Being a great leader is more than just leading and mentoring people to develop their great potential, run an organization efficiently, and make crucial decisions that could affect the organization they are leading. A great leader must also be self-aware enough to see if they are good at leading people and not taking advantage of their position and power to abuse and use people and resources. If you’re a leader in your organization, it takes a lot of humility to know yourself by admitting which areas you are good at and the areas where you need a lot of improvement. To work on that, you need a leadership development plan to guide you on improving yourself. Read the article to know how to make a personal leadership plan.
A personal leadership development plan outlines the things you need to do to become a better leader to your team or organization, to start a new career, to pursue educational opportunities, or to complete a degree program. The leadership development plan must include the leadership skills you want to attain and improve on, the responsibilities you want to take on, and the leadership goals you want to achieve.
Before you get started on creating your leadership development plan, research some great leaders on the internet. List their traits, competencies, abilities, and experience that makes them great leader. Highlight the things you want to simulate in your qualities.
To be able to develop your leadership plan effectively, it’s important to be self-aware to help you know yourself a little bit better. Knowing yourself well helps you determine which leadership qualities and techniques suit your personality better. To do this, you need to identify your personality traits. You can do this by taking psychology tests or asking your friends, family, and colleagues to list down adjectives that best describe you.
Once you’ve identified your traits, it’s time to identify your core values. Your core values are the guiding principles that will help you in making important decisions. Research some examples of values and list down at least three that are most important to you.
The next thing to do is to create your vision statement. It should reflect who you are, where you’ve been and where you are now, what you want to be (base this on your self-assessment), what you want to achieve, and what principles and values you use to make crucial decisions. This will help you develop your goals and your action plan.
Identify how your peers and colleagues think of you as a leader. Think of what they say about you when you’re not in the room and how they perceive you. Think if you care what others think of you and if needed, will you be willing to change your image or some aspects in your life to cater to your colleagues’ needs and change their perception of you. This part will help you realize the areas you need to improve.
You now have in writing leadership qualities every leader should possess; your personality traits, core values, and personal vision; and a list of what other people think of you. All this reflection allows you to accomplish this next step: Expanding on further defining the skills you need to become a good leader.
First, identify the skills you already have. You must list down the personal, interpersonal, group, and technical skills you already developed and possess that you can confidently identity that those are your strengths. Next is to identify the skills you want to develop further. Ask help from a colleague to offer their insights. By identifying the areas where you can improve can help you create goals for the development plan that you want to achieve.
List down the goals you want to accomplish to improve your leadership skills and qualities. Write around 2-3 challenging leadership development goals and 1-2 manageable goals. No matter how easy or difficult they may be, make sure your goals will follow the SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely) efficiently.
Once you have your goals it’s time to act on them by making an action plan. It is a perfect road map to do the specific steps you’ll take to achieve your goals, along with the resources you’ll need to use, and the timeline when the steps are done until it is accomplished in a certain period.
In personal development, especially in leadership development, you can learn and improve some skills such as communication, interpersonal, organization, problem-solving, self-confidence, adaptability, integrity, and good work ethic.
The five areas of personal development are mental, social, spiritual, emotional, and physical development.
Once you’re done making your leadership development plan, make sure to review and revise it for any errors. After all, it is a reflection of the current state of your leadership and where you hope to go. Remember that developing your leadership skills and qualities is a lifelong process (as long as you take the role of being a leader for the rest of your life) so expect you’ll revisit the plan often and update and tweak it according to your journey to become a great leader. To help you get started making the development plan, download our free sample templates above to use as your guide!
