Personal development advice
Personal development advice always starts with feedback.
In traditional feedback scenarios management and consultants tend to focus on a critique of an employee's shortcomings.
Unfortunately our long-standing practice shows that the hackneyed standard approach - start on positives, then identify problem issues and close on positive note - simply doesn’t work when the feedback is provided by an external consultant, instead of management. This is due to the structure of the approach: after mentioning in passing the individual's strengths, the consultant then spends most of the time identifying the individual's shortcomings and rarely mentions the reasons why the employee fails to demonstrate the requested behavior.
As a result the employee obtains a considerable amount of negative feedback and it can prove very hard to unlock the individual’s development potential. Furthermore, the individual may subsequently relay this negative energy to other members of the organization, thereby undermining trust in development measures.
We decided against the traditional feedback system for development purposes and instead devised our own unique approach. We concentrate on different examples of an individual's behavior, even some that may appear insignificant, focusing on areas that demonstrate the employee’s potential and eliminating shortcomings in different competencies.
We believe that an individual is only capable of unlocking his or her true potential after experiencing positive emotions. Therefore we try to support the individual's self-assessment and belief in his or her strengths, showing the individual how he/she can leverage personality traits to improve performance and prompting the easiest path to self-improvement.
Stages of developmental feedback:
- Identify personality traits or skills that will help the employee develop corresponding competencies.
- Determine an approach aimed at developing specific competencies, taking into account individual traits.
- Compile individual development plans.
- List specific actions to realize individual development plans.
The individual development plan is compiled on the basis of such procedures as:
