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Practice Makes Perfect: Why each leader needs to plan his or her own personal development

As a leader, or even simply as a manager,
you need a personal development plan to progress in your career
. The organization you work for may (or may not) make these opportunities available to you but, ultimately, it's your career. You own it.

Working in the world of organizational development and adult learning, the idea of continuous development seems like a given. We do still run into managers (and sadly sometimes senior managers) who don't believe that development of individuals is a business priority. The reasons we hear vary from "managers should already be skilled when we hire them" to "they have been with us for many years, they are already experienced."

I have read many bios and reviewed many resumes that boast of tenure and equate this to experience. "Twenty-five years of commercial and managerial experience." So what?
Tenure does not equate to entitlement, experience or ability
. In fact, most organizations may look at a static career path as a lack of ambition and "promotability."

And to say that managers will simply learn skills and improve leadership capability through exposure to the job, well that simply isn't the case. Too many managers plough through their careers in autopilot, oblivious to their flaws.
Skills are simply not acquired through osmosis.

Don't believe me? Let's look at a simple example. My father bought our first computer in the early 80's. It was a TRS-80 with a 1.7 Mhz processor and 48KB of ROM (pictured, with the author). Since then I have used a keyboard every day of my life for the last 30 years. I still type with 3 fingers. Sure I type a lot faster than when I was 12, but if skills did develop without a learning structure I would have reached 80 WPM using all ten fingers by now!

Need for structure

Since skills (hard skills and soft skills) don't just develop spontaneously over time, what is the solution? Simple:
you need a basic learning strategy.

Your personal development plan should include some formal training and lots of on-the-job development opportunities. Careers are built on strengths and addressing only those weaknesses that are fatal flaws (i.e., they are harming your current performance/satisfaction or are barriers to career aspirations and future success). So where do you find this development?

This is where the now-famous 70:20:10 rule comes in – according to
Charles Jennings, Global Head of Learning for Reuters
.
"About 70 percent of organizational learning takes place on the job, through solving problems and through special assignments and other day-to-day activities. Another 20 per cent occurs through drawing on the knowledge of others in the workplace, from informal learning, from coaching and mentoring, and from support and direction from managers and colleagues. Only 10 percent occurs through formal learning, whether classroom, workshop ,or more recently, e-learning."

Great. Except that you can't skip the 10% and expect to garner the other 70% automatically. That 10% of classroom work — if well designed — is what provides you with the insight, feedback and structure to develop continuous improvement during your time on the job.
This also supposes that you are actively engaged in the learning and applying it back on the job.

Need for practice

Once you have the insight and strategy in place, it's time to practice. Practice. Practice. Practice. And practice means exactly that; not getting it right every time — trying and failing are part of practicing — but being aware of the failures, being willing to acknowledge and revisit them, and then being willing to try again and again until you succeed.

"Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can't get it wrong."

If you want to develop your career you need to constantly learn and improve your game. Practice is a major part of this — every day on the job is an opportunity to self-criticize and reach for a higher level of performance. Career paths have changed and many people reach a "plateau" much earlier in their careers — because their formal education, their skills and knowledge from college are tapped into very early on by the organization they work for. If you want to progress your career you can't rest on your academic laurels. You need a conscious strategy for acquiring and practicing new skills — especially the so-called "soft" or people skills.

Need for feedback (and a willingness to listen)

The final piece of a learning strategy has to be
a feedback loop
. After all, when it comes to inter-personal skills, you can't decide on your own if you are making progress. Ultimately,
it's other people's perceptions that matter
in this equation. So solicit (and be open to) lots of feedback — and be prepared for the feedback to be diverse, from polite non-committal statements to downright off-the-wall. Don't rely on a small sample. The more feedback from the more people, the better your development effort will become.

One last thought on tracking progress: When coaching managers on both career and personal development issues, I find it useful to have them plot their progression to date. Try this. You can easily map out a personal development journey over time and identify milestone events (key projects, promotions, role and reporting changes). While careers are far from linear, this provides you with a growth curve or trajectory You Can Use to evaluate personal progress.

P.S. Spread the word

With every edition of eNews we get a dozen requests to reprint and redistribute the article. Please do: please print this off and stick it on the fridge in the break room. Please email it along to colleagues or stick it up next to your monitor. Let people know that — for their sake and the sake of the organization they work for —
a personal development strategy is a must.

Fraser is based in BlessingWhite's Princeton headquarters and manages all marketing, research and production functions. He can be reached at fraser.marlow@blessingwhite.com

For more information on how BlessingWhite can help your organization develop coaching and career programs, call 1.800.222.1349 or email info@blessingwhite.com.