A leadership development plan is a useful tool to ensure that your organization has a strong pipeline of future leaders. To create leadership development plan is a key initiative for many businesses. Organizations not only try to recruit candidates with leadership potential but also who can cultivate their current employees’ leadership skills.
The continuous evolution and success of any organization are linked to the continuous growth and evolution of its leadership. Creating a solid leadership development plan helps outline detailed steps to identify and nurture the next generation of leaders within your organization.
What is a leadership development plan?
A leadership development plan is a strategy designed to help employees gain and develop leadership competencies, along side preparing for leadership roles within an organization.
This plan is usually structured, long-term and personalized for the unique needs of an employee and the organization. It outlines learning objectives and activities an employee is going to undertake to reach their goals.
Importance of leadership development plan
Leadership development plans are critical to business continuity in times of crises and in competitive markets. Such a plan has the potential to keep your most valuable employees engaged with the organization and dissuade them from seeking alternative job opportunities with competitors.
Steps to creating a leadership development plan
As you plot your career trajectory and consider how you can maximize your professional influence and impact, here are the possible steps to creating a successful leadership development plan.
Identifying talent
Some organizations have a formal leadership development program and talent pools from which they can select talent for a specific leadership development plan. However, some organizations do not have formal talent identification or assessment procedures.
Understanding yourself
Mapping your leadership development starts with understanding yourself and where you stand professionally. Taking stock of your strengths, weaknesses, and workplace tendencies can help identify areas for improvement and anticipate pitfalls that could arise on your journey to becoming a more capable leader.
Buy-in from stakeholders
For a leadership development plan to work, there must be buy-in from senior leadership, the manager or supervisor of the targeted employee(s), and the employee. A leadership development plan often requires more significant investment into that employee. This usually includes allocating a budget for it to be successful. The budget would need to be approved by senior leadership before proceeding.
Knowing leadership style
There may be an overarching leadership style within the organization that is expected of potential leaders. This may be based on the organization’s culture and business needs.
Leadership training
Leadership training can benefit at every stage of ones career. Beyond the opportunity to gain and practice the technical skills needed to empower employees and influence others, one is exposed to faculty and peers that you can lean on for support and learn and grow from. It can also help in equiping for future leadership roles.
Knowing leadership competencies
Leadership competencies are necessary for organization’s success. These competencies become the foundation of the developmental plan. Developing them means ensuring the next generation of leaders are ready for current challenges and unknown crises yet to be encountered.
Continuous leadership assessment
To know if leadership development program is effective and reaches its goals one needs to create a way to monitor the employee’s progress and to determine readiness after completion of a leadership development plan.
Leadership development plan challenges
There are potential challenges to successfully executing a leadership development plan. For example:
- Limited resources: budget and time.
- Lack of commitment.
- Inability to create skills development solutions faster.
- Ineffective succession management programs.
However, knowing the challenges enables leaders to take preemptive action to avoid potential obstacles to the plan’s successful implementation.
Leaders must press ahead by adapting proven processes, relinquishing those that do not meet the demands of the times, becoming more agile, and acquiring digital and cultural intelligence to face these challenges. Invest in future leaders by creating leadership development plans and ensure that the needed skills are identified and developed in real-time.
