You can stick your PDP where it fits

A question from a practice manager yesterday elicited a rather blunt response from me.

The question: "I'm going to launch Personal Development Plans in 2022 and I'd like some ideas on how to get the team motivated to complete them?"

My answer: "If you asked me to start a PDP in January I'd probably tell you where to shove it."

Let's be clear.

The last 20 months have been some of the toughest any of us have faced in our lives.

During much of that time, my own lifetime habits of carefully planning the future and delivering the present have been overshadowed by the need to deliver Quadrants 1 & 3 of the Eisenhower Matrix .

My days have been:

• Do the urgent and important stuff;

• Do the urgent but not important stuff.

There were swathes of time last year and this, when my 3-year vision, 12-month plan and 90-day goals were out of the window. It was just a succession of groundhog delivery days.

Was it the same for you and your teams?

Absolutely - and that's why so many of them have suffered in silence or otherwise.

Much as I am taking a greater degree of control of my own strategy and tactics in 2022, much as I'm encouraging clients to do the same - the current state of affairs with the pandemic does still leave us with a background sense of uncertainty.

How Omicron will spread, what further restrictions on our movement will come into effect, whether there will be further variants to contend with and how our own dental regulators will respond, in their idiosyncratic principalities?

Never more important to be a Great Boss, never more important to have a Coach to hold you accountable, never more important to be part of a Community helping each other through these troubled times.

Your team don't need a PDP - what they need is to feel as if you are listening to them and that you have their back.