Why CEOs need a personal development plan and how to build one
Every CEO understands the benefits of developing their team. But it’s easy to forget that CEO development is just as important — I know that from experience. This blog is to help others avoid my early mistakes and understand from the get-go that a CEO development plan is essential for leadership success.
At Charlie, we place a heavy emphasis on high performance. It’s baked into every part of our company culture, and we only hire people who are determined to become world class at what they do — and quickly. Once they’re in the company, we make it our responsibility to help them get there.
As part of that process, we ask everyone at Charlie to complete a Personal Development Plan (PDP) — this is where we set out one or two main goals to achieve for the year. Our People and Talent Manager takes the lead on this, encouraging everyone to reflect on where they are, where they want to be, and what the company could do to support them. At the end of each year, everyone sits down with their Team Lead to set out what a successful next 12 months looks like for them.
One Christmas though, I had a pretty jarring realisation. Despite preaching the virtues of development plans, I didn’t have one for myself — there was no CEO development plan.
This struck me as foolish, short-sighted and hypocritical in equal measure. I should be the standard-bearer for quality and high standards, but I had no plan for CEO support and development over the next 12 months. I'd assumed that I didn't need to develop my own leadership ability.
This is a crucial realisation that I don’t think enough founders face up to. As CEOs, we have to understand that we’re one of the biggest limiting factors to success. Every month, the challenges facing our businesses become more acute, and the ability to navigate them has the potential to either make or break a company.
What’s more, as a small business these challenges are constantly changing and evolving. For example:
- The demands of a CEO when it’s a team of 50 versus 150 people
- When you have multiple offices in different international locations
- As the board expands and different interests and expectations must be managed and met.
Every startup and small business CEO needs to be able to handle all of these challenges and more — which is why a plan for executive personal development is so vital .
What’s more, we must be primed and ready to deal with problems that we’ve never tackled before, and able to manage them when they’re coming at us thick and fast. With no plan for CEO development, I’d been caught out as a preacher who didn’t follow his own gospel, and I was determined to put that right.
So after that Christmas, I sent this email round the team:
Hello everyone,
I hope you all had a great break.
I got quite jealous over the break that I didn’t have my own PDP, so I decided to have a go at it.
I just wanted to share it with you all for transparency. Let me know if you have any thoughts!
Ben
Below is my attempt to flesh those thoughts out a little more — basically, the plan I’ve come up with for professional and personal growth for executives.
Understanding executive personal development
Thinking about a plan for CEO development is difficult — it’s not as clear cut as it might be for one of our Junior Engineers, for example. A Junior Engineer needs a planned path to becoming a Mid (and then Senior) Engineer, and that process is guided by their Team Lead.
But there’s no corresponding pathway for a CEO. In 12 months' time, I will either be busted, fired or… well, still be a CEO.
At this point, it’s important to note that I hadn’t been completely disregarding my own development — as a CEO, that’s almost impossible. And the steep learning curve is (at least for me) part of the thrill of the job.
Day to day, there are several sources of CEO support and development at Charlie:
- Constant feedback from the leadership team and the board. They play an invaluable role when it comes to holding me to account, and I’m always grateful. Regular feedback is built into our business model at Charlie, and we frequently feed back to each other, so everyone always knows what’s going on. We also have performance reviews twice a year, so that’s when we review our individual PDPs.
- Supported immensely by my peers. I am in touch with many other CEOs and founders who have helped me negotiate choppy waters, and have been hugely influential to my own executive personal development.
- Our investors. Charlie’s investors are crucial for challenging my decision-making and applying rigorous critique to my thought processes.
But as valuable as these sources are, they’re also very reactive — all inevitably connected to what’s happening right now. A CEO development plan, on the other hand, is about the future: plotting a course for the next 12 months and knowing exactly where you want to be.
I knew I needed to move beyond learning on the fly. To be the CEO that Charlie needs, I had to start learning more proactively and conscientiously. With an eye on the future, my mission was to up-skill today in order to be better prepared for tomorrow.
So what does a CEO development plan look like?
What to include in your CEO development plan
Despite not having a clear plan for my CEO development, I didn’t have to look far to know what I needed to include — everything we’d put in place for the development of the Charlie team was also applicable to me.
I reviewed our HR policies and internal docs through the lens of executive personal development, and used them to craft my own CEO development plan.
Below are the elements I think are applicable to any plan for CEO development, regardless of industry.
High performance behaviours
High performance behaviours are a framework and a common language that we use to talk about delivering top performance at Charlie. And they apply to everyone — even the CEO.
No matter what level or role, these behaviours embody what we feel is important and ensure that the same foundations are at the heart of everything we do.
Our high performance behaviours are:
- Get uncomfortable
For a CEO, this could look like: acquiring new skills and/or knowledge that allow you to push yourself.
- Give energy
For a CEO, this could look like: finding moments to support others in the business, either personally or with their work.
- Drive for results
For a CEO, this could look like: questioning if there’s a faster or more efficient way to achieve a successful outcome.
- Be humble
For a CEO, this could look like: looking to others and challenging your own hypotheses and assumptions.
Just like the rest of my team, I need to be aligned with our high performance behaviours. I’ve used them as a framework for my CEO development plan — they guide my executive personal development and provide a quick and effective way for me to check in with myself and realign if I’ve strayed off course.
Personal development time
To ensure that everyone has the opportunity to grow and learn, we champion the importance of dedicated 'personal development time' at Charlie.
To that end, every member of our team spends two hours a fortnight on their own personal development. Whatever the focus of this development, it needs to be linked back to their PDP. I realised this didn’t have to be any different for me.
Like my team, I now set time aside for my own personal development. My CEO development plan is the springboard for this. And if something comes up during study time that feels like it could take me in a different direction, I make a note of it for inclusion in a future plan.
Development budgets
From the first day on the job, there are development budgets available to Charlie employees — we want everyone to have equal access to opportunities that we believe are essential to doing our jobs well.
One example is ‘Learn Your Way, which is a central budget to support more expensive development activities such as training courses and coaching. To make use of this budget, members of our team can propose anything that they and their manager believe will benefit their development and contribute to Charlie's goals.
In keeping with this — and you may be sensing a theme here — I now have a budget for CEO support and development, which enables me to take advantage of opportunities that I may have previously allowed to pass me by.
The matrix of performance
Understanding how someone is performing can be a difficult one. At Charlie, we follow a matrix of performance to understand where people stand on the performance scale. This is also something I do myself, to try and see where I'm at. Of course, I don't really have a manager to give me feedback, but that doesn't mean I can't ask others for feedback on performance and where they would place me on that scale.
Stepping out to step forward
As a CEO, you’ve got to be really intentional about your growth and development — you can't expect others to grow if you're not considering what that also means for you.
Growth can come from all areas, and often in the ways you least expect, so I think the key behaviour here is making the time to reflect. It’s in those moments when you realise what has changed, and what needs to change, in how you approach your role.
Here are two of the intentions that fuel my own executive personal development:
- Every month, I am committing to one full study day out of the office, where I am completely disconnected from Slack and emails
- I’ll be working through one book at a time, looking for learnings to help me become the kind of CEO I need to be, and developing new leadership skills.
Taking that time out like this feels like an extraordinary luxury, and I won’t pretend that stepping out like this doesn’t make me a little twitchy. But achieving excellence in my role should be as important to me as it is to anyone else at Charlie, so I need to prioritise it.
I’ve also added targets to my CEO development intentions. For example, I’m going to read each book in one (max two) sittings — and not just read, but study. I’ll take notes and work them into my CEO development plan, which I’ll then share with the team for comments and feedback. Their input will be both insightful and useful, and help to keep me accountable. Once they know my ambitions, I’ll have to regularly update them on my progress.
They’ll also be able to see that the way I work is no different to them: everyone at Charlie has a development plan — even the CEO.
