The ripple effect of the right development plan
Using behavioural insight to elevate performance
Most of us have created a development plan for every year we have been in paid employment. How many times have you attributed your success to one of yours?
A development plan is only as good as the insight that drives it. Too often, these plans are a box-ticking exercise; generic, disconnected from real work or focused on abstract competencies that bear little relation to what a person actually does day to day.
However, a wealth of research suggests that learning and development are powerful drivers of retention and loyalty, making development plans a significant missed opportunity. To create an effective plan, start with a genuine understanding of individual preferences, natural strengths and the specific context in which a person is operating.
By building a development plan that matches individual preferences to the needs of the role, supports meaningful growth and is genuinely sustainable over time, you create a powerful ripple effect. The impact on competency, loyalty and commitment compounds over time, not just for the individual but for the people around them too.
Why Development Plans Matter: The Evidence
IMAGE
The gap between what employees want and what organisations actually provide is significant. A well-constructed development plan is not just a retention tool, it is a direct signal to your people that their growth matters.
1. Start with insight
The foundation of any strong development plan is insight and self-awareness. If your team members know and are able to articulate what energises them, together you can align plans to what they are motivated by. Before anyone can develop effectively, they need to understand how they like to naturally approach work: what energises them, what they gravitate toward and where they are likely to face resistance.
Behavioural frameworks that give people the language to define this and enable them to map individual preferences to their objectives can be enormously valuable. Tools like the PROPHET model give people data and insight into their natural behavioural tendencies across key business activities, helping individuals and their managers understand and define:
- Which types of tasks and challenges they are most naturally drawn to;
- Where their instincts are likely to serve them well;
- Where they may need to adapt, develop or seek complementary support from others.
This is not about labelling people or putting them in boxes. It is about giving individuals and their organisations a richer, more nuanced picture of how people work - so that development can be targeted, relevant and far more likely to succeed.
2. Align development to what energises someone
Tip. A key reason development plans fail is when the manager completes them and / or when they are aligned to the business task but don’t take the person’s motivation into account.
One of the most powerful principles in development planning is alignment: the closer the match between what a person enjoys and what their role requires, the more sustainable and successful their development is likely to be.
Research consistently shows that people respond more positively to work that is rewarding for them. When work feels natural and plays to someone's strengths, they are more motivated, more committed and more likely to perform well. Importantly, positive outcomes reinforce behaviour; people are more likely to repeat actions that lead to success.
This has direct implications for how development plans should be constructed. Rather than focusing solely on gaps or weaknesses, an effective development plan:
- Builds on existing strengths and natural tendencies;
- Identifies where preferences align well with the demands of the current role or business phase;
- Highlights areas where adapting or developing new approaches will make the biggest difference;
- Ensures that development actions feel relevant to real objectives, not just abstract self-improvement.
Consider an example: an individual with strong entrepreneurial preferences - someone who thrives on new ventures, innovation and disruption - may be enormously valuable during a start-up phase but potentially a destabilising influence during an operational consolidation phase. A good development plan would help that person understand this dynamic, channel their energy productively and develop the behavioural flexibility needed to succeed across different business contexts.
3. Anchor the plan to concrete job objectives
Development plans that float free from day-to-day reality rarely stick. The most effective plans are securely linked to what a person is actually trying to achieve in their role.
Start by clarifying your current job objectives, then ask:
- Which of your natural strengths directly support these objectives - and how can you lean into them more deliberately?
- Where do your current gaps create risk or limit your effectiveness - and what is the most important gap to address?
- What specific behavioural changes or new capabilities would have the greatest impact on your performance right now?
Tip: Prioritisation is key. Trying to develop everything at once is neither realistic nor effective. Focus on the two or three actions that are most directly tied to your current objectives and where the return on development investment will be highest.
This applies both to your own development and to what others need from you. A development plan should not only ask, “how do I get better?” but also “how do I work more effectively with the people around me?”
4. Factor in Key Relationships
Individual development is much less likely to happen in isolation. Being accountable to others makes you significantly more likely to follow through on tasks or development, as well as reinforcing team relationships. Research from the Journal of Applied Psychology shows you have a 20% chance of completing a goal on your own but are 65% more likely to follow through on a goal when you share it with a manager or someone you respect. Scheduled check-ins (e.g. with a colleague, peer or manager) raise the chances of success to 95%.
IMAGE
How you develop has a direct impact on those around you. While in turn, your manager, your team and your key stakeholders - and their behaviours - shape the environment in which your development takes place and make it more or less likely to succeed.
A good development plan explicitly considers these dynamics. Reflect on:
- Who are the key relationships that most affect your ability to deliver - your manager, direct reports, peers or key stakeholders?
- What is it about how you work that helps or hinders those people - and what do they find difficult about working with you?
- What do others need from you that you are not currently providing - and what do you need from them?
Understanding the interpersonal dimension of development is not a soft add-on. It is central to performance. Executives in particular operate in environments where relationship dynamics, team composition and the ability to coordinate diverse behaviours toward a common objective are critical success factors. Holding a team development session and having in person one-to-ones between team members and their team leader are vital activities that support how likely someone is to follow through on their plans. Colleagues and managers are more likely also to support and reinforce development in day-to-day activities.
5. Focus on flexibility across the business cycle
One of the most valuable things a development plan can do is build behavioural flexibility - the ability to adapt your approach to different situations, business phases and challenges.
Most executives find that the range of activities their role demands goes well beyond what comes naturally to them. The goal of development is not to turn people into someone they are not but to expand their range - to be effective across a wider spectrum of tasks and contexts, without losing the authenticity that comes from playing to their core strengths.
This means a development plan should include:
- Actions to deepen strengths and make better use of natural preferences
- Actions to address critical gaps that limit effectiveness in the current role
- Stretches that build capability in areas that will be increasingly important as the business or the individual's career evolves
Progress in all three areas simultaneously is ambitious. But even incremental movement in the right direction - done consistently over time - compounds significantly and leads to sustained performance improvement.
6. Make it actionable and measurable
This one you are likely to know already: SMART objectives. The best insight in the world has no value unless it translates into action. A development plan should specify not just what you want to develop, but how - with clear, concrete steps that can be taken in the context of real work.
Effective development actions tend to share certain characteristics. They are:
- Specific: clearly defined and not open to interpretation
- Connected to real objectives: not abstract exercises but genuine work challenges
- Progressive: building on each other in a logical sequence
- Observable: others can notice and give feedback on your development
Tip: For each development priority, aim to identify at least one action that you can take immediately, one that will require sustained effort over weeks or months and one that will test you at the edge of your current capability.
Frameworks such as PROPHET are useful as they generate specific, actionable recommendations linked to individual profiles. These recommendations can serve as a starting point - but the individual must take ownership of prioritising and contextualising them to their unique situation.
7. Create a Culture of Positive Development
Finally, development plans do not exist in a vacuum. They are most effective when they sit within a broader organisational culture that values self-awareness, encourages honest feedback and celebrates growth daily, not just discrete development tasks that bear no relation to real work and interactions.
When people receive positive recognition for expressing their natural traits and developing their capabilities, extrinsic reward reinforces the development effort. People want to work in environments where they feel understood, where their strengths are valued and where development is treated as a genuine investment rather than a remedial exercise.
Organisations that take this seriously - that actively coordinate individual preferences with business needs, that invest in understanding team dynamics, and that create conditions where people can thrive doing work they find meaningful - consistently outperform those that do not.
In Summary: the hallmarks of a sterling development plan
A good development plan is not a form-filling exercise. It is a living understanding of development, that connects individual insight (and team relationships) to real objectives, that is honest about both strengths and gaps and that generates specific, prioritised actions that make a genuine difference to performance.
To summarise the key principles:
- Ground the plan in genuine self-awareness and behavioural insight
- Ensure it is motivating to the individual
- Match development to the specific needs of the role and the current business phase
- Factor in the dynamics of key relationships – and use team development and one-to-ones to reinforce development and make it more likely to be supported by one another
- Make it specific, prioritised and actionable
- Embed development in a culture of positive reinforcement and growth
When these principles are applied together, development plans stop being administrative obligations and become what they should be: powerful tools for sustained, meaningful improvement that also contribute to loyalty and retention, as well as impacting the wider team around an individual.