Creating Leadership Development Plan: 7 Simple Step By Step Guide

An organization must maintain good leadership behaviour to achieve development and success. A leadership development plan is the best strategic plan designed to develop employees’ leadership competencies and prepare them to play leadership and management roles within an organization. It is considered to be an effective and useful tool that ensures a strong pipeline of the future organization. But how to create a leadership development plan. Here, you go with the answer.

How to create a leadership development plan?

• Identify the right talent

It is crucial for an organization to have talent pools and a formal leadership development program from where they can choose the right talent to build a leadership product development plan. Suppose the organization does not have a formal talent pool. In that case, there is a need to take the assistance of talent management tools that can help to measure the present performance and future performance capacity.

• Get buy-in from key stakeholders

It is important to have buy-in from key stakeholders at the organizational level to work on a leadership development plan that includes the employees and the supervisor or manager of the targeted employees. The key stakeholders agree on the plan’s success by focusing on who will participate and when, and how it will be achieved.

• Identify the key leadership competencies

An organization need to identify the key leadership competencies for present and future success that are important for the leadership development plan. The leadership competencies may include conflict management, decision-making, Social Intelligence (SI), sharing a compelling vision, interpersonal skills, inclusiveness, agility, Emotional Intelligence (EI), etc.

• Determine the leadership style

The American Express Business Trends and Insights report shows that 7 different leadership styles exist: autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire, coaching, authoritative, affiliative, and pacesetting. In addition, one more leadership style is gaining attraction, which includes transformational. In order to function effectively, the organization need to follow one or two of this leadership behaviour.

• Assess the important leadership competencies

The organization needs to assess the selected employees against the identified critical leadership competencies to know the leadership development plan. As a result, it will be easy to determine the competency gaps and design the most suitable development opportunities.

• Develop the leadership development plan

An organization must develop the right learning opportunities for employees and incorporate key strategies to enhance their learning environment. The key strategies include job shadowing, job rotation, self-paced micro-learning, professional development course, complementary leadership mentoring, and professional certification.

• Assessment of continuous 360-degree leadership

The key stakeholders need to conduct a 360-degree leadership assessment to ensure the success of the plan and the employees through continuous engagement and feedback.

Conclusion

Many challenges may come across while developing the leadership development plan that may, including lack of commitment from the key stakeholders, limited resources, ineffective succession management programs, inability to generate skills development solutions and many more. In order to avoid such obstacles, leaders need to take the appropriate actions. Thus, invest in your future leaders by determining their leadership behaviour.