Proposing a tailored management development training plan for John

HR Letter

Dear Vice President of Human Resources,

As I am sure you know, we have a new development program that involves our management and the development thereof. It is just one piece of our broader talent management efforts and initiatives here at our company. As we have discussed, part and parcel of that program is to execute and complete a battery of training courses and lessons over the course of an entire year after someone is promoted to the program. Beyond that, each one-year plan is tailored and developed with the specific person in mind. Due to that fact that John, your subordinate, has just entered this program, it is imperative that we plan out his training over the next year so as to help him fully realize his own personal potential and his value to the company.

I understand that your time is valuable and that it might be challenging to fit this into your demanding schedule. However, both your presence and involvement in this meeting and the development process is imperative as you will be working most closely with John as compared to anyone else that will have a manager/subordinate relationship with him. Because you are the closest to him, you are the person that will best know his strengths, his weaknesses, what precisely he needs to develop in terms of traits and performance metrics and so on. You will also be the person that will see him as he progresses through the program. Through this firsthand witnessing of his progress, you know will know what he has mastered, when he has mastered it, what he needs more work on, what he needs less work on and areas where he remains weak in general. The idea is to have John reach the highest level of competency possible overall without sacrificing potential gains in other areas. While other people could certainly assist him in this regard, you are most able to help him due to your direct exposure and relationship to him (Forbes Coaching Counsel, 2016).

Of course, the best way for John to learn is to actually complete tasks that will be mundane to his new role. It will certainly help him to see tasks being completed in the correct manner by yourself or someone else that is qualified. Indeed, if John is best at learning by seeing, then this will help him a lot. Regardless, he will have to venture out on his own behalf at some point so that he can prove what he has learned. Indeed, some people also learn well (or learn better) by actually completing the task themselves. In short, there is a need to tell him what is needed, show him what is needed and then allowing him to prove what he has learned. Any deficiencies that are spotted can then be coached and fixed. I understand that this may or may not be new to you given your relatively new status with this company. However, our firm strives for consistency and parity in all things and we want to ensure that John is truly representative of his department and the company he works for (Katzenbach, 2016).