IDP — Individual Development Plan
The IDP (Individual Development Plan) or PDP (Personal Development Plan) is a plan tailored for each employee to demonstrably grow their skills.
Note: IDP is not PIP. PIP is a Performance Improvement Plan after the employee has been underperforming and giving feedback and coaching failed. It is usually an official stage, and failing it is likely to terminate the employment.
Why grow at all?
Isn’t it euphemism for “you must improve” or for “here’s a task you’d hate”?
Is this just a new trend, flavor of the month, corporate bull$#!t?
For the individual
Personal growth is important for the individual’s career, market value, hirability, promotability, pride, motivation and satisfaction of bringing more value to the society and the organization.
Imagine the industry grows by 5% per year (whatever “grows” means), the organization grows by 6% per year, your colleagues grow by 8% per year but you don’t grow at all.
Where does it leave you? Behind. Going backwards.
For the Organization
Very similar — benefit from the higher performance due to the new acquired skills and improved strengths, which in turn lead to more value for the organization as well as higher retention of employees.
Remember the old joke:
CFO: “What happens if we invest in developing our people and then they leave?”
CEO: “What if we don’t and they stay?”
How companies invest in growth
Not surprisingly, about 80% of the learning is done on the job (either self work or a pairing with colleagues), not in training and conferences. This is also known as the adult learning model — learning by doing.
The rest 20% are done in various ways:
- Educational leave per quarter — allowing days off of work for learning
- Library — virtual and physical books
- Education budget to be used on courses, conferences, coaches, etc.
- 10% of work for joint or self learning activities (new programming languages, frameworks, technologies, methodologies, etc.)
- Coaching by colleagues and managers (specific skill, time-boxed)
- Mentoring by colleagues and managers (generic, long term)
- Tech Talks, knowledge sharing sessions, hosting meetups
- Recommendations about resources from peers
- And our topic for today: IDP — which is partly on the job.
IDP
IDPs usually come from the manager’s perspective, who merges the needs of the organization with the aspired trajectory of the direct report.
Before the practicality of how to do it, let’s look at some preparation work.
When we start, we can first think about the direct’s vision, reasons and passions, which we ideally already know from previous 1:1s. This will help us to be more precise, get buy-in, increase retention, dedication and likelihood of success.
It’s not about pleasing the direct report. We do what is right for the organization and we’ll adapt to its needs.
Their Vision
- A specific role, such as VP Engineering
- A specific company, such as Google (yes, even such trajectory)
- A skillset, such as public speaking
- Be known as a “go to” person, such as for serverless architecture
- T shaped — know a lot about one topic and a little about other topics
- Generalist — know a little about many topics
- A business owner
Reasons
- Bring more value to society
- Craftsmanship
- Kai zen (continuous improvement)
- Higher autonomy
- Influence
- Social status
- Promotion
- Competitiveness and ambition
- Fame
Passion
- Technology
- Solving customer problems
- Coding
- Model training
- Testing, quality
- Architecture
- Coaching and training others
- Debugging
- Observability
- Methodology and process
- Leadership
- Product
- Business
When will the learning happen?
This varies a lot, depending on life circumstances (e.g. having a new child, taking care of a sick spouse), pressure at work, skills needed, personal ambition to grow, etc.
- On-the-job growth (new responsibilities, new type of tasks, pairing with new people, facilitating meetings)
- Knowledge sharing sessions, workshops
- Being coached during work
- Pairing (working together with another colleague on the same task)
- Teaching others — one of the best ways to learn
- After-work personal learning (practicing, podcasts, articles, books, videos, meetups)
- Mentoring outside of work by someone else
- Constant, fixed effort (e.g. 2 hours per week)
- Concentrated efforts (like 2 weeks intensive technology course)
Content
We can look at several places to get ideas and then clarity on where we want the direct to grow.
Dimensions
They may come from the he organization’s career ladder document or the performance review document and additionally:
- Impact — technical and soft skills that bring value
- Mastering the job responsibilities
- Company values
- Manager’s own values
- Direct’s own values
- Developing internal and external relationships
- Process
- Leadership
- Strategy
Strengths and weaknesses
- List their strengths and weaknesses — which ones are important to work on? Usually it’s worth making the good excellent, and sometimes it’s worth investing in weaknesses, when they are an impediment for work or career goals
- 1:1s documentation — pick areas for improvement or things they’re already good at and can excel
- Previous performance reviews
- If known — Meyer Briggs / DiSC profile
- Consider the 6 Types of Working Genius — 2 you’re great at, 2 you’re competent at, 2 you’re bad at:
> Wonder — you see potential.
> Invention — you see ideas.
> Discernment — you assess ideas.
> Galvanizing — you rally others to act on ideas.
> Enablement — you help to bring ideas to life.
> Tenacity — you push ideas to completion.
How
Principles
- Cover 1–3 development goals, not more
- Realize this can take a long time to achieve, and every journey starts with a first step
- Instead of SMART goals, we want only M and T — Measurable and Time-bound
> Objective measures which clearly tell us if we succeeded
> Target date because humans are deadline driven, and without it we’re less likely to act, not to mention succeed - Because big work is intimidating and gets postponed, break it into small steps. They are also easily trackable. Example:
> Research which book to read by date…
> Order the book by date…
> Summarize the intro in 5 sentences by date…
> Summarize chapter 1 in 5 sentences by date…
> Summarize chapter 2 in 5 sentences by date…
> …
> Give a tech talk about the book by date…
> Write a blog post about the book by date…
In practice
Create a worksheet with the details first:
And the essence:
5 columns: objective, actions, resources, success criteria and target date
Here is an example with some comments, which is also not perfect — we don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of good and get into paralysis or delays.
Case study
A direct report that was a senior engineer who was a high performer and aspired to become a manager in order to increase his influence.
His IDP included this single area of growth by reading specific books and attending managerial training to acquire skills and have a basic tool box within 5 months.
When the opportunity to transition to management came, the person was ready to hit the ground running and avoid many mistakes that new managers make.
Making it work
- Not on the calendar → will not happen.
Direct report to schedule time on the calendar to work on it weekly - Track the direct’s progress on 1:1s, give feedback and adapt if needed
- Note consecutive “I was too busy this week to work on it” — if it’s neglected, it will not be achieved in the last week before the target date
- Visualize the progress (similar trick to LinkedIn showing the percentage of profile completion)
- Remain agile — if more important things to develop come up — discuss changing the plan
- Consider notifying other colleagues about specific goals and ask for their support
- Document the direct’s achievements and things to improve, so you won’t forget them for the periodical performance review (a.k.a journaling)
Resources
- HeyJobs engineering performance management
- Manager Tools podcast
- Career Tools podcast
- Management 3.0
- Drive
