Why Development Planning Is Broken: HR’s Dirty Little Secret Here is a new, human-centered approach to employee learning and upskilling

By Jamie Broughton, Avenue Careers

Given the current market, organizations are scrambling to invest in their workforce through upskilling and career programs. Every year we all campaign about performance goals and development plans, chasing after leaders to get their team’s goals in.

Yet, in our daily conversations with HR professionals the story is the same: we know we are supposed to do it and enjoy it, but just like those we are supporting, the development planning process we champion is uninspiring, boring, and at the bottom of our to-do lists.

HR’s Dirty Little Secret: We Aren’t Completing Our Plans Either

At the end of the day, what people really want at work is to have an impact while doing interesting, meaningful work with great people. That is about it.

Instead, we make it complicated. We are usually talking with everyone about development plans, skills inventories, competency models and rating systems... language and processes that serve the organization, but not the human.

To non-HR types, this is what we call “HR Weird-ry” - now, do not get me wrong, much of this stuff is important, however when it comes to mobilizing a workforce and getting them interested in taking ownership of their growth - we have taken the wrong approach.

Upskilling Is Crucial - It’s the Planning that’s Broken

Let us flip the script here. What if we made upskilling and development about the individual, not the plan? A plan is the outcome of the process, it is not the purpose of the process.

We are proposing a whole new, human-centered approach that increases the value for organizations while being meaningful and interesting for people:

1. Get curious - Growth is sometimes plain hard and almost always inconvenient.

Yes, their skills are important to the organization but what do they enjoy? What are they interested in? Getting curious taps into the dramatically underestimated ingredients for growth - motivation and commitment.

2. Identify their distinct ability - Their unique mix of talent and aspiration. If money were handled, they would do it forever and for free. It taps the best of what they have to offer the world and the organization. It comes with a lifetime of natural growth, impact and joy. Who does not want that?

3. Then, the skills - What skills could they learn/develop to enhance that distinct ability even further? We call these the multiplier skills - the skills that, when developed, help the individual make an even bigger impact (e.g. a creative person enhances her ability to write impactful pieces by developing the skill of being organized).

4. Align with the team’s priorities - How can the leader and the individual partner together offer more opportunities for the distinct ability to be used while developing the new skills required? How can they meet team goals while doing that?

5. Next, create a plan that serves both the human, the team and the leader. You would be surprised how much more interested leaders become when there is something in it for them.

6. Finally - stop chasing people around to get their plans done - we all know you have better things to do.

If you are stuck wondering why development planning is so hard or how to begin upskilling - refocus on what is important, stop the HR ‘Weird-ry’, and let us get more people talking about what they really want to do.

Remember, it is not about the plan; it is about the people (you included).