Consulting Director at Qualintra
Our recent experience with 360° feedback show that building effective development plans remains a difficult exercise. So how do you go about it? Here are a few common-sense rules.
The 360°, via the numerical evaluations and open comments, provides valuable clues. However, the beneficiary must be given the opportunity to challenge them so that they can make them their own and add to them. In addition to the lessons learned from the 360° feedback, the debriefing interview can highlight other areas that do not emerge from the report. The quality of the feedback helps to select the relevant areas for development.
When it comes to development, abundance is detrimental to efficiency. It's better to have a small number of relevant actions that are actually implemented. Beyond 5 or 6 actions, vigilance is required to avoid the risk of dispersion. It is also important to ensure that these actions are precise. For example, how can internal customer/supplier relations be improved without setting precise cooperation objectives and individual roadmaps with the main stakeholders? How can you strengthen delegation without documenting it with forms indicating the nature of the tasks, the expected reporting and the delivery dates?
There is a great temptation to reduce the development plan to training activities. However, the winning model is 70/20/10 (70% of on-the-job situations and experiences, 20% of mentoring and coaching, 10% of training only). We therefore need to ensure that development plans respect this rule, which is not only effective but also economical (training can be expensive!).
There can be no development plan worthy of the name without precise indicators. By answering the question "How will progress be measured?", the beneficiary is obliged to identify the relevant measurement indicators. These indicators may or may not be quantified: feedback from stakeholders can often be a good indicator.
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