Making Growth Plans Personal
A Personal Growth Plan holds the key to your true potential and realising the vision you have for yourself. Not only does it serve as a valuable tool for tracking your own growth, but it also grabs the attention of peers, mentors and managers. By crafting a comprehensive plan for your own advancement, you demonstrate your commitment to continuous development. It equips you with a compelling response to the age-old question: “Where do you envision yourself in five years?”
What is a Personal Growth Plan?
A personal growth plan is like a compass guiding you towards a more fulfilling and successful career journey. It invites you to reflect on how you can enhance various aspects of your life, from fostering meaningful connections to honing your work ethic and cultivating positive habits. Think of it as a cherished tool that empowers you to turn your personal development aspirations into reality.
Imagine, for instance, that you would like to become more focused at work. Your personalized plan might include practical strategies to nurture this habit. It could involve creating an environment with fewer distractions, such as setting specific periods of time to abstain from using mobile devices.
Essentially, a personal growth plan acts as your trusted ally, helping you outline your goals and providing a roadmap for self-improvement.
When and Why would you create a PGP?
There are various reasons to do a PGP. Usually it goes hand-in-hand with an annual review, or passing you probation period. These are times of reflection, when you can sit down with your report and discuss what they would like to achieve? Where do you see the growth areas and opportunities for them?
Doing a PGP as part of a performance review is a great way of coming up with and setting goals for anyone.
Others would do one off the bat, when they join a team, or they may already have a plan on their own which they can bring to you as their manager. I’ve came across people as a manager where they would have a very clear goal of what they want to achieve (let it be a title or a status within a company / team). You can help them refine their goals and keep them in check with the milestones.
How to construct a PGP
What will bring you the most happiness in life? From there, work backward. Determine the habits you need to develop, the skills and knowledge you must master. Establish the step-by-step goals you need to achieve to get there. But how to start?
Let’s stick with the work setting for once, where my advice would be to start with your manager / team leader / mentor. Talk to them about what is that you want to achieve?
Let’s say you are a mid-level engineer and your goal is by the end of the year you want to be proficient in Elixir + Phoenix and a target of 2 pull requests a week to deliver a feature or fix for the team. These are great goals to have! You want personal growth via in a language and framework that you’re interested in (best if it is related to your day job) as well as have a steady contribution to your team.
Your manager and mentor might see different things to concentrate on and push you for. I.e. they may see an opportunity for you to not just grow on the technical side, but also improve your communication with your colleagues and the whole organisations. Throughout this conversation — or series of conversations — you may end up having a set of goal as such:
- Pet-project written in Elixir + Phoenix
- Steady delivery of 2 PRs a week with unit tests
- Demo a feature once a month
- Write and publish 1 blog post in the quarter </aside>
The good thing on this, that you can if you want add real personal goals as well. I.e. if you would like to get out more from the home office setting, and socialize in the office once a week. Or add a sports or health goal of yours — i.e. I’ve in mine to reach a 10K run in one go.
The absolute key here at the “construct” phase that this is a joint exercise between you and your manager / mentor:
- Agree on the goals
- Set the timeframe
- Set milestones for you and your manager to check back on
As the manager, your responsibility will be to do the agreed and regular check-ins and give the space, time and tools for the person to make this plan a success. You’re there to support and help the person grow in these areas. Connect them with the right people, get them the right tools!
As the person, you then use the tools given to you! Show progress, be proud of your wins, however small they may be. And don’t forget to look back, have a big breath and see how far you’ve come from the previous checkpoint.
Feedback and Followups
To use another one of Peter Drucker’s wisdoms: “ You can’t manage what you don’t measure. ” In other words, to know if your plan is working, you need to measure your progress. Measuring helps holding yourself accountable and can reveal weaknesses in your plan.
Source: https://www.userlike.com/en/blog/personal-growth-plan
A Growth Plan like this would not be effective at all with constant feedback and followups. You need to put in regular check-ins for your plan.
This can be done as part of your 1-on-1s, or have them as a separate meeting in your calendar, the important part is that both you and your manager will be accountable on measuring progress. In these reviews, find the answers to these questions:
- What has been working well?
- What did I have trouble with?
- What did I complete in the past period that I am proud of?
- Where do I stand with my overall goals?
Don’t be afraid to change and adjust the plan! It’s not like you’ve written these on stone. Circumstances change, people’s goal may change as they embark on a journey only to realise mid-way that it’s not what they want to pursue in the long term. The plan itself is a living document, and can be altered and tailored midway, just use the checkin questions, these will guide you if you need to change your growth plan.
OK, I’ve achieved my goals, what now?
Look back, and relax 🙂 you’ve ticked off you goals, maybe it’s a good time to do a bit of a retrospective of your progress. Discuss it with your manager and talk about what went right in that process? What could be improved for your next Growth Plan! And then, when you’ve figured out what’s your next target: rinse and repeat!
