Leadership Development Plan Template

The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal HR agency, sets out what an effective individual development plan should include. Its minimum is a profile, goals with dates, development objectives, planned activities, and signatures from employee and supervisor¹. OPM calls the plan a partnership between the two. For senior federal executives, the plan is mandatory: 5 CFR 412.401² requires agencies to prepare one for each senior executive and review it every year.

Read everything first: the assessment report, the new role's job description, the manager's brief and the last review. Take the assessment item by item and note the rater counts. A single item scored 2.1 out of 5 is specific enough to build a goal on, but a category average is not. A gap of 0.2 across six raters can be one person moving one point.

If the leader was promoted recently, compare the old and new job descriptions and list what changed: decisions they now own, people they lead, meetings they run. Someone promoted six weeks ago isn't failing at their old job. The best goals sit where a new expectation meets something the assessment flagged.

No recent assessment? A short mini 360 collects item-level ratings from the people who see the work. For a first-time manager, a new manager onboarding plan covers the first weeks with the team.

Keep each goal in the leader's own words. A goal like "stop being the escalation path for my team leads" is one they will own, while a competency label reads like someone else's verdict. Then check that each goal names an act, not a state of mind. For "be more strategic", ask what a strategic leader does that others don't, and where that act leaves a mark.

Give every goal a direction and a target with a condition, such as "under 8 a month, two months running". "Improve" is not a target.

For each goal, name the record that would show it changing, who keeps it and how often it refreshes. The strongest records already exist, kept by someone with no stake in the plan: a ticket queue, meeting minutes, an HR case note. Ask one question of each: would this record exist if the plan were dropped tomorrow?

Evidence the plan itself creates fails that test: self-ratings and a coach's score can't confirm the work that produced them. Self-ratings also run high. Cornell psychologist David Dunning reviewed the self-assessment research for the Association for Psychological Science in 2004. His summary: at least in North America, what people think about themselves tends to be biased in a positive direction³.

Name the source when you write the goal, not after the results arrive. US federal agencies work this way by law: 31 U.S.C. 1115⁴ requires each agency performance plan to identify the sources for its data and how measured values will be verified.

Each record refreshes on a schedule, so each goal gets a fixed number of readings before the review. Count them on day one: divide the days between the start and review dates by the record's cadence. A 26-week plan gives 26 weekly readings but usually only two quarterly ones.

Two readings show a before and an after, with nothing to steer by in between. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement, which teaches improvement methods, says that determining if improvement has really happened and if it is lasting requires observing patterns over time⁵. It takes a third reading to show whether a change held, so treat three as the floor.

Under three, choose a fix now: add a faster record beside the slow one, move the review date, or agree that the goal will report once.

Most growth happens on the job. The Center for Creative Leadership, which runs leadership programs, bases its 70-20-10 guideline on over 30 years of research. Leaders, it says, tend to learn 70% from challenging assignments, 20% from developmental relationships and 10% from coursework⁶.

Tie each practice step to an event already on the calendar, like "close every decision in the April 2 planning meeting". A real event can happen, move or be canceled, and the log shows whose calendar it was on.

Some goals can't move until someone senior acts: a delegation, a seat on a committee, a word to a peer. Write each one as a manager's commitment with a date agreed in the room. If it slips, report the goal as blocked, with the days overdue, not as no progress.

Review with the people who see the work. In a study published in 2004, executive coaches Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan analyzed more than 86,000 co-worker survey responses for 11,480 managers⁷ at eight of their client companies. In those co-workers' ratings, leaders who discussed their priorities with them and followed up regularly showed striking improvement. Those without that ongoing dialogue showed improvement that barely exceeded random chance.

Ask stakeholders to confirm a goal only once it has three readings, and review the manager's commitments in regular one-on-ones. At the final review, sort each goal into met, moved, blocked or struck, with its baseline, closing reading and record.

The template on this page holds the whole plan, with a worked example in every file. Open it with Edit with AI and River reads your assessment, asks which record would show each goal moving, and counts the readings each one gets before the review.