Learning Environment: Sharing Your Personal Development Plan

Posted by Sarah Hobbs

Over the coming months we’ll be introducing a new series of articles looking at how you can create an environment where your team want to spend time learning and developing. Doing this will help increase engagement, performance, innovation and help them tackle new challenges in a more agile and successful way.

While the benefits are clear, you may be hesitant as to whether this is possible within a single team in your organisation – but the great news is there are things you can do as a manager to encourage this to happen. Today we’ll explore the first one, which may be quite challenging as it’s based around your Personal Development Plan (PDP).

PDPs are a timely subject for many as Q1 of the calendar year often sees the annual round of objective setting taking place for performance and development plans. If you’ve been on Talent Manager your development plans this year will take full advantage of the opportunities and experts you can learn from in the workplace! But the key here is to engage your team in finding ways to create and implement development plans for you.

Here are two great things to consider to get started:

1. How open is development in your team? You can turn development planning into an activity that people contribute towards – but to get there are you willing to share your own development plan in one of your team meetings?
   
   If you are, ask your team for ideas about how it could be improved or how it could focus on a particular development area. And use the time to generate lists of people you could learn from – your team may well have some contacts you weren’t aware of!
   
   At the following team meeting, ask one of your team to share their own PDP and offer them the same level of support – continuing to work through your team until everyone who wants to has had a chance to share their plan. As well as enriching the quality of the plan, it creates a supportive team environment.


2. How do you monitor PDPs? If you’re like most managers, PDPs get checked either at the end of the year or in a bi-annual review. Instead, consider giving some time over in your team meeting to allow people to discuss their PDPs and talk through the progress that’s been made on them. This creates a mini-deadline that encourages that plan to be implemented and plays to the fact that people don’t like to say “I haven’t done anything with it” month after month.

Both of these ideas are quite bold, but could make a real difference to the dynamic in your team. Is it time to take a risk and let your team learn about development planning by setting them a great example?

TAKEAWAY
As the manager you have an ability to create an environment where learning happens at a faster pace. This will involve doing something different – and maybe your willingness to do something different will encourage people to be open and enthusiastic about their own development.