Skip to Main Content
HBS Online
  • Courses
    Open Courses Mega Menu
    • Business Essentials
      • Credential of Readiness (CORe)
      • Business Analytics
      • Economics for Managers
      • Financial Accounting
    • Leadership & Management
      • Leadership Principles
      • Management Essentials
      • Negotiation Mastery
      • Organizational Leadership
      • Strategy Execution
      • Power and Influence for Positive Impact
      • Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability
      • Leading Change and Organizational Renewal
      • Dynamic Teaming
      • Transforming Customer Experiences
    • Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB)
    • Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy
    • Entrepreneurship & Innovation
      • Entrepreneurship Essentials
      • Disruptive Strategy
      • Negotiation Mastery
      • Design Thinking and Innovation
      • Launching Tech Ventures
      • Winning with Digital Platforms
      • Leading Change and Organizational Renewal
      • Entrepreneurial Marketing
      • Transforming Customer Experiences
    • Strategy
      • Strategy Execution
      • Business Strategy
      • Economics for Managers
      • Disruptive Strategy
      • Global Business
      • Sustainable Business Strategy
    • Marketing
      • Digital Marketing Strategy
      • Creating Brand Value
      • Entrepreneurial Marketing
    • Digital Transformation
      • Winning with Digital Platforms
      • AI Essentials for Business
    • Finance & Accounting
      • Financial Accounting
      • Leading with Finance
      • Alternative Investments
      • Sustainable Investing
      • Strategic Financial Analysis
    • Business in Society
      • Sustainable Business Strategy
      • Global Business
      • Sustainable Investing
      • Power and Influence for Positive Impact
      • Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability
      • Business and Climate Change
    • All Courses
  • For Organizations
    Open For Organizations Mega Menu
    • Corporate Learning
      Help your employees master essential business concepts, improve effectiveness, and expand leadership capabilities.
    • Academic Solutions
      Integrate HBS Online courses into your curriculum to support programs and create unique educational opportunities.
    • Need Help?
      • Frequently Asked Questions
      • Contact Us
    • Insights
      Open Insights Mega Menu
      • Business Insights Blog
        • Career Development
        • Communication
        • Decision-Making
        • Earning Your MBA
        • Entrepreneurship & Innovation
        • Finance
        • Leadership
        • Management
        • Negotiation
        • Strategy
      • All Topics
      • Learner on computer exploring HBS Online business lessons
        Sample Business Lessons and E-Books

        Gain new insights and knowledge from leading faculty and industry experts.

      • HBS Online Parlor Room podcast logo
        Podcast

        The Parlor Room: Where business concepts come to life. Listen now on your favorite podcast platform.

    • More Info
      Open More Info Mega Menu
      • Learning Experience
        Master real-world business skills with our immersive platform and engaged community.
      • Certificates, Credentials, & Credits
        Learn how completing courses can boost your resume and move your career forward.
      • Learning Tracks
        Take your career to the next level with this specialization.
      • Financing & Policies
        • Employer Reimbursement
        • Payment & Financial Aid
        • Policies
      • Connect
        • Student Stories
        • Community
      • Need Help?
        • Frequently Asked Questions
        • Request Information
        • Support Portal
      • Enroll Now
    Login
    My Courses
    Access your courses and engage with your peers
    My Account
    Manage your account, enrollment, and payments.
    HBS Home
    • About HBS
    • Academic Programs
    • Alumni
    • Faculty & Research
    • Baker Library
    • Giving
    • Harvard Business Review
    • Initiatives
    • News
    • Recruit
    • Map / Directions
    HBS Online
    • Courses
    • Business Essentials
    • Leadership & Management
    • Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB)
    • Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy
    • Entrepreneurship & Innovation
    • Strategy
    • Marketing
    • Digital Transformation
    • Finance & Accounting
    • Business in Society
    • For Organizations
    • Insights
    • More Info
    • About
    • Support Portal
    • Media Coverage
    • Founding Donors
    • Leadership Team
    • Careers
    • My Courses
    • My Account
    • Enroll Now
    • …→
    • Harvard Business School→
    • HBS Online→
    • Business Insights→

    Business Insights

    Harvard Business School Online's Business Insights Blog provides the career insights you need to achieve your goals and gain confidence in your business skills.

     
    Filter Results Arrow Down Arrow Up

    Topics

    Topics

    • Accounting
    • Analytics
    • Business Essentials
    • Business in Society
    • Career Development
    • Communication
    • Community
    • ConneXt
    • Decision-Making
    • Digital Transformation
    • Earning Your MBA
    • Entrepreneurship & Innovation
    • Finance
    • For Organizations
    • Leadership
    • Management
    • Marketing
    • Negotiation
    • News & Events
    • Productivity
    • Staff Spotlight
    • Strategy
    • Student Profiles
    • Technology
    • Work-Life Balance

    Courses

    Courses

    • AI Essentials for Business
    • Alternative Investments
    • Business Analytics
    • Business Strategy
    • Business and Climate Change
    • CLIMB
    • CORe
    • Creating Brand Value
    • Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy
    • Design Thinking and Innovation
    • Digital Marketing Strategy
    • Disruptive Strategy
    • Dynamic Teaming
    • Economics for Managers
    • Entrepreneurial Marketing
    • Entrepreneurship Essentials
    • Financial Accounting
    • Global Business
    • Launching Tech Ventures
    • Leadership Principles
    • Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability
    • Leading Change and Organizational Renewal
    • Leading with Finance
    • Management Essentials
    • Negotiation Mastery
    • Organizational Leadership
    • Power and Influence for Positive Impact
    • Strategic Financial Analysis
    • Strategy Execution
    • Sustainable Business Strategy
    • Sustainable Investing
    • Transforming Customer Experiences
    • Winning with Digital Platforms
    Subscribe to the Blog
    *
    Please complete this required field.
    Email must be formatted correctly.
    Please complete all required fields.
    RSS feed

    Filters

    Topics

    Topics

    • Accounting
    • Analytics
    • Business Essentials
    • Business in Society
    • Career Development
    • Communication
    • Community
    • ConneXt
    • Decision-Making
    • Digital Transformation
    • Earning Your MBA
    • Entrepreneurship & Innovation
    • Finance
    • For Organizations
    • Leadership
    • Management
    • Marketing
    • Negotiation
    • News & Events
    • Productivity
    • Staff Spotlight
    • Strategy
    • Student Profiles
    • Technology
    • Work-Life Balance

    Courses

    Courses

    • AI Essentials for Business
    • Alternative Investments
    • Business Analytics
    • Business Strategy
    • Business and Climate Change
    • CLIMB
    • CORe
    • Creating Brand Value
    • Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy
    • Design Thinking and Innovation
    • Digital Marketing Strategy
    • Disruptive Strategy
    • Dynamic Teaming
    • Economics for Managers
    • Entrepreneurial Marketing
    • Entrepreneurship Essentials
    • Financial Accounting
    • Global Business
    • Launching Tech Ventures
    • Leadership Principles
    • Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability
    • Leading Change and Organizational Renewal
    • Leading with Finance
    • Management Essentials
    • Negotiation Mastery
    • Organizational Leadership
    • Power and Influence for Positive Impact
    • Strategic Financial Analysis
    • Strategy Execution
    • Sustainable Business Strategy
    • Sustainable Investing
    • Transforming Customer Experiences
    • Winning with Digital Platforms
    Subscribe to the Blog
    *
    Please complete this required field.
    Email must be formatted correctly.
    Please complete all required fields.
    RSS feed

    5 Steps to Creating a Successful Leadership Development Plan

    Female business leader speaking to team
    • 27 Nov 2019
    Matt Gavin Author Staff
    tag
    • Career Development
    • Leadership
    • Leadership Principles

    Leadership development is a key initiative for many businesses. Organizations not only try to recruit candidates with leadership potential but cultivate their current employees’ leadership skills.

    In a survey by global research and advisory firm Gartner, 60 percent of human resources executives said they’ll focus on cultivating leader and manager effectiveness for their company in 2023. In doing so, they intend to nurture the professional development of potential leaders by developing specific leadership qualities, such as authenticity, empathy, and adaptiveness—representing a new kind of “human” leadership.

    Additionally, a report by the World Economic Forum projects leadership and social influence to be among the fastest-growing workplace skills through 2022, which ties into a burgeoning trend for all workers to become lifelong learners to address emerging skills gaps.

    For motivated professionals who want to advance their careers and assume leadership positions, creating a leadership development plan is vital to staying ahead of the curve and rising to the demands of the job market. According to Harvard Business School Professor Ethan Bernstein, the path to effective leadership is more fluid now than in the past.

    “Once upon a time, you would enter a leadership development program in a company that might put you on a 20-year track to becoming an executive,” Bernstein says. “Many of us can’t even fathom that today. But that should be freeing in that it gives us license to develop ourselves and create our own individualized leadership development plans.”

    As you plot your career trajectory and consider how you can maximize your professional influence and impact, here are five steps to creating a successful leadership development plan.

    How to Design Your Leadership Development Plan

    1. Assess Where You Are Professionally

    Mapping your leadership development starts with understanding yourself and where you stand professionally. Taking stock of your strengths, weaknesses, and workplace tendencies can help identify areas for improvement and anticipate pitfalls that could arise on your journey to becoming a more capable leader.

    “In the process of identifying how what you’ve done before may or may not make you successful going forward, you raise your awareness about how what you already know will contribute to, or undermine, your capacity to successfully lead others in the future,” Bernstein says.

    Completing an assessment can be a valuable way to reflect on your motivational drivers and limitations and gain a more holistic view of your personal leadership style. Pairing self-reflection with a 360-degree assessment enables you to solicit feedback from colleagues and peers, which can provide greater insight into how others experience you. In turn, you can build and leverage a keener sense of emotional intelligence throughout your leadership development journey.

    Related: 4 Tips for Developing Your Personal Leadership Style

    2. Set an Attainable Goal

    Goal setting is an essential component of any leadership development plan.

    “Just like anything else: If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably not going to get there,” Bernstein says. “It sounds overly simplistic, but that summarizes why goals are important."

    Bernstein teaches the PACE model, an acronym for:

    • Pick a leadership goal
    • Apprise others in your inner circle of the goal
    • Collect specific ideas on how to improve
    • Elicit feedback on how you’re doing

    The PACE Model in Leadership Development

    PACE is employed by learners to select leadership development goals and chart a course of action for achieving them. The first step in the process, Pick, is centered on identifying and prioritizing a goal you can strive toward to boost your professional effectiveness. When setting this goal, take an agile approach and consider both the short and long term.

    “You can’t lose sight of where you’re trying to go over the span of a decade—or even a career—which is why making long-term goals is important,” Bernstein says. “But we can’t, as human beings, make progress if we make the milestones so grand and far away that they seem unachievable. A little bit of progress each day keeps the frustration at bay.”

    As you define and establish your key goal, consider how you’ll measure progress along the way to ensure you stay on track.

    How to Become a More Effective Leader | Access Your Free E-Book | Download Now

    3. Engage in Leadership Training

    Leadership training can benefit you no matter your career stage. Beyond the opportunity to gain and practice the technical skills needed to empower employees and influence others, you’re exposed to faculty and peers you can lean on for support and learn and grow from. It can also equip you for future leadership roles.

    According to Bernstein, honing your leadership abilities in a classroom setting is advantageous because it provides a low-risk environment for reevaluating and fine-tuning goals when you encounter setbacks.

    “It’s helpful to have a group of people—we call it your ‘inner circle’—who’ve heard and embraced your leadership goals, and whose conversations helped inform how you would go about achieving them,” Bernstein says. “In moments of challenge and relapse, you can go back to them for encouragement and courage. You can revise your goals in a safe environment because you have a level of openness and vulnerability with those people built into the course.”

    4. Interact with Your Network

    A professional network is one of the most valuable resources in any leader’s arsenal, so make it a point to grow yours. Throughout your leadership development journey, connecting with like-minded peers can have a positive impact by providing opportunities to employ the knowledge you’ve gained and receive feedback on your progress.

    These kinds of interactions are core tenets of the online course Leadership Principles, in which learners practice delivering feedback through video exercises that allow them to evaluate their effectiveness in various business scenarios.

    “Ensure your leadership development includes some interaction with other learners and also with the people who are benefitting and suffering from your current capabilities as a leader,” Bernstein says. “We try to teach people to be good protégés, as well as good leaders. It’s an ongoing process. That interaction is important in making things that seem very theoretical ultimately become very practical.”

    5. Hone Your Soft Skills

    Effective leadership requires a unique blend of characteristics and skills.

    “There are skills you need as a leader that you don’t necessarily develop in any other context, at least in a focused way,” Bernstein says. “These include communication; career planning; knowing how to create and evaluate authentic change in a person, including yourself; and negotiating career transitions. These are things you typically won’t do many times in your career, but they will be very important to continuing your leadership trajectory.”

    As you chart your leadership development plan, consider how you can bolster essential soft skills like actively listening, practicing empathy, and creating value in a negotiation to ensure you’re prepared to tackle any organizational challenges that come your way.

    Leadership Principles | Unlock your leadership potential | Learn More

    Developing Your Leadership Skills

    Striving to become a strong, capable leader is a commitment you can make at any stage of your career—although doing so sooner means you can reap the benefits longer. By assessing where you are professionally and thinking deeply about where you want to go, you can design a leadership development plan that enables you to channel your passions and build the skills needed to be more impactful in your role.

    Do you want to enhance your leadership skills? Download our free leadership e-book and explore our online course Leadership Principles to discover how you can become a more effective leader and unleash the potential in yourself and others.

    This post was updated on December 21, 2022. It was originally published on November 27, 2019.

    About the Author

    Matt Gavin is a member of the marketing team at Harvard Business School Online. Prior to returning to his home state of Massachusetts and joining HBS Online, he lived in North Carolina, where he held roles in news and content marketing. He has a background in video production and previously worked on several documentary films for Boston’s PBS station, WGBH. In his spare time, he enjoys running, exploring New England, and spending time with his family.
     
    All FAQs

    Top FAQs

    How are HBS Online courses delivered?

    +–

    We offer self-paced programs (with weekly deadlines) on the HBS Online course platform.

    Our platform features short, highly produced videos of HBS faculty and guest business experts, interactive graphs and exercises, cold calls to keep you engaged, and opportunities to contribute to a vibrant online community.

    Are HBS Online programs available in languages other than English?

    +–

    We expect to offer our courses in additional languages in the future but, at this time, HBS Online can only be provided in English.

    All course content is delivered in written English. Closed captioning in English is available for all videos. There are no live interactions during the course that requires the learner to speak English. Coursework must be completed in English.

    Do I need to come to campus to participate in HBS Online programs?

    +–

    No, all of our programs are 100 percent online, and available to participants regardless of their location.

    How do I enroll in a course?

    +–

    Certificate Programs

    HBS Online welcomes committed learners wherever they are—in the world and their careers—irrespective of their professional experience or academic background. To extend the reach of HBS Online, we no longer require an application for our certificate programs. (Applications are still required for our credential programs: CORe and CLIMB.) You can now immediately enroll and start taking the next step in your career.

    All programs require the completion of a brief online enrollment form before payment. If you are new to HBS Online, you will be required to set up an account before enrolling in the program of your choice.

    Our easy online enrollment form is free, and no special documentation is required. All participants must be at least 18 years of age, proficient in English, and committed to learning and engaging with fellow participants throughout the program.

    Updates to your enrollment status will be shown on your account page. HBS Online does not use race, gender, ethnicity, or any protected class as criteria for enrollment for any HBS Online program.

    Credential Programs

    HBS Online's CORe and CLIMB programs require the completion of a brief application. The applications vary slightly, but all ask for some personal background information. You can apply for and enroll in programs here. If you are new to HBS Online, you will be required to set up an account before starting an application for the program of your choice.

    Our easy online application is free, and no special documentation is required. All participants must be at least 18 years of age, proficient in English, and committed to learning and engaging with fellow participants throughout the program.

    Updates to your application and enrollment status will be shown on your account page. We confirm enrollment eligibility within one week of your application for CORe and three weeks for CLIMB. HBS Online does not use race, gender, ethnicity, or any protected class as criteria for admissions for any HBS Online program.

    Does Harvard Business School Online offer an online MBA?

    +–

    No, Harvard Business School Online offers business certificate programs.

    What are my payment options?

    +–

    We accept payments via credit card, wire transfer, Western Union, and (when available) bank loan. Some candidates may qualify for scholarships or financial aid, which will be credited against the Program Fee once eligibility is determined. Please refer to the Payment & Financial Aid page for further information.

    We also allow you to split your payment across 2 separate credit card transactions or send a payment link email to another person on your behalf. If splitting your payment into 2 transactions, a minimum payment of $350 is required for the first transaction.

    In all cases, net Program Fees must be paid in full (in US Dollars) to complete registration.

    What are the policies for refunds and deferrals?

    +–

    After enrolling in a program, you may request a withdrawal with refund (minus a $100 nonrefundable enrollment fee) up until 24 hours after the start of your program. Please review the Program Policies page for more details on refunds and deferrals. If your employer has contracted with HBS Online for participation in a program, or if you elect to enroll in the undergraduate credit option of the Credential of Readiness (CORe) program, note that policies for these options may differ.

     

    Sign up for News & Announcements


    • • Please complete this required field.
    • • Email must be formatted correctly.
    • • Please complete all required fields.

    Subject Areas

    • Business Essentials
    • Leadership & Management
    • Entrepreneurship & Innovation
    • Strategy
    • Marketing
    • Finance & Accounting
    • Business & Society
    • Digital Transformation

    Quick Links

    • FAQs
    • Contact Us
    • Request Info
    • Enroll Now
    • Support Portal

    About

    • About Us
    • Media Coverage
    • Founding Donors
    • Leadership Team
    • Careers @ HBS Online

    Legal

    • Legal
    • Policies
    Harvard Business School
    Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College
    • Site Map
    • Trademark Notice
    • Digital Accessibility