3 Planning your leadership development

Personal development planning allows you to focus on potential study, career and personal development options and goals. Watch this short video for an introduction to the concept.

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 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , 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. If you choose to access this, you’ll notice that R = Relevant, A = Achievable and the acronym has been expanded to SMARTER, adding Engagement and Reward to the list of letters. There are various different interpretations of the SMART tool and you should choose the one that resonates for you. In this course, we’ve chosen to use ‘Agreed’ as you may need to agree your plans with a current manager. ‘Realistic’ has been chosen as it’s important that your goal is achievable and that you’ve identified and can remove any potential obstacles or constraints, such as financial cost to either yourself or your organisation.

If none of this resonates with you, there are other goals setting tools available, such as HARD (heartfelt, animated, required and difficult) and PACT (purposeful, actionable, continuous and trackable), which we don’t have time to cover in detail here, but that you can easily explore using your preferred online search engine.

Swann (2024) suggests that to be effective for the individual in that specific situation, different types of goals should be set in different circumstances. He goes on to explain that setting the wrong goal can be detrimental and lead to feelings of failure, and proposes two important questions to ask yourself:

• Are you already good at the task? If you already have the ability and resources to pursue the goal, then a specific goal will probably work best. He recommends aiming high!
• Are you new to/still learning a complex task? A learning goal will work better for you instead. For example, focus on identifying a number of strategies that you aim to try out in order to get better at something.

There are numerous different templates you could use to break down the different elements of your personal development plan. Here is a worked example:

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.