How to create a 70/20/10 professional development plan

702010 Development Planning, part of an ongoing non-profit leadership development video series. You've completed reviews of your direct reports and identified their development goals. So now, how do you help a strong performer with high potential become a future leader? Organizations who fail to ask that question and act on the answers often end up losing their best talent and find themselves in a perpetual state of promoting second string players In our last video, we discussed how to use the performance potential matrix to identify a direct report's development needs. Now, you and your direct reports are ready to co-create their development plan. A development plan is not remedial or pejorative. It's about growth. The focus is to help all individuals build or strengthen basic job and leadership competencies that will help them. Good development plans are created by identifying concrete opportunities to improve skills or build required knowledge. But what exactly should these opportunities be? To find the answer, I want you to identify a skill that you have had to learn from scratch. Maybe financial literacy, project management, or surfing. How did you learn that skill? What were the critical experiences that helped you develop a real proficiency and eventually an expertise? Maybe you read a book or took a class. Maybe you had a friend or manager provide feedback. But the majority of your expertise likely came from simple practice. Taking advantage of opportunities to use and perfect your skill until eventually it became less difficult. This insight that the most effective development happens on the job is based on research. While training and coaching have a role to play in leadership development, research from the Center for Creative Leadership and others has found that job-related learning drives roughly 70% of development, mentoring and coaching 20%, and formal training only 10%. Job-related learning includes things such as special projects, stretch assignments, and an expansion of one's role. Of course, development is most powerful when the three elements are tightly integrated. Imagine trying to learn how to surf simply by swimming out into a choppy ocean, board in tow, without any lessons or coaching from an expert. Now let's look at an example for an individual who is at the high end of the spectrum for job-specific performance and in the middle with respect to leadership competencies. With a development plan focusing more on the leadership competency dimension, she and her manager might agree to work on strengthening her public communication skills. On-the-job experiences might include requesting the opportunity to present a new idea to the board of directors. Videotaping a presentation and having the future leader identify where she is strong and where she's weak, and then doing it again. Or serving as a trainer in internal employee training. For coaching, the future leader may ask a trusted coach or mentor to signal her whenever she goes off topic at a meeting, or to assess how clearly she communicates when she writes. Finally, for formal training, she may sign up for an in-person class that focuses on communication, or she may decide to read a recommended book. Let's look at one more example using a direct report in the central blue box. In this position, the balance of development focus should be on performance in the individual's current role, with less of a focus on leadership competencies. Using your assessment and rubric of job-specific competencies, identify a competency to strengthen and describe a more specific development goal for that individual. After drafting development goals, the next step in the process is to create a development plan, which outlines the actions you'll take to achieve those goals. For each development goal, think of three job-related experiences that might help him or her achieve that goal. Make sure that these opportunities are doable. You don't want to suddenly overload your direct report. If you're looking for inspiration for on-the-job development opportunities, we recommend looking at the classic book, For Your Improvement. The book provides concrete example activities to support competency-based development. Next, think of two ways your direct report can better leverage you or someone else in your organization to achieve the development goal. Depending on the competency your direct report is trying to build, you may not be the right coach. And think of one formal training, book, webinar, online course, seminar, conference, or other resource they can access to achieve that development goal. Again, development is most effective when you link the 70 with the 20 and 10 to help someone strengthen a competency. Also, make sure that that plan is doable. After you think through a rough draft of the development plan, have a conversation with your direct report to co-create a final version of the plan. There are a few things to keep in mind when having this conversation. First, connect the conversation to ones you've had in the past about performance and explain evolutions in the organization's thinking about demonstrated job performance and demonstrated leadership competencies. Second, ask your direct report which leadership or job-related competency they most want to develop. And third, offer your own perspective, flexing to your direct report's priorities as much as possible. Finally, ask your direct report about their aspirations. Do they want to take on increasingly challenging work or new roles? Remember that different people have different motivations, and these may be influenced by factors such as their stage in life and family situation, so they may change over time. People may not readily communicate their aspirations, so it's important to ask what they are. Authentic co-creation and co-ownership of the development plan are necessary for effective implementation over time. 70-20-10 means the majority of learning happens by experience, but it doesn't get senior leaders off the hook for a well-managed and well-thought-out development process. Development happens on a job, but it doesn't happen on its own. It is up to current leaders to help guide the development of future leaders and help them identify the skills they need to develop, the opportunities to learn those skills, and provide the critical feedback and mentorship they will need to get better. After all, even your highest potential staff are likely to stumble at times when they begin practicing new skills. Don't forget to visit our website, where you can find links, downloadable resources, and more information about developing leaders.