3 Powerful Performance Planning Questions You've Never Asked as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

Struggling to make your performance and development plans truly effective?

If you’re finding that traditional planning questions aren’t setting your team up for success, this episode is tailored just for you. We’ll dive into how to tackle common pitfalls in performance and development planning, ensuring your goals are not only achievable but transformative.

By tuning in, you'll discover how to identify and overcome potential obstacles before they derail your plans, pinpoint the specific changes needed to achieve your objectives, and recognize the goals that will truly motivate and impact you and your team.

Don't miss out on these game-changing insights—click play now and revolutionize your approach to performance and development planning!

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, my aspiring modern and humanitarian development leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. Today continues our series on performance and development planning. I know several of you are experiencing that right now, even if you're not, you can use this for developing goals in general, or even those check-in times.

So I encourage you to listen because today you're going to learn: why the typical performance and development plan questions don't fully prepare your team to succeed. Three powerful questions that will help yourself and your team create game-changing performance and development plans. And when to ask these questions during performance and development planning time.

So just really quickly, because I want to be mindful of the time today. Most development plan or performance planning questions fall a little short from my experience.

We put together a series of goals for the year. The performance planning goals, which are usually tied to a strategy or a project that we have. And we also tie development, planning, hopefully to the needs of the individual and their desires to advance professionally.

But they don't from my experience really fully prepare ourselves or our team for taking action and for really overcoming and thinking through what might realistically happen as we're going through our year.

Most performance and development planning questions do not tap into the motivation behind why someone might be wanting to do something or what is motivating them and how to be more motivated.

Most performance and development planning questions focus on the doing and not what might get in the way while they're doing. Which is so interesting because we spend a lot of time thinking about these things for our projects, for example, contingency plans, or when we have our monitoring and evaluation plan, I forgot what it's called, but I remember you have to come up with a series of things that might happen, and then what you might do about those. But we don't really do that for our performance or development planning goals.

And then finally, we do not think a lot about what might need to change in order to take action on this plan. And what I mean by that is what might we need to do differently?

How might we need to be different to accomplish some of these goals? Those are kinds of questions that are overlooked from my experience, and yet are so helpful and transformative in terms of what is the growth that we need to happen in order to be able to realize these goals. So I'll explain a little bit more as we go through these three questions. But just to say that these will make your performance and development planning goals or your teams more comprehensive and more realistic.

The first powerful question is what is the most likely challenge that might prevent you from completing your performance and or development plan? You could ask this question for the performance plan and then also about the development plan. But I think that it's really worth the time to think about what might derail you from completing this plan.

What are the obstacles that will probably happen, because they're probably similar to this year's obstacles. In terms of getting in the way of you achieving your goals. Just some things that I can think about off the top of my head, our meetings, unplanned emergencies, proposal writing, donor visits. And unforeseen events that can come up and might prevent us from acting on something.

Especially when it comes to the development plan, I don't think we really think through how are you really going to make time for this course, for example? The most likely challenge that might prevent you from completing your development plan is likely that you will not create time for it. Or that you prioritize other things over it.

And so how can you plan for that so it doesn't happen? How can you plan for the things that you know are going to get in the way, and that could be applied to both the performance plan and the development plan.

Once again, first powerful question: what is the most likely challenge that will prevent you from completing your performance and or development plan? And then what can you do about overcoming or planning for those challenges? A contingency plan.

The second powerful question is: what are three things you will need to do differently from what you're doing now, in order to accomplish your plan? This is an interesting question because I don't think we often think about how we might need to change in order to achieve a goal.

And a lot of times when we are pursuing a goal, especially if we want to grow in some way professionally or develop a new skill, we will need to do things differently. And so some answers to this might be something like I will need to manage my time better, or I will need to do more field visits. I will need to work more closely with our implementing partner. There are all kinds of answers to this, but it's such a great question.

And I like saying what are three things specifically, because it gets people to really think, not just about all the things, but maybe the top three things that you will need to do differently. And it allows them to focus a bit more on those three things, rather than being overwhelmed by an entire list of things that they're going to need to do differently. And if you can get them into this space of how they might need to think differently or be different in some way, how they might need to see themselves differently.

Like for example, if they're going to start supervising others, how might they need to see themselves differently in order to do that? Right? That could be part of that question. This is something we also don't often ask, but can be very powerful. And this question can be asked after your team has made their first draft of their performance or development plan and you are finalizing it or you're reviewing it together.

This will help strengthen what they already have and your own as well. You can use this for your own plan. Okay. So once again, First two questions: what is the most likely challenge that might prevent you from completing your performance and our development plan? Second question: what are three things you will need to do differently from what you are doing now to accomplish your plan? The third one is what is the goal that would make you feel proud

and like you've made a big impact if you were to accomplish it? So which of these goals if you were to accomplish it, would you feel like you've really made an impact? Yeah. So it should be one that they've already written down.

By asking this question, first of all, if they don't have a goal that is going to make them feel proud by accomplishing it, then that to me is a red flag right there, because it means that they're probably going to be less motivated as they pursue their performance or development plan. But this will also help you as a leader

understand what is their priority? What do they really hope to accomplish so that you can help them prioritize their time and make sure that they're able to accomplish it? And also it lets you know, what is important to them that they would feel proud to accomplish. And it gives them the time to think about it as well.

So I think tapping into, through this question, which goal is the one that would be most motivating for you to accomplish is a very powerful way of understanding what is their priority. And then how can you as a leader, help them make that a priority. Because oftentimes, especially if it's a development plan goal, like let's say that they say that their priority is to learn a new skill or get an HR certificate, for example.

And you know that will help them develop professionally in some way. And they just haven't been able to do it in the past for whatever reasons, maybe time management, whatever. So, if they say that that's the thing that they think they would make the most impact by accomplishing. Then you can also explore that through coaching follow up questions, like, how would it make you or make more impactful or how would this make a bigger impact? But then also asking them, okay, well, how can you make sure that you're able to do this?

And then finally, I have a bonus question for you, and that is to ask your team member to name three things that they will do to make sure they are not feeling overloaded or overworked. So those three things might be something like saying no to extra work, not being available all the time, working on perfectionism.

They might be something like going to you to ask for help with prioritization of their workload, all these kinds of things, but it's a really nice question, because it shows that you care about their workload. That is a priority for you. And that you want to help them plan for it in advance before it becomes an issue.

And I'll be talking in another episode about how to incorporate non-traditional goals into the performance plan and development plan, because I think putting a goal like caring for yourself as a goal for your performance plan can be a really effective way of making somebody feel like they have the permission to do it. And also you're showing them that you're serious about it.

So once again, the top three questions or powerful questions are, what is the most likely challenge that might prevent you from completing your performance and or development plan? And, what will you do if those things happen? Number two, what are three things that you will need to do differently from what you are doing now in order to accomplish your plan? And then number three, what is the goal that would make you feel proud and like you've made a big impact if you were able to accomplish it?

And on our next episode on Wednesday. We're going to be discussing when is the appropriate time to ask the all time favorite question: how can I support you? Because from my experience, we usually ask it at the wrong time and we actually undermine our team's development. Until then keep evolving bye for now.