How Do You Write a Development Plan for a First-Time Manager?

How do you write a development plan for a first-time manager?

Write it around one behaviour your team would notice, not a trait you'd like to have. "Be a better leader" cannot be measured and cannot be practised on a Tuesday afternoon. "Hold a 20-minute 1:1 with each report every week, and name one specific piece of feedback in it" can be. Attach a measure, a weekly time budget, and a first step within seven days, then review in 90 days. That structure matters more than the specific skill you choose.

This isn't a stylistic preference. Locke and Latham's review of four decades of goal-setting research found that specific, moderately difficult goals produce better performance than vague ones such as "do your best" (Locke & Latham, 2002). "Be a better leader" is the workplace equivalent of "do your best." It feels aspirational and does nothing.

What does the goal actually need to contain?

The if-then line is doing real work. Gollwitzer and Sheeran's meta-analysis found that implementation intentions — simple "if X, then Y" plans — reliably improve follow-through compared with a goal alone (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). New managers are especially prone to letting 1:1s slide once a crisis arrives; the if-then clause is the guardrail.

An example outside the office: a captain who has never captained

Consider a cricketer handed the captaincy mid-season after years as a specialist bowler. The technical skill that got them there — bowling — is not the skill the new role demands. Their development plan for the season might look odd on paper: almost no time on bowling mechanics, and two hours a week on reading match situations with the outgoing captain and giving post-over feedback to two younger bowlers. The measure isn't wickets. It's whether those two bowlers say, three months on, that they understood what was expected of them in the field. That's the same shape as the office example: a behaviour, a measure someone else can confirm, a modest weekly budget.

How should the practice be structured?

Most of a first-time manager's development should happen in the job itself, not in a workshop. The 70/20/10 framework — roughly 70% on-the-job practice, 20% learning from others, 10% formal instruction — is a reasonable starting split, though the exact ratios aren't rigorously evidenced and shouldn't be treated as fixed (CCL; ATD). For a new manager, that typically means:

1. 70 — practice: running the actual 1:1s, giving actual feedback, chairing the actual team meeting.
2. 20 — from others: shadowing a manager they rate, or a monthly debrief with their own manager on what they're noticing.
3. 10 — formal: a short course on giving feedback, read or watched once, not repeated weekly.

We wrote more on sizing this ratio to a real hours budget in our explainer on the 70/20/10 model.

What counts as progress, and when should it be checked?

Checking weekly invites noise — one awkward 1:1 doesn't mean the goal has failed, any more than one good one means it's cracked. Amabile and Kramer's research on workplace motivation found that even small, visible progress on meaningful work reliably lifts how people feel about their work, which is one reason a short, regular check-in beats an annual one (Amabile & Kramer, 2011). But "regular" doesn't mean constant. A 90-day review is a sensible first checkpoint for a management behaviour — enough time for a real pattern to appear rather than a lucky week. Our piece on surviving week six covers the earlier wobble point most plans hit.

Where Jobulary fits

If you're sponsoring this plan as an HR or L&D lead, or writing it for yourself, Jobulary structures exactly this: a live goal needs a reason, where it sits, a measure, hours from a stated budget, a first step within seven days, and a trade-off if another goal is live. Check-ins take about three minutes, and growth is only reported when it's larger than measurement error — otherwise the plan says "held steady," which is itself useful information. The plan belongs to the manager, not the organisation that sponsored it; nobody but them sees the reflections behind the numbers. For deciding how many goals a new manager should actually be carrying at once, see our piece on that question, or browse the broader approach on how it works.