Building Formal Development Plans with the Help of Informal Learning Resources
Coaching and Development with Myers-Briggs® ThinkBox 
—Jennifer Overbo, MBTI® Product Marketing Manager
Thanks to technology, globalization, and the increasing importance of innovation, organizations today must demonstrate the ability to change more quickly than ever before. Individuals and companies are challenged daily to be faster, better, and more efficient, and employees and managers are called upon to be learning agile able to retain information they've gathered on the fly. At the same time, many organizations have customers spanning the globe and colleagues operating out of remote locations. Bringing everyone together around the corporate training room table is a luxury many teams simply do not have.
The Emergence of “Informal” Training
With everything we know today about the differences in employees’ life styles, locations, and skill sets, a one-size-fits-all training approach hardly makes sense. Today’s learners have an ongoing need for manageable pieces of information—when they need it—to help them address current realities and challenges. Studies have shown that employees’ informal training coupled with their manager’s support is the best formula for building a learning culture.
So what should informal training look like? As mentioned, it’s important that training match individuals’ unique learning styles. It’s also important that it map to the organization’s overall goals and vision, and that it be competency and behavior based. Not only is focusing on competencies and behaviors important from a business development perspective, but it also gives your training programs context, as employees are held responsible for developing toward common goals.
Along with addressing the demands of today’s business world, ideal informal training should address the needs of the learners as well. One of the most essential of those needs is leadership development. As boomers exit the workforce, the leadership gap will continue to widen. And as new executives assume the open roles, the learning curve is often so steep that many fail within their first 18 months. In addition, research has shown that top performers are looking for career growth and mobility in their organization, and that as the economy continues to improve, these top performers will move on and out if these opportunities are not provided.
With these risks in sight, proper on-boarding and development is more critical than ever for organizations that want to mitigate this potential loss of talent. Informal training programs must provide opportunities for future development, get people up to speed, be easily accessible, and be digestible in bite-size chunks. But how can you ensure that employees will take advantage of training opportunities if the solution is informal?
Even with an informal approach, the development plan is still the best way to keep employees responsible and accountable for their own growth, and for managers to ensure that a substantive change in behavior occurs. Proper development planning can do a number of things, including:
- Prepare employees for their next job or challenge
- Lead to improvement in their current role
- Prepare them for changes in job scope or scale
- Address problems that detract from optimal performance
When plans are created in a vacuum, or addressed only during the annual training initiative, they work about as effectively as New Year's resolutions. With an ongoing informal approach, the employee must take ownership of the plan and be accountable monthly, weekly, or even daily for goals outlined in the plan, and the manager must give regular support and feedback for the plan to be successful. Because 70% of development happens on the job, a good development plan can and should include tasks that can be folded into the everyday fabric of work roles. Throughout the process, leaders must help employees identify the correct areas to work on and provide critical feedback throughout. From there, employees must be open to feedback and be willing to work to achieve the goals discussed in the plan.
Myers-Briggs® ThinkBox: The Development Planning Solution
Development plans may have gotten a bad rap over the years, but they do work. They are most effective when they are concrete, when they address strengths as well as gaps, when they are apart of the everyday work, and when they are not limited to the annual performance review. In this regard, Myers-Briggs® ThinkBox has emerged as an ideal solution. It is a powerful online learning tool that offers a wide range of learning modalities for development, and it can be used by coaches and organizations in a wide variety of settings.
Myers-Briggs® ThinkBox offers detailed descriptions of personality types with valuable tips for starting, stopping, or continuing specific behaviors, and it allows managers and employees to search for development ideas by personality type, business issue, or competency. These resources offer actionable and practical ways to achieve your desired outcomes. In addition, the “My Development Plan” module allows individuals to build concrete, goal-oriented plans that can be tracked in terms of progress and provide mechanisms for continuous feedback from others such as coaches or managers. The ability to create targeted plans and to support them with accessible, on-demand tools means that organizations and individuals can leverage the benefits of both formalized action plans and informal learning.
To learn more about how Myers-Briggs® ThinkBox is being used in coaching and development scenarios, please view this free 60-minute webinar.
