PDP & ‘SMART’ goal setting

Personal Development Plan

A Personal Development Plan (PDP) is a tool to help you reflect on your own performance
and achievements and plan for your personal and career development.
It is likely to be more short-term than in other areas of work where long and medium goal are
more usually set but of course it can contribute to medium and longer term goal e.g. change
of career, and success in the short-term is likely to be motivating, encouraging you to
challenge yourself further.
It involves the setting of personal goals/outcomes and developing an awareness of the
process and activities which enable the goals to be achieved.
A Personal Development Plan will help you to:
 Evaluate and recognise you own strengths
 Be more effective in monitoring your progress
 Take responsibility for your own personal development
 Identify learning opportunities that might be available.

You should share your PDP with your line manager and use it in your appraisal /
performance reviews; your PDP is something that you can talk through with your mentor as
well.
Goal and objective setting for competencies – the behaviours
To achieve high performance, people need to know:
 The scope of their responsibilities
 What standards of achievement are expected
 The process by which their performance will be measured
 What support they can expect
 How they are doing.

Clear goals and measurable outcomes are essential. Ideally, when setting long and short-
term goals people need to ensure that they are:
 Specific - they spell out in concrete terms what is to be achieved
 Measurable - quantitatively or qualitatively, you will know when it has been achieved
 Achievable - they are ambitious, yet attainable given the conditions, resources
available and timescale
  Results Orientated / Realistic - they describe a specific end product, result or
outcome that is of value to the organisation and employee
 Time Bound - a time limit in which to achieve the results is included.

Making Personal Development Goals SMART

People can find writing goals to improve a competency or behaviour (the how) more difficult
than writing goals to improve performance objectives (the what). It can sometimes seem
harder to make them really specific or measurable.
However, it is possible. Below is a worked example of a competency or behavioural goal,
showing how you can make it SMART.
Broad area of focus:
Confidence in meetings.
Being more specific – a SMART goal: What specifically do I want to achieve?
When speaking in meetings where the majority of people are more senior to me I want to be
able to put my point of view across clearly and confidently. I want to go from a 7-9 by the end
of XXX.
Making it Measurable – How will I measure it?
Self-measurement:
I will review how I think I have performed after each meeting – how many times, and how
well did I do the things I said I was going to do?
Measurement by others:
Feedback on the extent to which I demonstrate the behaviours I’ve identified, and how
confident (on a scale of 1-10?) I appear. I could ask people before each meeting to observe
me and give me feedback afterwards.
Making it Achievable, yet challenging – Am I, and anyone else involved, truly agreed and
committed to this? How strong is my reason for wanting to achieve this? To what extent will
this help me develop myself and improve my performance? Dream big and reach for the
stars but keep one foot on the ground
It is important for my future career that people know who I am and what I stand for and also
so that people engage with the project I am currently working on. It will challenge me as I get
very nervous and can feel intimidated in those meetings.
Making it Realistic – Do I believe there is at least an 80% probability of me succeeding?
Yes I believe I will achieve this and the timing is right as I need to get some decisions about
the key elements of the project soon.
Making it Timed – What do I want to achieve by when?
By xxx (short-term) I will have taken the necessary steps, as outlined above, to improve my
confidence.

Tips
Focus on what success will look like/sound like/feel like.
 Explore what success means to you
 Step into the future and imagine having achieved your goal
 How does it feel?
 What are the tangible differences?
 What have you gained?
 What were the key things that helped you to get to where you are now?

When setting your goal focus on the why and the what, the how can be decided later. The
“Yes, but how?” syndrome can kill objectives before they are fully defined, e.g. “I want to
develop new skills, yes, but how do I make the time?”
When you are drafting goals look out for the following words in inverted commas. If they have
been included, use the prompts given at the side to help you make the goal more specific:
 Improved - specify a measurable improvement
 Better - specify how much better
 More - specify how much more
 Less - specify how much less
 Feel - specify what you will feel.

Process to help someone identify a SMART goal:

 Determine the general area of behaviour for the goal
 Explore that using probing questions to narrow it down
 Repeat process until its specific
 Is it behavioural?
 Is it in their control?
 Make it measurable using qualitative or quantitative method i.e. improve from 3-5,
increase number of times
 Ensure there is a timescale
 Ask if it’s achievable yet challenging
 Is the goal of real value?

Action
 One to three steps for each goal ensuring these are practical and precise
 What support / resources you need
 Who can help you