3 Planning your leadership development
Personal development planning allows you to focus on potential study, career and personal development options and goals. The Open University has developed a short video explaining how it works: Introduction to personal development planning [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .
You started this process in Week 3, when you reflected on your own skills and those you’d like to develop, and you started to consider ways in which you could do that.
You have also started a leadership journal. The thoughts you’ve recorded in there could make a useful starting point for articulating your goals and ideas.
It is highly recommended that the goals that you come up with are SMART:
S = specific
M = measurable
A = agreed
R = realistic
T = time bound
In your Toolkit, you’ll find a Goal Setting tool, which will take you through the SMART process and help you to write down and plan your goals.
There are numerous different templates you could use to break down the different elements of your personal development plan. Here is a worked example:
| Goal | To increase my confidence in leading a team |
Current status:
|
|
| Development/training needed to reach my goal |
|
| Action plan | Organise a charity fund-raising event in the next six months |
| Outcome | Disco organised in July, raised £2000 |
| Evaluation | Wrote a strategic plan for the event. Had to negotiate fee waiver with venue and DJ. Feel more confident about my leadership skills. |
| Next step | Build strategic thinking further. Look for opportunities to contribute to strategic planning at work |
Activity 4 Putting it all together
1. Refer back to key activities from earlier in the course, and pull together relevant content in the box below (e.g. Week 1, Activities 4 and 5; Week 2, Activity 7; Week 3, Activities 3, 4, 5 and 6; Week 5, Activity 5; Week 6, Activity 5; Week 8, Activity 2):
2. Now you have the information you need to start building your leadership development plan. Use the template here to set your goals. If your workplace has a template that is used to support performance review processes etc. – use that if you prefer. You could also use the Goal Setting Tool to make sure your goals are SMART.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| Goal | |||
Current status:
| |||
| Development/training needed to reach my goal | |||
| Action plan | |||
| Outcome | |||
| Evaluation | |||
| Next step |
Discussion
You may have identified more than one goal, in which case you’ll need to prioritise your action plans. Is it achievable to tackle them all in one go? Don’t have too many goals or you’ll be overwhelmed and may not achieve them all, which can be demoralising.
By now, you should have a set of SMART goals and an action plan for achieving them. Next, you’ll consider the people who might be able to help you to achieve those goals.