How to Build a Leadership Development Plan: A Complete Guide
Creating a leadership development plan is more important than ever as organizations face growing pressure to adapt, retain talent, and guide teams through constant change. Without a clear strategy for developing leadership capability, organizations often struggle to align behavior change initiatives with business goals, leaving critical leadership gaps unresolved.
In a poll of senior talent leaders outlined in the FranklinCovey Institute’s The Leadership Imperative insight report, when asked how well their company’s behavior change initiatives were aligned with their organization’s goals and strategy, only 51% of respondents felt those initiatives were “very well” or “extremely well” aligned. Additionally, recent research confirms that most organizations struggle to close the gap between the leadership capabilities they currently have and the ones they need to compete.
Organizations that invest deliberately in leadership grow faster, retain stronger talent, and adapt more effectively to disruption. Those without a structured approach often find themselves filling critical roles reactively and losing high-potential employees who see no clear path forward.
Below, we’ll cover what a leadership development plan is, why it matters, the five core elements every effective plan includes, and how organizations can adapt them to their unique needs.
Key Takeaways:
- A leadership development plan is a structured roadmap that translates leadership competencies, business priorities, and personal aspirations into measurable growth.
- The strongest plans combine honest self-assessment, defined competencies, measurable goals, blended learning experiences, and consistent progress reviews.
- Leaders who follow a written plan build capability faster, move into bigger roles sooner, and strengthen the organizations they serve.
What Is a Leadership Development Plan?
Understanding what a strategic leadership development plan contains is the first step toward building one that produces real results. A leadership development plan is a written framework that identifies the competencies a leader needs, the goals they will pursue, the experiences and learning that will close skill gaps, and the timeline and metrics to measure their progress.
The most effective leadership development plans connect personal growth to organizational outcomes. When those two directions align, the leader and their organization can proactively move forward in their goals together. Developing leaders with intention requires both the individual and the organization to define success in advance and hold themselves accountable for achieving it.
Why a Leadership Development Plan Matters for Organizations and Individuals
Leadership is the highest of the arts, simply because it enables all the other arts and professions to work.
A leadership development plan serves both the organization and the individual leader. The strongest plans connect the two, producing value on both sides of the relationship.
Organizational Benefits
Stronger succession planning reduces single-point-of-failure risk in critical roles. When organizations map leadership capability with intention, they identify gaps before a vacancy creates a crisis.
When employees see a clear path for growth, higher retention follows—both for leaders and individual contributors. Research from PwC has shown that workers who feel aligned with leadership goals report being 78% more motivated than those who feel least aligned, and Deloitte data reveals that workers who feel engaged and have a clear growth path are more likely to remain with their current employers.
Organizations that build leadership capability proactively also adapt more quickly to organizational change and market disruption, as they carry a deeper bench of leaders prepared to make and take ownership of difficult decisions.
When development ties directly to business goals, organizations generate a measurable return on their learning investment rather than treating leadership development as a cost center. That shift in framing changes how leaders, managers, and executives engage with the process at every level.
Individual Benefits
A recent study found that after completing a leadership development program, 86% of leaders saw significant improvements in their overall leadership effectiveness. FranklinCovey data also reveals that after completing the 6 Critical Practices for Leading a Team® course, managers reported a 15% increase in satisfaction with opportunities for leadership development. In other words, providing leaders with the opportunity to bridge skill gaps and invest in continued growth not only improves leadership effectiveness but instills engagement, commitment, and job satisfaction.
A written leadership development plan helps leaders approach growth with greater consistency and intentionality, building capability through deliberate practice rather than inconsistent experience. Structured development increases self-awareness around leadership strengths, capability gaps, and behavioral patterns that influence team performance and decision-making.
Focusing development efforts on specific leadership capabilities creates clearer priorities for improvement and makes progress easier to evaluate over time. Greater clarity around long-term leadership goals also helps individuals make more intentional decisions about skill development, expanded responsibilities, and career direction.
A personal leadership development plan takes that investment a step further by incorporating individual values, motivators, and career aspirations alongside organizational expectations. When leaders “own” their development plan rather than receiving it as a top-down directive, they engage more deeply with its execution and sustain that engagement when competing demands pull their attention elsewhere.
Download our insight report, Where Are All the Great Leaders?, to reveal the forces impacting today’s leaders and how organizations can build the capability needed for long-term success.
The 5 Core Elements of an Effective Leadership Development Plan
The best leadership development plans contain five core elements that work together as a system. The order matters: Assessment comes first, then competency identification, then goal setting, then relationship-based learning, and finally ongoing accountability and review. Skipping any element weakens the whole. Leaders can also return to this framework repeatedly as their roles and organizational priorities evolve.
1. Self-Assessment and Feedback
No leadership development plan should begin without honest data that details where the leader stands today. Useful inputs include 360-degree feedback, validated strengths assessments, manager and peer reviews, and structured self-reflection pertaining to recent leadership decisions. Each of those sources reveals something the others miss: a 360 surfaces patterns across relationships, a strengths assessment names underlying capability, and peer feedback highlights impact in real-time situations.
Feedback is most effective when leaders treat it as a starting point for inquiry. The instinct to defend previous decisions is natural, but the more productive response is to approach the data with curiosity and explore what it reveals before deciding what to do with it. Leaders who engage openly with feedback design plans that address real gaps rather than the ones that feel comfortable to name.
2. Leadership Competency Identification
The most-cited leadership competencies across organizations include communication, agility, integrity, innovation, conflict management, and team building.
The highest-leverage approach is to identify a few key competencies that will have the greatest impact on the leader’s current role and the next-level role they are targeting. Pursuing every competency simultaneously produces shallow progress across the board. Leaders who select and concentrate on one to three Wildly Important Goals® generate deeper behavior change in less time.
Competency selection works best when it triangulates across three data points: what the assessment data reveals, what the leader’s manager and key stakeholders identify as the greatest need, and what the organization’s strategic direction will demand in the next two to three years. That intersection points to the competencies worth prioritizing in the plan.
Download our guide, Too Much Disruption, Too Little Leadership: The Leadership Capability Gap Behind Burnout and Disengagement, to bridge gaps and drive connection, retention, and results amid uncertainty.
3. Goal Setting
Certain kinds of goals, such as SMART goals, can provide a solid foundation for structuring a leadership development plan’s growth targets. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound—all of which are foundational to strong goal setting.
But while this framework excels at defining the destination and anchoring expectations, leadership development plans often stall during execution. SMART goals don’t inherently provide the systems leaders need to follow through amid the daily pressure of operations. Without ongoing accountability, even well-defined goals lose momentum within weeks.
Supplementing these standard types of goals with a single, focused initiative and an execution framework helps leaders direct their energy toward the Wildly Important Goal (WIG®) that requires deliberate attention to achieve. That level of focus distinguishes plans that produce measurable behavior change from plans that exist only as documents.
Leaders who begin with the end in mind are able to identify goals that stay anchored to a longer-term vision, which makes it easier to course-correct when short-term demands pull in competing directions.
4. Mentorship and Coaching
Relationship-based development accelerates progress in ways that self-directed study alone cannot replicate. One study found that leaders are 95% likely to meet a goal when they hold ongoing accountability meetings with a partner, compared to 65% when they make a commitment independently.
Leadership coaching provides structured support that helps leaders navigate real challenges in real time. Mentorship adds a different dimension: access to someone who has navigated similar transitions and can surface blind spots that a structured curriculum might not reach.
Building both relationships into a leadership development plan creates a support system that bridges the gap between aspirational goals and day-to-day behavior. The plan identifies where the leader is going; the coach or mentor helps them navigate the terrain as conditions change.
Learn how to equip your leaders with essential mindsets and skillsets for success when you download our guide, Coaching: Equip Your Leaders to Navigate What’s Next.
5. Progress Tracking
A leadership development plan is a living document. A consistent review cadence with three anchoring checkpoints keeps it current: progress against stated goals, conversations with a coach or peer mentor, and any shift in role or organizational priorities that might redirect the plan.
Each review creates an opportunity to retire goals that no longer apply and add stretch goals when a leader’s capability grows. Plans that stay static become irrelevant. Leaders who actively use feedback as fuel treat each review as useful data rather than a performance judgment. This, in turn, makes the review process sustainable over time.
The Path Forward for Proactive Leaders
Are leaders born or made? This is a false dichotomy—leaders are neither born nor made. Leaders choose to be leaders.
Leaders who follow a leadership development plan build skills faster, move into larger roles sooner, and create lasting value for the organizations they serve. But the plan itself is not the end goal; consistent execution of the plan is what produces results.
The strongest leadership development plans combine self-assessment, focused competencies, measurable goals, coaching and mentorship, and disciplined review. No single element does the work alone. All five elements, revisited with consistency, produce lasting change.
FranklinCovey’s leadership and organizational partnerships build great leaders with proven frameworks to close crucial capability gaps and ensure future leaders will be equipped with the skills to navigate what’s next.