Working out loud can accelerate development. Share your Development plan with your team. They know your weaknesses already and they are in a great position to coach and support your learning.
When I worked in corporate life, I always managed to shock a few of my colleagues, both peers, team members and others, by sharing my development plan openly with them. My thinking was pretty simple. The benefits of sharing the plan were real.
My colleagues work with me every day. They know my strengths and weaknesses, usually better than I do. They are a great source of coaching and feedback. Sharing my plans with them authorised them to say “hey, Simon, you are doing that thing on your plan”
Acknowledging that I am trying to develop and sharing how was a great way to gain their trust and their support in the changes I was seeking to make. People valued the honesty and the effort to improve. People that I mentored valued the insight into how I put together my plan and where my efforts went. People went out of their way to give me suggestions and to work with me when their development needs were aligned. Peers and my teams also held me to account to do what I had openly committed to achieving. Most importantly, I was publicly role modelling what I asked them to do each day.
In addition, being explicit on when I was hoping to move roles and where I was hoping to go next helped the team around me to understand how they needed to develop and what opportunities that they might have ahead. Instead of succession planning being a mystery, it could be an open conversation in the team.
Take your development plan. Remove anything that is truly confidential or relates to others. Then share it will your colleagues. Get ready for some great conversations to help you and your peers grow.
