Leadership Development Plan

Name what you already lead with, choose the three areas that hold you back most, and aim real experiences, people and a little formal learning at those areas, with a short debrief after each attempt.

Learning leadership mainly through experience, other people and study comes from the lessons-of-experience interviews (McCall, Lombardo & Morrison, 1988); the popular 70-20-10 split is weak or contested (Clardy, 2018). Structured debriefs have strong meta-analytic support (Tannenbaum & Cerasoli, 2013; Keiser & Arthur, 2021). Kolb's cycle has mixed evidence; Gibbs' cycle, SBI and Radical Candor are practice, not research.

Use it when:

• You are moving from specialist to leading people, or into a bigger leadership role.
• You have feedback on how you lead and want to act on it over the next six to twelve months.
• You are preparing a development conversation with your manager, a mentor or an HR partner.

Skip it when:

• Your gaps are mainly technical or functional, not about leading: use 1.5 Skill Gap Map & Priority List.
• You want to reflect on one experience rather than plan several: use 1.12 Kolb Cycle Learning Sheet or 1.13 Gibbs Deep Reflection Template.

This plan is a composite, and its parts stand on different ground. The reflection tools it schedules differ in standing: Kolb's cycle is a long used, much revised heuristic with mixed evidence (Kolb, 1984), while Gibbs' cycle is an untested teaching tool from the same tradition (Gibbs, 1988). The feedback frameworks you may lean on, SBI (Weitzel, 2000) and Radical Candor (Scott, 2017), are coaching craft: useful scripts, never tested as packages, and worth holding loosely because feedback can help or hurt. What the plan adds is arrangement rather than evidence: development builds when stretch, support and reflection all point at the same few priorities instead of being scattered across the year.

So each area states what holds you back and what success looks like before you pick any activity. Each experience, helper and resource must name the area it serves. And reflection goes in the calendar, because in practice unscheduled reflection is skipped reflection.

Write two leadership strengths you can back with something that happened, not a trait you hope you have. These are what you build from in the hard areas.

Strong answer: "Staying calm in incidents. Evidence: during the line stop in October I coordinated four people and wrote the review the same week." (Illustrative.)

Illustrative example: the role, the company and all details are made up.

A senior process engineer at a fish farming company in Norway is about to become production manager for one site, with eight operators reporting to her.

Section 1: strengths: solving process problems (she cut feed waste on two sites) and teaching new operators (three trainees say she explains clearly).

Section 2: areas in order: difficult conversations (she covers for people instead of raising problems); seeing beyond the site (she plans by the week, not the year); influencing peers she does not manage (she leads with logic and skips relationships).

Section 3: one: raise a missed safety routine with an operator within a week, with a written follow-up. Two: present the site's budget proposal to the regional management team in April. Three: lead the joint biosecurity project with the neighboring site and the vet service.

Section 4: mentor, a production manager at another site, every second week; feedback partner, her own manager, monthly; formal learning, the company's new manager program in March.

Section 5: Friday reflection slot; Gibbs sheet after the safety conversation; quarterly review booked for June.