The power of a development plan.

A good development plan is not a simple document. To be powerful, it has to be built around a development model grounded in real-world experience. It has to be carefully crafted to fit the needs of the person being developed. It has to include job assignments that build leadership skills. And it has to be supported by the organization and integrated into a development philosophy that views planning documents as the beginning of the development journey, not the end.

In 2001, the Corporate Leadership Council published its much-awaited study of the most effective leadership-development strategies. Entitled Voice of the Leader, this study closely examined 17 different development interventions. The two most influential development actions turned out to be 1) the amount of decision-making authority a person was given, and 2) the existence of an individual development plan.

That the existence of a development plan would be named as the second most important stimulus for development may seem surprising. What is so important about having a development plan? Why is it so powerful? How could line and staff executives give such weight to a simple document?

The answer is that a good development plan is not a simple document. To be powerful, it has to be built around a development model grounded in real-world experience, it has to be carefully crafted to fit the needs of the person being developed. It has to include job assignments that build leadership skills. And it has to be supported by the organization and integrated into a development philosophy that views planning documents as the beginning of the development journey, not the end.

Individual development plans are a critical part of any effective leadership-development system at two levels. At the organizational level, these plans ensure that the next generation of leaders will have the skills and experiences required to define and implement the corporation's strategies. At the personal level, they force future leaders to focus on what needs to be done in order to grow. When done right, the individual development plan becomes a contract future leaders make with themselves and the organization about the things they want to do or to become. The plan creates discipline and a good plan creates motivation.

Two recent best-selling books on leadership highlight this point. Bossidy and Charan (2002) looked at the investments made by major corporations in their people processes, including the identification and development of leadership talent. The most successful development strategies emphasized building plans that focused on the skills and behaviors needed to execute the company's strategy. Even when organizations identify the correct activities in their development plans, they frequently fall to implement them effectively. This same failure was noted by Collins (2001). It turned out to be one of the factors differentiating "good" companies from the "great" ones.

What does a good plan look like? How does it create discipline and motivation? In order to answer these questions we need to explore how leadership development happens--not in a theoretical way, but in the real world.

How Leadership Development Happens: A Real-World Model

Our experience--over a combined total of almost 50 years of consulting, executive coaching, and leadership training--tells us there are three major components to leadership development: awareness, motivation and skill-building. But many "old-fashioned" development plans are almost totally focused on skill-building and pay little attention to awareness-building or motivation. As illustrated in Exhibit 1, these three dimensions must be sequentially engaged in order for a person to learn.

Because creating awareness of the need to develop is the number one priority, "awareness-building" must be the dominant theme of any good development plan. In reality, it is generally forgotten or overlooked.

Motivation is also a missing ingredient in most old-fashioned approaches to development planning. The typical leadership-development plan assumes the executive "gets it" and wants to change. Yet, Leslie and Van Velsor (1996) point out in their study of executive failure at the Center for Creative Leadership that most derailed executives, even in the face of strong contrary data, are confident that what worked for them in the past will continue to work in the future. They simply were not motivated to alter their behavior. The ability to work through this denial frequently differentiated the executives who got back on track from those who failed. Many high-potential managers know they have weaknesses but simply do not believe they need to fix them.

Only when there is sufficient and ongoing awareness of the need to develop, and clear and continuous motivation to develop, can future leaders effectively focus on building those skills most valued by the corporation.

Plans that Work: Characteristics of Effective Development Plans

If Exhibit 1 describes how development actually happens in the real world, how do you use this framework to create individual plans that really work? What do they look like? What features do they have? Although there is no preferred format or template for an effective leadership-development plan, all good plans share certain characteristics:

Highly Personalized (and Personal) Plans

We have asked successful leaders over the years about the major influences on their development as leaders. Not surprisingly, the vast majority do not mention books they have read, seminars attended, or consultants who have coached them. Instead, they talk about jobs they have had, people, and relationships. Often they talk about a leader who was their boss, or someone they observed, or a particularly stressful experience. They may describe a heartbreaking failure, a great boss, or a horrible boss, but their image of success is based on a real experience and a real person. Effective development plans capture that imagery and describe aspects of the ideal leader in terms that make sense for the individual. This kind of highly personalized development goal cannot be imitated or copied from another plan or another person. Nor is it represented in the typical leadership competency model, unless that model is carefully tailored to individual situations and needs, it applies only to the individual who starts from one place (with an acknowledged set of strengths and development needs) and wants to end up at another.

Personalization starts with pinpointing a person's unique set of development needs. We are always amazed by the number of development plans that are not based on even a cursory assessment of the individual. It's as if the doctor takes a patient's word he has pneumonia without ever using the stethoscope, or worse, assumes all her patients have pneumonia. A good development plan should he based on a systematic assessment of personal strengths and weaknesses, and it should include development actions that uniquely apply to the person involved.

Plans Focused on Specific Development Needs, Not Just Summary Issues

Where most development plans fail is not in their inaccuracy but in their tendency to deal only with the surface symptoms rather than what lies behind or beneath the observed behavior. Unless the plan pulls together the known information in a specific way that has meaning for the individual, the development actions are likely to fail. For example, if the issue is that the manager is not "letting go," the typical development plan will suggest increasing delegation. That is fine as far as it goes. But a good development plan should dig beneath the surface and deal with why the individual cannot delegate. Is he afraid of change? Does he have such a large ego that he believes that no one can do the job better? Or is he a realist and accurately understands that his subordinates are not up to the task and will fail? If the development plan does not address the real issues and consider these issues in terms of current and potential future circumstances, it will miss the mark.

Practical Plans

There are many different dimensions to practicality, but the one to focus on is what will actually work and be meaningful for the future leader. While a plan that has 20 critical issues to address might win points for comprehensiveness, it will not motivate a person or create disciplined action. Most of us, if we are lucky, can work on a maximum of one or two things at a time. We can agree to "lose weight," "improve our disposition," "ask questions rather than tell people," "delegate responsibility and authority." But chances are we are incapable of doing all of them at once.

Plans Relying on On-the-Job Learning Experiences

Leadership is learned by doing or by watching someone doing. Morgan McCall, in his book High Fliers (1998), repeatedly documents the developmental impact of work experiences. He points out that job experiences that are challenging, risky, stressful and visible--where success and failure are real possibilities--are the most developmental. Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger, in The Leadership Machine (2001), emphasize that people learn most of the skills they need on the job and list four kinds of experiences that teach the most: 1) key jobs, 2) important other people, 3) personal hardships, and 4) training courses.

Formal training programs that emphasize awareness-building and teach skills that can be immediately applied to a person's on-the-job situation are the most valuable kinds of courses. This explains the success and popularity of training built around 360-degree feedback.

Plans "Owned" by the Person Who Wants to Develop