Steps to Writing an Executive Development Plan was originally published on Ivy Exec.
Executive Development Plans (EDP) can be an important planning document for the development of professional skills for yourself and other executives on your team.
If you have noticed stagnation in the professional development of executives or if you are in an industry with rapidly changing requirements, then an executive development plan may be necessary to help keep your team focused on success and growth while building out the leadership capacity of your organization.
What is an Executive Development Plan?
An executive development plan is a strategic planning document that is comprised of short-term and long-term training methodologies to improve an executive team’s skills, professional development, and effectiveness as leaders.
They are typically personalized for the individuals on an executive team and intended to help them gain a greater organizational perspective, as well as deploy strategies for the growth of their departments through better leadership from within their teams.
How To Write an Executive Development Plan
It is usually an iterative process to create an executive development plan that can involve multiple stakeholders. This article will provide an overview of the most important steps to take to write an executive development plan.
1️⃣ Identify Your Goals & Objectives
The first step to creating an executive development plan is to identify key outcomes and goals for your leadership team. This will help guide your EDP toward the most impactful objectives and set a realistic path toward attaining meaningful impact for your organization.
It can be useful to explore goal-setting methodologies such as:
- SMART goals
- WOOP technique
- HARD methodology
Ultimately, the goals of an executive development plan should be aligned with the objectives of the organization for the most effective outcomes. It’s also critical to ensure that all goals are reasonable and attainable with realistic short-term and long-term milestones.
2️⃣ Evaluate Strengths & Opportunities to Improve
The next step in creating an executive development plan is to conduct a full evaluation of your organization’s leadership strengths, as well as to identify opportunities for improvement. It’s important to be honest in this analysis as every executive team has areas where they excel and other areas where they fail.
This will help provide context for your goals and objectives to ensure that you are allocating the right resources and times to areas that need improvement while still seeking to strengthen parts of the team that are performing well from a leadership perspective.
3️⃣ Set Realistic Timelines & Milestones
An executive development plan needs to be paired with a realistic timeline and marked with important milestones to measure progress. An effective EDP is an evolving process and will need to be implemented over long periods of time, as well as maintained and adapted on an ongoing basis.
It will be easier to manage the implementation of an executive development plan if there is a road map for everyone to follow. This will also help identify when progress is made, as well as flag the need for adaptation of the plan if the desired results are not being produced.
4️⃣ Build Frameworks for Identifying Leadership Potential
A successful EDP will include a strong framework for identifying leadership potential within the executive team, as well as future leadership qualities within internal departments of the organization. This provides a self-perpetuating plan to help an organization scale its leadership team and capacity as needed.
Executive leaders need to be equipped with the right tools to identify new leadership talent and cultivate positive traits as the organization grows. The strong ability to collaborate, highly effective communication skills, confidence in delegation, and other soft skills are all important leadership qualities that need to be regularly identified and encouraged internally.
5️⃣ Establish Resources and Training Methodologies
There are multiple ways to execute an executive development plan, so it’s important to outline the resources and training methods that will be used as part of the process. This helps keep a plan within realistic bounds and gives guidance to stakeholders who are operating within it.
This may include identifying training modules such as one-to-one interviews, surveys, team activities, and other training techniques that may be used within the plan. It will also help provide guidelines to effectively use resources and budget, as well as directions on any special circumstances, such as online courses or professional development courses that executives might be expected to take.
Measure, Analyze, and Optimize
Even the best-laid plans need to be modified based on the results. It’s important to set a framework for regular review of an executive development plan to ensure that it is operating as expected.
Goals should be measurable in order to give a framework for analyzing and optimizing results, with an understanding that professional development is a process that takes time and is most effective when tailored to individual strengths and weaknesses.
