How Individual Development Objectives Help Employees Adapt to New Business Strategies

The following is adapted from Adaptive.

An employee at a mechanical business, where they’re treated like little more than a cog in a machine, can easily fall into a rut. Every day they are exercising the same muscles. They are a piece in a machine always rotating in the same direction. It is no wonder, then, that when strategic change requires different muscles, nobody is ready. 

By setting individual objectives to help your employees develop new skills, your team as a whole will be better prepared to pivot directions and keep up with the changing market. 

Develop Employee Skills and Agility by Setting Objectives

Asking an employee at a mechanical business to quickly pivot is like asking Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt to play soccer. Just because you can run fast in one direction does not mean you can zigzag a soccer ball down a field. Yet business leaders ask people to do this all the time.

Instead, leaders need to train employees to change direction and diversify their skills. To stay limber, everyone should be doing something to improve themselves or move a strategy closer to its desired outcome. If you are always stretching, you will not pull a muscle when told to break left. In traditional hierarchical business structures, performance improvement plans (PIP) that set development goals are typically given only to low performers as a red flag that they need to up their game or else. 

In a more adaptive company structure that promotes cross-team collaboration instead of relying on commands that come from “higher up,” everyone is given a performance improvement plan (PIP), regardless of their level of experience. While one goal is to level up those with low scores or room to improve, it’s also important to use individual development objectives with high performers to better utilize their skills and allow them to share that sunshine with other team members. In this model, there is no differentiation between how high and low performers are treated. In each case, we are challenging employees to figure out how to stretch their skills and keep them engaged and invested in both their own performance and the performance of the company. 

For best results, you should hire people to be business coaches. Better yet, you can identify high-performing, capable individuals from within your company to fill this role. These coaches will establish and oversee individual development objectives for the rest of your team. The objectives will be based on a combination of business strategy and the review of comprehensive feedback that has been provided by their colleagues. What skills will your company need to strategically cultivate moving forward? Individual development objectives serve as a way of aligning personal growth with business strategy. 

Development Objectives Create an Equal Playing Field

Individual development objectives can also go a long way toward reducing animosity in your teams, which in turn improves how well those teams handle new strategies together. Creating and working with individual development objectives takes away the opaque nature of promotions and pay raises, and provides clear evidence of how each individual needs to improve in order to perform more effectively in the eyes of their colleagues. The feedback they are receiving, whether positive or negative, is concrete. This feedback can now be parlayed into specific individual development objectives that individuals are on the hook to complete on a quarterly basis. At the end of each quarter, the employee will check in with their coach to confirm that these objectives either have been completed or are ongoing. Everyone knows what they’re expected to do and has a clear path to advancement. 

This results in a transparent formula for calculating salary adjustments. It serves as a way of ensuring not only that employees are constantly growing and improving, but that they are improving in response to what the business requires for growth and refinement.

While salary adjustments are great motivation for driving employee performance improvement objectives, it’s critical to publicly recognize any time these improvements are achieved. Whereas promotion announcements can be divisive because they are pointing toward a zero-sum game, employee achievements are a completely different ballgame. 

Colleagues can rally around one another for personal achievements that they know their cohorts have worked for in a demonstrable manner. With this model, everyone gets their own cheerleading squad. Beyond this, they can motivate others in the company to emulate. Not everyone can get a promotion, but everyone can get a certification or some sort of training that makes the entire team stronger. 

By properly implementing individual development objectives, in one fell swoop, you have built a more adaptable workforce, a network of support, and a fair path to advancement for your employees.

For more advice on development objectives, you can find Adaptive on Amazon.

Christopher Creel has spent more than twenty years building and leading research and development teams at major companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Perot Systems, and CSC. During this time, he realized that trends in education, technology, and globalization had broken the traditional organizational model, and he began to devise a system that could improve business results, increase employee productivity and engagement, promote collective and individual growth, and raise the general level of happiness in the workplace. He refined this model through fifteen years of applied R&D, and three independent studies over the last five years showed dramatic improvements in engagement, productivity, operational efficiencies, and risk mitigation.