Limit your developmental objectives to one or two.Sample Leadership Individual
Development Plan
This plan is a summary of your strengths, career directions, and areas on which your development will focus.
Effective development plans are:
• Relevant to your organization’s needs.
• Based on an objective, accurate assessment of strengths and needs.
• Focused on challenging development activities targeted to sustaining/strengthening your strengths as well as focusing on addressing your development needs.
• Inclusive and tap others for coaching and feedback on progress.
• Driven by you. You own the plan and implement it; it is best seen as a journey, not a destination.
• Indisputable Strengths: These are your towering strengths, abilities that come quickly to mind when people think about what it is you bring to the organization.
• Surprise Strengths: Identify one or two based on the assessment results and your discussion with your coach.
• Development needs: The key areas on which you need to focus development. These include your indisputable and surprise development needs. To be practical, limit these to one or two per area; they should be related to making you the best in your current role and positioning yourself for whatever future opportunities may develop for you.
• Development objectives and actions (see Step 6 in Assessment-Driven IDP Tool):
Development objectives describe your areas for development.
Limit your developmental objectives to one or two.
Focus on changes in knowledge, skills, or behaviors.
Action steps provide experiences and practice needed to develop. Steps might include:
Further clarification or feedback.
Actions to be taken within your present job assignment.
Additional responsibilities or reassignments.
Coaching and training.
Progress reviews with your boss or others at regular intervals.
You will benefit most from action steps that:
Place you outside your comfort zone.
Provide a diversity of experiences that will broaden your skills and perspectives.
Improve awareness of your impact on others.
Give practice needed to perform new skills even under stress.
Include assignments where either success or failure is possible.
Include in your plan ways to measure your progress. This should include regular reviews of your plan with your boss, your coach, or any other appropriate people.
• Strategic Thinking: Able to create strategies and plans to achieve business objectives. Understand the big picture and all the forces at work.
• Critical Thinking: Apply disciplined market and competitor analysis to identify sales opportunities and focus efforts for maximum impact.
• Team Leadership: Understand and communicate the vision and business objectives to the team. Motivate others to make sales and achieve business objectives.
These goals are based on present circumstances and are open to modification.
• Next 1–2 years: |
Demonstrate value and success as Sales Manager. |
• Next 3–5 years: |
Advance to Vice President of Sales and Marketing. |
• Long-term, 5+ years: |
Advance to President. |
• Improve individual performance management skills so that I can better manage my sales force.
• Expand working relationships with peers.
• Strengthen creative thinking.
Build a high-performance work environment for my sales team that fosters accountability, creativity, and professional growth.
• Transform current job descriptions and department goals into a performance management system that ties individual responsibilities, actions, and results to measurable business objectives. Consult boss and HR group regarding this action step. (End of Q1)
• Establish one-on-one meetings at least monthly that enable direct reports to evaluate progress, seek insights and feedback, and adjust activities. (End of Q1)
• Hold biweekly team meetings to encourage knowledge sharing and common understanding of progress against objectives. Also use these meetings to have fun and foster creativity; do brainstorming, use mind-bender exercises to get us thinking out of the box. (End of Q1)
• Work with direct reports to create individual development plans utilizing HR organization and tools (like this template). (End of Q2)
• Talk with HR department about training programs, either in-house or out, that will help me take performance management to the next level. (End of Q4)
Broaden my in-house network while adding value to the company (so that this is not just a social exercise).
• Work more closely with Rob and his organization. Ask Rob to assign me to a specific project within his organization where my marketing skills compliment the production team. (End of Q2)
• Serve on a regional cross-functional committee over the next year. Ask Frank for an appointment ASAP.
• Expand network through two informal lunches per month with members from different functional organizations to learn new approaches to business opportunities.
Strengthen creative thinking skills to make decisions without complete reliance on data.
• Develop a consulting relationship with Glenn to learn how he thinks about business opportunities. Get into his head about how he thinks about making decisions and how he uses his instincts. (This ties in with the networking lunches above.)
• Attend this year’s industry conference and have a veteran provide a tour and overview. Identify top products and what makes them number one. Write a one-page summary of findings, including implications for either my group or the company as a whole. Review this with my boss and at least two other people.