higher boxes, their world caves in because the focus is on how they’re being evaluated vs. how they’re growing and where they’re going. In a nutshell, not focusing talent review meetings around development creates chaos and demotivation. The Winning Action Strategies work so well in talent reviews because within minutes you can identify which one each person should focus on and what personal change people need to make to achieve the goals they want to achieve and create success for the organization.
Talent Acquisition is a great place to start talking about development. Before people even start, they should have a good idea of what their development and growth could look like. This is super empowering and motivating.
High Potential Programs will oftentimes have a development planning component, but not always. If you do, that’s a huge checkmark.
Mentoring Programs often fail because they don’t have a development component in them. Two smart, caring people can easily run out of things to talk about. Then, their meetings dwindle until they realize they haven’t touched base in months because they don’t know what to talk about anymore. If you’re talking about development, there’s always something new to say because you can continue to grow.
Internal Promotions is an essential place for development. As soon as someone gets put into a new role, it’s critical you look at what development needs to take place for them to be as effective as possible in that role. It’s also never too early to start thinking about the next person that might be able to go into that role and what it would take to get them there. When you take on a new role, there can be challenges. So, it’s really important to link all of this together.
Anybody can help create a culture in an organization. If you want to build and create a greater culture around development, it takes one critical thing: conviction. Be a person that really shows up with this as your mission: “I want people and the organization to grow, and I’m going to keep pushing it and talking about it.”
Download our free complementary resources for more information about linking talent practices: Resources.
Integrate Development into Your Talent Practices
Here are three great options to get started integrating development into your talent practices.
- Performance Management: Craft really good development goals, facilitate accountability conversations and discuss future career options. Educate your leaders and develop their capability to do this because sometimes they don’t have these conversations simply out of fear. They don’t know what to say or how to help. This can be very challenging.
- Succession Planning: Integrate the Winning Action Strategies and competencies to set performance levels. This can really make a difference and helps people understand how to change and what it will actually look like. Competencies really come alive in the vision.
- Talent Review: Discuss development for all employees and then follow up and discuss development focus. The output of talent review that people want to hear about is their growth and opportunity, i.e., how they can contribute and push themselves forward. This emphasis creates much greater opportunity for leaders to effectively communicate with people.
People Leadership – The Leader’s Role
This is the talent lifecycle: Get talent, Use talent, Engage talent, Grow talent, Keep talent. Managers often have the burden of thinking about how these elements are going. But they also have a lot going on and so talent becomes a low priority. It’s also a really hard skill. How game changing could it be if managers were empowered to think about growing talent capability and aligning with new opportunities? How are they growing talent for the long haul and developing that reputation as a talent magnet?
Strategic Talent Growth and Development
When leaders think about growth, they’re trying to do a good job and they really care. But it usually comes from a “fix it” point of view. They tend to give feedback or coach people on things that aren’t working, rather than focusing on what it will take to get this person where they need to be. To be that kind of leader takes a more strategic view. When thinking about developing people, that bigger viewpoint is important.
So, how do you do that? 1) Look at the big picture and focus on objectives and outcomes. As a leader, it’s important to think about what you must achieve and what it’ll take from each team member to get there. And how that affects each team member as well. How do you need them to show up differently to get to where they want to be? A leader’s number one job is to affect change and create movement. Goals are always bigger each year, so how do we all need to grow to make that happen? 2) Get to know your people individually. What are they good at or not good at? What are their needs? What is their ambition? 3) Then, you can link that to team goals and personal ambition and be able to put that together into meaningful personal change and strong development plans that will drive success for the team as well as for the individual.
To help with this, download our free complementary resources and use our strategic talent leadership planning tool: Resources.
GrowWise: A Personal Growth Lab
Because we are so passionate about development planning, we created an online learning program called GrowWise. More than a learning program, it’s a guided personal growth lab all based on self-discovery. In other words, what you’re learning about is YOU! This program enables individuals and organizations to make development planning simple, effective and meaningful. First, through a self-discovery process, you identify your development focus and define which Winning Action Strategy will best drive you forward. Second, the program helps you build your plan. The self-paced modules guide you through crafting your vision and identifying action steps you actually can and want to do. The best part is that it makes a manager’s job so much easier. The shared language makes having development conversations with employees less scary and more effective. Employees come to these conversations more prepared and engaged. And managers know what to say. Leaders and people can finally come together to grow themselves and each other through easier, richer conversations.
If you’re interested in a demo or free 30-day trial of the program for yourself, reach out. We’d love to hear more about your goals and see how we can help improve the development in your organization.