Personal Development Goals for Leaders
One thing all great leaders have in common? They focus on their own leadership professional development even more than focusing on getting their teams towards goals. Great leaders develop their own skills so that they can guide their team towards growth more effectively.
Personal development goals for leaders are often overlooked by new leaders who are overwhelmed with their new role. It can be a struggle to figure out how to start building leadership skills if you’ve never had formal leadership training before.
If you’re transitioning into a leadership role, developing leadership skills and setting professional growth goals is an important step to guide your development as a leader.
After working with new leaders as a leadership coach, I’ve seen several common skills new leaders need to develop across my clients, regardless of background or formal training. These essential leadership development goals are a great place to start if you’re new to leadership or feel that you need to improve your leadership skills.
What Are Leadership Development Goals?
It's possible to learn how to be a leader, regardless of your background, previous experiences, or even job position. Today, leadership is very different from decades ago that focused on a top-down approach.
As a result of changing definitions of leadership, modern leaders have a very different skill set than past generations. Even if you’ve had management experience or training, the skills you need to be an effective leader today are ever-changing.
Simply put, leadership development goals are professional growth goals focused on the skills required to be a better leader. Whether you’ve been a leader for a short period or you've been a leader for years, there’s always room for improvement.
Development goals provide the structure to improve your leadership effectiveness. The goals you set for yourself reflect your identity, values, resources, and purpose.
As you’re developing your leadership goals, you can ask yourself a series of questions to help identify goals that positively impact your development:
What are your strengths?
What are your values?
What are your big goals in 6-months, one year, five years?
Are these goals your own or goals someone else thinks you should have?
What habits or systems might you put in place to help reach your big goals?
What makes these goals important to you? Why now?
How do these goals align with your values?
How can you utilize your strengths to accomplish your goals?
How do you want to measure progress?
What are the barriers to accomplishing this goal?
How might you overcome those barriers?
What resources do you need (information, people, education, etc.)?
How will you feel when you accomplish this goal?
How will you celebrate?
Setting leadership development and personal growth goals helps you become a better leader by developing your strengths, improving skills, and setting priorities for your leadership style and methods.
How To Create a Leadership Development Plan
Before you start writing down your goals in a leadership development plan, there are a few steps you should take first to create your plan in a way that will lead to better outcomes. When I work with clients in leadership coaching sessions, we start the leadership coaching process with these four steps.
Step 1: Identify your current state
The first step is gaining self-awareness of where your leadership skills can be improved to achieve your goals. You can do this by having a conversation with a leadership coach and taking a self-assessment. Getting feedback from the people you lead helps you identify areas of improvement and your strengths as a leader.
Step 2: Set your vision for your future state
Your vision of your future sets the direction for your leadership development. Without a clear vision for the future, you’ll work on goals that may not align with the lifestyle you want and ultimately lose motivation. A leadership coach can help you clarify your vision and values to help you navigate the route forward.
Step 3: Establish your motivation to grow
Motivation is essential to personal growth and leadership development. If there is no purpose or meaning in your goals, you will fail. The things that are important to you get done. Understanding your values and vision can help identify motivations for development.
Step 4: Outline what resources, support, and accountability you need
As a final step in building your leadership development plan, you need to set yourself up for success by defining the resources you need, and what kind of support and accountability you need to stay on track. Without these elements in your leadership growth plan, you’ll often struggle to get to the vision you have. The best leaders don’t rely solely on themselves to improve and give themselves the resources, support, and external accountability needed to make big changes.
Common Leadership Development Goals Examples
So what kind of leadership goals should you be setting? With your vision in mind, you likely have a clearer picture of the type of leader you want to become—but how do you get there?
I’ve noticed that leaders often need to focus on the same kinds of skill development, even if they’re more experienced leaders. Leadership skills break down into four main categories: self-awareness, creativity, communication, and systems thinking. These leadership goal examples are a great place to start when you’re making your own leadership plan.
Self-awareness
Effective leaders understand their strengths, weaknesses, biases, and limitations and how these impact their ability to lead. Building self-awareness is usually one of the first things new leaders need to work on to develop effective leadership skills. Self-awareness goals for leaders can include:
Improve emotional agility
Improve resilience by learning to bounce back from difficulties, stress, and unanticipated events
Make rest and recharging a priority to be at my best
Creativity
Because of the nature of our rapidly changing world, leaders are called upon to develop creative solutions and lead their team towards imagination, exploration, and taking new risks through coaching leadership. Creativity is a skill we can develop over time.
Practice taking smart risks
Take time to play and imagine future possibilities
Learn to share ideas
Communication
Above all other skills, developing communication skills as a leader is one of the most important focuses for leadership development. Developing your communication skills can easily be the best investment of your time.
Become an active listener
Build trusting relationships with co-workers
Encourage participation so all voices are heard
Give (and get) actionable feedback
Celebrate milestones and recognize your team
Build coaching skills to support the growth and development of others
Systems Thinking
Leaders work within systems as part of their roles, and that can often feel at odds with the goals of modern leadership. New leaders often see systems as obstacles to overcome or a status quo to uphold. Developing your systems thinking skills allows you to more effectively lead by understanding different vantage points and models.
Increase mental agility to quickly adapt to a situation
Create an actionable feedback system that promotes a learning culture
Recognize and honor the interconnectedness of relationships
Develop problem-solving practices
Could Leadership Development Coaching Help You?
Developing your leadership skills is challenging enough. Going it alone is even more of a challenge. New leaders are often under the impression that they need to have all the answers or that there isn’t support for their new role.
Working with a leadership coach can be one way to develop your leadership skills faster and more effectively and get the support you need. Even if you’re a more seasoned leader, having someone else collaborate with you while helping maintain accountability can be hugely helpful.
We work with clients one-on-one to help them create a leadership development plan and build their leadership skills. Let’s talk.