Throughout our years working with senior executives, we have made a concerted effort to avoid the unfortunate obstacles of many coaching relationships. What has emerged is a process we call our Executive Development Intensive (EDI), a leadership development plan, and it departs dramatically from traditional “coaching” efforts.
For scale, one study reported a 25% increase in organizational outcomes, thanks to leadership development.
Figure 1.0 – Executive Development Intensive
Phase 1: Definition of a Leadership Development Plan
It’s stunning how many efforts to form a development plan for leadership are launched in a vacuum. If a leader development plan is an objective, it is important to scope your work with the key stakeholders properly to ensure you are positioned to help at the individual, team, and organizational levels.
The conservative approach is to scope your diagnostic broadly at the beginning and then narrow it down later as consultant and executive learn more. The key question is this – are you positioned from the start to gain enough altitude to see and constructively address the more systemic issues you might uncover?
If step one in a leadership development plan example is to ensure the right altitude to enable transformation, step two is to ensure the work is anchored solidly in the context of the executive’s role(s). That means the boss needs to agree upfront to be actively involved in the coaching work.
It also means stakeholders (like HR, L&D, key peers, etc.) understand the executive’s day-to-day work will be the primary raw material for the coaching support. Finally, stakeholders should understand that the tangible and intangible results that the business expects from the executive will be a key part of how the impact of the coaching will be measured.
Unfortunately, when the intervention is “corrective”, the potential vacuum may be larger because the leader is likely motivated to keep the work a “secret” so no one knows they’re “getting fixed”. Keep in mind though, that a leader development plan without context rarely results in lasting change or growth.
Successful Leadership Begins with a Development Plan
Phase 2: Discovery
A key outcome of Discovery is ensuring the development plan for leadership is deeply anchored in the business.
We strive to help clients understand the dynamics of the larger system (the business context, the organization, the senior team, the individual’s strengths and challenges, key stakeholder politics, etc.) and effectively navigate the system’s inherent interdependencies and idiosyncrasies.
Without that context, and the ability of the executive coach to work effectively at the individual, team, and organizational levels, we know from experience that leadership transformation isn’t likely. The key to this approach is that the work closely approximates the domains in which the leader needs to be highly effective.
They need to have, or develop, a high degree of self-knowledge. They need to be able to build, develop, and sustain strong working relationships that enable high performing teams and cross-unit collaboration.
They need to be organizationally savvy – understanding how organizations function, how the inherent interdependencies impact performance at the individual, team, and organization levels, and how the importance of being effectively politically in the organization increases with altitude.
The higher up you go, the more important it is to be able to influence and advocate effectively outside of your chain of command and domain of expertise and to get work done with and through others.
Phase 3: Integration of a Development Plan for Leadership
By this point in the process, the data collection is winding down and being synthesized into a set of insights to give the executive a full mirror reflection of how their leadership is experienced by the organization.
Rather than having the executive coach gather up all the data, go into a dark cave, and re-emerge with all the answers, the consultant and executive share the learning journey. This not only increases buy-in to eventual solutions and actions, it further enhances their own capabilities to make sense of similar data in the future.
Here’s How to Make Your Own Leadership Development Plan
Phase 4: Intervention
In typical coaching engagements, the real work doesn’t begin until Phase 4. But if the consultant has missed the opportunity to truly engage in Phases 1-3 of the leadership development plan, the intervention is likely to fail.
Instead, in productive partnership with a consultant, this Phase is focused on targeted interventions that lead to detailed skilled development, finding new ways to utilize strengths, and exploration of deeper beliefs and underlying assumptions that can get in the way of true change.
Many coaches make the mistake of bringing prescribed interventions that too often have little to no real application to leaders’ daily lives. Great consultants draw interventions from executives’ daily responsibilities. A day in the life of any executive is chock full of opportunities to focus on deepening capability.
With a conventional leadership development plan example, you start with what’s most broken and process through a serial fix-it list. We have found, however, aligning the executive’s developmental order of battle with his or her business priorities is a far better approach and tends to stick more once the “coaching” is done.
It prevents development fatigue and doesn’t over-focus on the things the leader is weak at. When the battle plan is aligned to business priorities, everyone becomes vested in the success of the executive.
Phase 5: Reflection
Reflection is often neglected or assumed to have happened in Phase 4. Leaders (and poor coaches) assume that because they have engaged in a leadership development plan, learning automatically took place and behavior actually changed. But that’s not the way human behavior works.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, people don’t learn from experience; they learn from the analysis of the experience. It’s the reflection on the experience that consolidates sustainable change and helps secure new behavior. According to one study, 83% of businesses say it’s important to invest in leadership development at different levels of company operation.
One of the greatest misses in individually based coaching interventions is the blatant disregard of the system in which the leader has changed their behavior. For the same reason people who leave recovery programs regress terribly upon returning home, if the environment isn’t as prepared to accept the change as the executive is who made it, it will likely fail.
Executives who become more inclusive need teams who want to be more included. Executives who need to be more decisive need peers who are prepared to support those decisions. Just because those surrounding an executive can readily point out what needs to change doesn’t mean they are aware of what is required of them to support that change.