Whether you are a leader or an employee we all know, and sometimes dread, the term development plan. Many organizations take the process very seriously and almost all of the time the process is introduced with the best intentions in mind.
There are good reasons for this.
Employees that feel they are growing are more engaged and productive after all. At least that is what a lot of studies have found to be the case. One such study from the Dale Carnegie institute found that companies with a high employee engagement level outperform those with lower engagement levels by up to 202%.
According to a Statista report the worldwide spend on training was an average of $1308 per Employee during 2019 so companies are definitely investing.
Never mind the other benefits a company receives from having an engaged workforce such as higher employee retention rates, increased profitability, and an easier recruitment process to name a few.
The question is what could your employees not be telling you about your development planning process and what could be done to increase development goal achievement rates?
A while back I was attending a lecture on Goal setting and of course being one of the most common and tried and tested goal setting methods SMART goal setting came up. If you have never heard of SMART goal setting before I will do a quick article some time and link it here.
One of the topics that came up was why SMART goal setting doesn’t always work as well as we think it does in business environments and the answer was a very simple one. One that made me realize why I had failed at so many goals in the past during my career.
The answer can be split into two sections.
The first being the goal is not ecological to the employee!
What does this mean exactly? It simply means that it is not the employees own goal. It does not come completely from them, and it doesn’t fit with what they really want.
So why could this be a problem? Maybe take a pause here and think back on the big goals you have achieved in your life. Were these goals to achieve things YOU really wanted, or things other people told you that you “should” want? I bet they were things YOU really wanted and the ones for the things that you “should” want are still filed away in cabinet 13 collecting dust.
We will always give priority to something that we want and benefits us directly over what someone else wants us to do. This is why smokers will never stop smoking no matter how many times their partner or doctor complains at them. That is until the day they decide they themselves want to.
The second item that came up was that often the goal isn’t directly within the employee’s control.
To put this one into perspective let’s use an example. Imagine you had the following Goal:
I will sell X amount of dollars of Y product to Z customer by A date.
That’s quite a SMART goal right. Its specific, measurable, it has a time stamp.
Let’s think about it though:
Do you have direct control over the customers buying process?
The answer is NO. We cannot control a third party and thus the goal is neither realistic nor achievable which means its not within our control.
A better version of a goal that would be realistic and achievable would be:
I will pitch product Y to Z customer X by date A and follow up with them weekly.
This is completely within our control. The pitch can be done to said customer by a certain date and follow up done with them weekly. We cannot control if they will buy the product. We can however give them the best pitch we have ever given to try influence that decision.
So how can these two points be addressed?
There are a few things that would need to happen to make sure employees achieve their goals on their development plans.
Assuming the basics are already in place. The first step is to embrace the fact that an employee may have goals outside of their job role. Allow employees to feel comfortable enough to be fully open with what they really want to achieve. It is their development plan after all. Even if they tell you that their goal is related to something external and they may leave one day. The worst that can happen is that they do, and you can at least start planning for it. The best that can happen is that they discover they can follow their passion right where they are and stay on.
Let’s face it they will have these goals whether they tell you about them or not!
The real trick is to skillfully align the employees’ goal with the organization’s goal and come up with a goal that benefits both parties equally over the short to long term.
Another hint here is that if the Goal address’s a KPI it’s not the employee’s goal. Performance should be addressed via a different process to development planning. Either via regular coaching or another internal process that addresses performance improvement or both.
The second portion would be ensuring the goal is completely within the employee’s control.
An employee cannot control customers, colleagues, managers, teams, company policies etc. They can only try influence those things. Always dive deeper into the question of whether the employee has complete control over the achievement of the goal. If they don’t, they are unlikely to achieve it.
Bonus Tip: Some surveys and studies claim linking a development plan to a performance review is a good idea. My opinion and from experience, it’s a bad idea. It is demotivational and if you need to do that you have failed on one of the above.
By setting good goals with your employee that fit with what the employee wants and making sure the employee is in complete control of the outcome will set them up for success. A good development plan will improve their engagement and trust levels and drive better productivity. The final outcome of which will be a positive affect on profitability.
I hope you have found this insight helpful and more so I hope you give it a try and let me know how it worked for you.
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“A goal properly set is halfway reached.” – Zig Ziglar
