A Deeper Look at the MBTI® ThinkBox - My Personal Development Plan
posted by agammy
Hi everyone - I will be taking a week to explore the Myers-Briggs® ThinkBox and discuss several of the features in this blog. Today’s entry is about creating a personal development plan using the ThinkBox platform.
Day 3: My Personal Development Plan
After looking at some of the basic functionality of ThinkBox and exploring how I could use ThinkBox to improve my team, I decided to move into creating a development plan for myself. I thought the Developmental Plan would be really effective for individuals who also benefit from the guidance of a coach, counselor, or other “accountabili-buddy,” but as I started getting into it, it seemed like someone interested in improving their skills and developing their challenge areas (who didn’t benefit from the assistance of a coach) could use the system to self-monitor as well.
To begin, I first clicked on the My Development Plan menu at the top of the screen and then selected Create New Development Objective. When you are creating a developmental objective you are pretty free to choose suggestions from your type strengths/weaknesses list, or you can just write out your own personal or professional goals.
When creating your developmental goals, here are all the things you need to think about:
- Development Objective
- Description
- Start Date
- Check-In Date
- Completion Date
- Percent Complete
- What Success Will Look Like
- How I Will Measure Progress
- From this section, you can choose feedback in terms of 360 Feedback, a Performance Review, or you can self-monitor or request feedback by email from another member of your team (or anyone else you might want to be working on your goals with.)
Once you start adding developmental goals, you can send email reminders to yourself, add notes about milestones you’ve reached, see resources related to your goals, and save new resources into each goal. All this information can be turned into a pdf that you can print out for feedback sessions (or to hang on you fridge!)
This really demonstrated how comprehensive the ThinkBox system is. You can look at the challenges you face based on type, and then translate these challenges into developmental improvement plans. The goals you make are really “SMART” goals, in that you are forced to create Specific, Measurable Attainable Relevant and Time-bound goals.
Setting up a few goals for myself took a couple of hours, but I really felt like I had accomplished something when I was done, and I had already found some great resources to check out over the next several days.
Come back tomorrow, when I will discuss the E-Coaching Module in some depth.
