Use your employee development plan to achieve professional development goals and drive performance.
Performance planning stems from your strategy. When done well, performance goals align personal and professional values so that your employees are motivated to achieve company goals.
A good leader can inspire others to work together and achieve common goals. Motivated employees who feel empowered demonstrate greater initiative, and in turn, inspire confidence so that leaders feel comfortable delegating important tasks to them.
This dynamic leads to greater confidence, increased initiative, and continued employee development; a win-win scenario for everyone. Leaders who include employees in setting performance goals will achieve better results than those who dictate objectives on their own.
The Importance of Employee Participation
By working together and being inclusive, leaders demonstrate openness while promoting dignity and respect.
By identifying goals and working together to create your employee development plan, employees and supervisors can satisfy personal and professional performance goals. In this way, shared goals will drive performance.
Communicating is about achieving common understanding, and being inclusive promotes cooperation, establishes trust, and further improves employee motivation that is so critical for long-term success.
Planning is the First Step
Planning is the first step in driving performance and achieving results. Once you have established the setting where employees want to be involved because you have made this a joint activity, the rest becomes easier.
Next, performance involves setting job goals, providing critical feedback, conducting interim reviews, and completing the performance evaluation.
Make the Process a Valuable Experience
Employees want to be involved. Leaders who are inclusive often discover that employees will present more ambitious goals than the leader might have proposed.
By including employees throughout the process, you will experience a better exchange of ideas and perhaps more important, promote dignity and instill greater motivation.
Then, you will be able to transform the appraisal process into a valuable learning experience.
Tom's Biography
Tom Crea is a leadership expert, decorated career Army Officer, and Blackhawk Helicopter pilot. Because of his proven skills, he was hand selected to run the Army’s leadership development program at two Boston colleges, where he and his team transformed college students into combat leaders.
(Discover how to be a Guiding Light — 3-step process)
Today, he is a Servant Leadership ambassador: An author, keynote speaker, and leadership development coach. He is also a radio show host.
Tom has a B.S. & M.C.S. in Computer Science and a M.A. in Political Science and loves coaching basketball and spending time with his wife and two boys.
Creating a Culture:
Tom’s proudest leadership moment came when his unit was called to war in Iraq after he had rotated out. His replacement was not able to perform, so members he developed stepped up to lead; they attribute their success to the leadership Tom instilled in each of them. Today, the Blackhawk leadership way.
