How to Write an Executive Development Plan (EDP)

Are you finding that your executive staff members are no longer growing in their roles? Is the industry moving faster than your company can? Are you keen to stay one step ahead of the competition? Whatever the motivation to grow your business through learning and education, creating an Executive Development Plan (EDP) is an excellent place to start.

An EDP is a strategy that comprises short- and long-term training methods to motivate and build your executive team’s skills.¹ EDPs are more intensive than general leadership training. They’re more personal and specifically allow executives to gain a broader perspective, giving them the power to grow their departments and identify future leaders within their teams.²

Ways to conduct training include face-to-face, online, and blended learning (a mix of face-to-face and online learning that supports the same development plan) – all of which aim to deliver a holistic, engaging learning experience.³

Deciding what kind of plan your business needs to implement to thrive is best seen as a five-step process. Investing the time to create an Executive Development Plan is investing in the future of your company and your employees.

Five steps to creating an Executive Development Plan

1. Define your goals

• Defining goals helps you to understand who you are and what drives you as a company. Right from the start, a development plan needs to incorporate goals from two different parties: a) the company and b) the individuals.
• Determining SMART goals are always a good place to start. This process involves weighing every goal against the SMART criteria ensuring they’re all Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. A good example of a SMART goal looks like this: By the end of the month, I want to increase my typing speed from 50 words a minute to 100 words a minute by making small speed improvements each week.⁴
• It’s vital to define both short- and long-term goals. For instance, you may immediately require your staff to understand and implement new policies like those outlined in the Protection of Personal Information (PoPI) Act but, over a longer term, you might want to develop your executives’ systems-analysis skills.
• Short-term goals are generally easier to define because they grow out of immediate concerns or motivations, while long-term goals can be harder to formulate (yet as important). One way to have a view into the future is to consider specific leadership gaps your company may have. Will any of your employees retire or go on maternity leave soon? How will their departure affect the company and which skill sets will be missing? Are there any opportunities to take into consideration?

People with written goals are 50% more likely to achieve than people without goals.⁵

2. Recognize development potential

• Potential leaders could be found anywhere in your company and identifying them can be challenging. Focusing only on top-performing employees is a mistake because it’s key to develop your team beyond those already showing potential. Good performance also doesn’t necessarily denote leadership qualities – soft skills (i.e. communication, efficiency, delegation) are more revealing of leadership potential than hard skills.
• Employees who collaborate easily, are able to delegate when necessary, have an eye for system efficiency, and are excellent at communication are the ones worth developing. If you lack these soft skills in your workforce, developing them should form part of your goals and executive development curriculum, as they act as the foundation of leadership performance.⁶

Leaders can be nurtured and developed, but not manufactured.⁷

Bob Half, founder of recruitment specialist firm Robert Half

3. Create a self-supporting plan

• It’s completely acceptable to get training on how to build a training plan, or to outsource parts or all of your training. Even when you outsource your training, you can still choose to be actively involved in building the curriculum.
• A balance of formal and informal leadership strategies⁸ is necessary for a self-supporting plan, as each supports the other in attaining their goals. This approach also provides a more holistic learning environment.⁹
• Formal leadership strategies might include elements such as classroom training (e.g. MBA programs), executive education short courses, and structured online courses. Formal education is generally a good base for a development plan as there are fixed outcomes and they’re far easier to outsource. This allows you to support your company goals with more flexible, informal strategies.¹⁰
• Informal leadership strategies are usually implemented to support formal strategies in achieving an organization’s goals. They might include peer mentoring, job rotation, job shadowing, and conferences.¹¹
• An EDP works best when participants are supported with ongoing feedback and coaching or mentoring, developing both the mentee and mentor.¹²

Ninety-three percent of managers feel they need training on how to coach their employees.¹³

4. Encourage learning before, during, and after training

• Conceptualizing and implementing an EDP isn’t enough to ensure your executive team will gain the required skills. The development plan will be far more effective if you adopt an ongoing learning culture.
• A learning culture results in an organization where “employees have opportunities to expand their skills, reinforce existing knowledge, and advance within their organization.”¹⁴
• This type of culture requires constant re-working and learning from the stream of data all around you. It’s an iterative process where there’s no end goal but rather an ongoing process of reframing.

There are many ways to encourage continuous education for your employees. One way is to offer staff members the opportunity to continue their education through online short courses.

High-performing learning organisations are 92% more likely to innovate and are 17% more likely to be their market share leader.¹⁵

5. Measure and optimize

• Once you have your goals in place and know what kind of program you can implement to achieve them, you’ll need to decide how to measure the success of your development plan.¹⁶
• To measure the plan’s impact, it’s key to capture hard statistics (e.g. financial metrics and the number of participants who completed the program) and soft statistics (e.g. employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and growth of leaders).¹⁷
• Once your EDP is running, you can collect this data and optimize your plan and goals as you move forward.

Implementing an Executive Development Plan could be seen as an employee retention and leadership longevity strategy. The plan will help you to identify potential leaders and nurture those who are already leading. Keep your broader business goals in mind as you build a development plan, and understand from the very beginning how you’ll analyze its success. Be sure to focus on creating a learning culture within your organization, even before you implement any formal executive development plans.

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