Professional Development Training Example
Welcome to the New Managers Training Academy 🎉! You’ve been identified as key performers who would make great managers. We’re here to help you to succeed on your journey. This training exercise for first-time managers will help you get experience with one-on-one’s and employee development planning conversations.
Working in partners, take turns being the manager and the employee discussing career goals. Start with the general one-on-one conversation, in which you work through the Rose, Thorn, Bud framework for kicking off conversations. Then move on to designing each of your performance development plans for addressing a business challenge that’s important to you. Finally, brainstorm together about common performance issues, so that you can develop the ability to respond empathetically to those issues.
One-on-One Conversations
What to Watch
Watch these videos and then proceed through the one-on-one agenda.
- 6 Tips for Productive 1:1 Meetings with Your Manager - The one-on-one from the perspective of the employee
- ONE-ON-ONE MEETINGS WITH EMPLOYEES - The one-on-one from the perspective of the manager
One-on-One Agenda
If you are playing the employee, respond to these agenda items:
| What to share… | Description |
|---|---|
| Rose | Per Jeff Su: “A win you experienced since the last time you two had a chat. Does not have to be a ‘big’ win, just needs to start the meeting on a positive note” |
| Thorn | Per Jeff Su: “A challenge you’ve recently encountered and might need more support on” |
| Bud | Per Jeff Su: “A new idea you have or something you want to learn more about and you want your manager’s input” |
Source: 6 Tips for Productive 1:1 Meetings with Your Manager
Remember, providing a great deal of detail may not necessarily help your manager give better recommendations. Try to be targeted when answering these questions.
If you are playing the manager:
- Listen attentively.
- Ask questions that will help the person to think through potential solutions to issues they are encountering.
- Offer suggestions about gaps in thinking that may be preventing the person from moving forward in their work.
- Recognize when the person just needs to vent, and you need to take no action.
- Suggest and offer resources that may help the person.
- Offer encouragement.
- Ask for feedback.
- Make plans to follow up.
Source: ONE-ON-ONE MEETINGS WITH EMPLOYEES
Remember, providing effective feedback sometimes relies on listening more, speaking less, and helping a person come to their own conclusions about work matters.
Performance Development Plan
Following D2L’s Employee Development Plans, quickly design a SMART system for addressing a business challenge you’d like to solve. Design your system based on the following format from D2L.
D2L Employee Development Plan Framework
| Plan category | Description |
|---|---|
| Plan category | What would you give as a short subject line to the challenge? |
| Your role | Who are you, and what is your relationship to the challenge? |
| Business challenge | What is the business challenge you’d like to solve? |
| Manager readiness check | What do you need to know to be able to do that? What preparation do you need to do to address the challenge? |
| Development within work priorities | How can you develop the capacity to address the challenge within the work you’re already doing? |
| Continuous feedback loop | How will you get continuous feedback about your improvement? |
| Competing-priority-proof accountability | What are ways of making the skills development you need to do actionable, given than you have many competing priorities? |
Performance Improvement Plan (PIP)
What to Watch
Watch this video and then proceed through the PIP agenda.
- JAN Role-Play Training Series: Performance Management - A role play on open and honest communication leading to performance improvements for both managers and employees
PIP Agenda
Your final activity in partners is to brainstorm answers together to questions around common performance issues. Pick an issue that interests you, and respond together to these questions.
- What is a common area for improvement that you would like to understand better, such as tardiness, late delivery of work, problems with communication? Why?
- How does understanding the issue help you to be a better employee or manager?
- What do the stakeholders need to know to respond to the issue? (Circumstances and policies, for instance)
- What help can be provided to each of the stakeholders to help them to respond to the issue?
- What communication structures and rules should be put in place to support everyone’s improvement in this area, if any?
📥 Download this Content
Find this file on our repo and download it.
🤖 GAI Study Prompts
Copy the downloaded content and try it with these prompts:
- “I’d like to build upon these management skills as a new manager. What are 3 topics you’d suggest that I study next?”
- “Please explain the motivation behind having difficult conversations.”
- “What do we do if a team member is demonstrating a common performance issue?”
- “What are constructive ways of having these types of conversations that avoid tone policing?”
- “Please generate 5 different scenarios in which a person is being tone policed. Write a 3-5 sentence narrative story that illustrates each scenario. Also include discussion questions that help guide a person toward understanding that a behavior may be tone policing.”