Development Plan Template

Development Plan template

We would like to encourage you to make your goals specific and to think through the action steps.
Development Plan - Each participant in this leadership program has the opportunity to identify what you believe will be most useful for you to work on to enhance your effectiveness as a leader in the year ahead. Selecting three or four developmental goals to focus on can help ensure you make the headway you see as important to your future. These goals are about your professional development. Keep in mind a goal could be focused on taking a strength from good to great. Development plans consist of goals, actions, practices and time lines you and your coach can review and revise during the year.
Goal - A goal can be defined as the object of a person's ambition or effort, your aim or desired result. As you draft your development goals please use the phrase “so that” to clarify what the result is you want to achieve.
Example: To get in the habit of delegating more often “so that” staff have an opportunity to learn new skills and enable me to spend more time on leading strategic initiatives.
Actions - Specific steps in support of a goal are called actions. These can be one-time actions or repeatable. We call repeated actions, practices.
In the delegation example the following is a sample one time action step: Create the categorization of my work queue into A) tasks only I can do, B) tasks I could teach others to do, C) tasks I could hand off to others and had just become accustomed to doing.
Practices are repeatable actions in service of a goal. Behavior change is the ultimate goal, and it is typically only sustained when individuals adopt new practices. Practices, done repeatedly, become incorporated into our on-going behavior as habits.
Similarly, committing to delegating one thing a day is an example of a practice.
Habit. We use the word practice as the means for developing these new behaviors. Once these changes become internalized they become a habit.
Time line. It helps to establish dates or milestones to indicate when you will implement the actions or practices you have identified.

Goal 1

Goal:

Action and Practices in service of this goal / Time line
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Support/Resource:

Goal 2

Goal:

Action and Practices in service of this goal / Time line
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Support/Resource:

Goal 3

Goal:

Action and Practices in service of this goal / Time line
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Support/Resource:

Goal 4

Goal:

Action and Practices in service of this goal / Time line
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Support/Resource:

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