Leadership Development Plan: Build One for Your Next Leader

A leadership development plan is a written plan for growing one person’s leadership skills. The plan starts with an honest assessment of how they empower people, hold them accountable, coach, handle tough conversations, and use their time as a leader. The plan works when the CEO owns the plan, and the person owns their growth.

Most plans I see are training calendars for work skills. After more than 1,200 interviews with leaders of fast-growth companies, I build them differently, starting with the manager you’re betting on next.

What Happens When You Promote Without a Plan?

Back when I ran my ticket business, I was the guy who did everything. I had color-coded lists and spreadsheets, and I got sucked into every fire of the day because I believed nobody could handle it the way I could.

I’m not proud of that. But it taught me what to look for, and I see the same thing in growing companies all the time.

I’ve had hundreds of conversations with CEOs about this, and you probably know the pattern too. Your best salesperson, engineer, or operator gets promoted because they’re great at the work.

Then they keep doing the work.

Sound familiar?

They hold on to control, make the decisions for their team, and avoid tough conversations. From the outside, your team looks good, but underneath, the next class of people isn’t growing.

That leadership gap is what stops a company from scaling past 30, 40, 50, or 100 employees with ease. Gallup found that companies miss on high managerial talent in 82 percent of hiring decisions, and managers usually credit their promotion to success in a non-manager role or to tenure.

In other words, you promoted them for the job they used to have. So let me ask you a question, and I want you to answer it honestly.

Who on your team got promoted for doing the work and is still doing it?

Got a name? Good. Hold on to it, because you’ll need it in a minute.

A plan changes that. There’s a lot more to say about turning managers into real leaders, but the plan is where it starts.

Start by Picking the Next Class of Leaders

A leadership development plan starts before the assessment. First, you decide who your “next class” of leaders is, the handful of people you’re going to build the company around.

One CEO I worked with ran a manufacturing company with about $40 million in revenue and about 50 employees. He was the driving force, especially in marketing, where he held the CEO role, the CMO role, and the director and manager of marketing roles, with six marketers reporting to him.

At that level, the setup worked fine, and nobody questioned it. Why would they? As the company scaled and he stepped fully into the CEO role, though, he needed more levels of leadership around him, in marketing and in other areas.

Here’s what changed:

• ●He let go. The big shift was releasing control of the work he’d always carried.
• ●He picked the next class. We identified the leaders worth investing in before we built anything.
• ●He gave them the skills. Empowerment, accountability, coaching, communication, tough conversations, and how to use their time as leaders.
• ●The company grew, and grew fast. They built a solid team they could count on, retention stayed very high, and the business stopped depending on the CEO to carry the load.

He did the hard part, and he gets the credit for it. Letting go of six direct reports in the function you love is not easy (I’ve watched plenty of founders refuse to do it).

What if your next class of leaders is already on your team, waiting for you to let go?

Who are the two or three people you’d build around if you stepped back next year?

Not sure who your next leaders are?

What Goes Into a Leadership Development Plan?

Every plan I build has five parts. You run them in order, every time.

Skip one, and your plan turns into a reading list (I’ve seen plenty of those, and they rarely survive the first busy month).

I want you to notice what is missing from that table. There is no list of technical courses. None.

Work skills and leadership skills are two different things. Work skills are how good someone is at the job, and leadership skills are how good they are at growing the people who do the job.

Your new manager already proved the work skills. That is how they got promoted in the first place, and I don’t need them to prove it again. You don’t either.

Which Leadership Skills Should the Plan Assess?

Assess the five leadership skills that decide whether your manager grows people or just manages tasks. Then add one more check, for confidence, because you can’t lead well if you don’t believe you can.

Be honest here, because nobody is grading you on this one. How many of those warning signs could you check off for your top manager right now?

Keep your ownership language precise while you assess. Responsibility is assigned, accountability is measured, and ownership is internalized, so a manager who empowers well builds people who stay with the outcome when no one is checking.

If you want to see how these skills build on each other, read our guide to leadership skills for managers. For the communication skill, start with how to handle tough conversations, because that’s the one most new managers avoid.

Why Can’t You Rely on a Manager’s Self-Assessment?

People can’t rate a skill they don’t fully understand, so most of them overestimate. I put it this way: “It’s really hard for someone to say how good their coaching skills are when they don’t really know what coaching is.”

Think about that for a second, because you’re asking someone to grade a test they’ve never seen. Would you trust that grade? I wouldn’t.

Research points in the same direction. In Kruger and Dunning’s 1999 study of inflated self-assessments, people who scored around the 12th percentile on tests of logic, grammar, and humor rated themselves near the 62nd, and training in the skill helped them see their limits.

So I use the self-assessment as a conversation starter, and I’d ask you to do the same. Add what you see in real meetings, what their manager sees, and what their team experiences.

Then measure again once they understand the skills. The gap is more honest the second time, and that second number is the one you build the next cycle on.

Name the Mindsets Under Every Skill Gap

Skills sit on top of mindsets. Train the skill without touching the belief underneath, and the old behavior comes back the first busy week.

Here’s the tricky part. Nobody writes their mindsets down, so nobody works on them.

Once I have an honest picture of the skills, here’s the next move: “Then you start to identify how to build a transformation. What are the mindsets underneath that need to be shifted and transformed?”

I know the first one well, because “it’s faster if I do it” ran my days in the ticket business. You may have a version of it running your calendar right now (many of the founders I coach do). Old habits are sneaky, right?

Write the one or two mindsets that matter most into your plan by name. If your plan only lists skills, you’ll get a manager who knows the right answer and still does the old thing.

Build the Skills Where the Work Happens

Here is where I see most plans fall apart. They fill up with books and video courses, and the manager learns about leadership without ever practicing it.

You’ve heard “people learn by doing” a hundred times. But is your plan actually built that way?

Be honest.

At Core Elevation, this is the work of our Leadership On-Ramp program, which Amanda co-created to grow confident leaders who communicate well and inspire their teams. Whether you use us or build it yourself, the plan needs these five pieces (yes, you can do this without us, and the pieces matter more than who runs them).

Start with training that defines each of the five leadership skills. A manager can’t build a coaching habit if they’ve never seen real coaching. How would they know what to practice?

Put them in a small group of peers, led by a facilitator, where they talk through real situations. Peers spot the excuses a manager can’t see in themselves, and they’ll call them out faster than you will.

Coaching is where the mindset work happens. A good coach asks the question that exposes “I know better” before it costs you a good employee.

The tough conversations and the delegation are the learning, so build them into the plan. Name the specific conversation they’ll have and the specific decision they’ll hand off this month.

Real conversations. Real decisions. Real stakes.

Once a skill starts to stick, have them teach it to someone on their team. Teaching forces clarity, because if they can’t explain a skill, they don’t own it yet. Teaching it also starts growing the next class below them.

What Does a 90-Day Leadership Development Plan Look Like?

Ninety days is a strong first window, in my experience. In that time, you can get an honest baseline, name the mindsets, start building skills in real work, and reassess.

I get asked, “Is 90 days enough?” all the time. I tell them, “It’s the start of the transformation. It’s not everything.” Then I add, “It takes time.”

The part most leaders don’t expect comes next, and you need to hear it before you start. “It takes cycles of leadership and of business to do this.”

Plan the next cycle before the first one ends. Leaders grow through repeated rounds of real decisions, and that’s how developing leaders at every level actually happens over time.

Who Owns the Leadership Development Plan?

When nobody owns your plan, it drifts. My answer to who owns it is simple. “Everyone should take a level of ownership.”

Sounds simple. Living it is harder.

Here’s how I describe the split: “The CEO is probably the owner of the plan per se, but the person has to take ownership of actually wanting this and growing.” Without the person’s own desire, help starts to harm the process.

You can’t want it more than they do, no matter how much you believe in them. Trust me on this one.

If you’re one of the HR leaders in fast-growth companies building these plans, your role is a partnership with the CEO. Handing HR sole ownership is how plans end up as side projects.

Why Do Most Leadership Development Plans Stall?

Busy CEOs and HR teams try to fit development in around their real jobs. As I see it, “They try to fit it in, and it’s not the core focus.”

You might be thinking you don’t have time for a plan like this right now. I get it, and I’m not dismissing how full your week is. But “no time” is the exact reason most plans stall, and the leadership gap doesn’t wait for a slower quarter.

Plans also stall when they:

• ●Center on work skills or technical training
• ●Treat the self-assessment as the truth
• ●Fill up with books and video courses with no real practice
• ●Have no clear owner, or sit on a busy CEO’s side list
• ●Stop at 90 days as if the work were finished

Which of those is your plan right now?

The cost lands on your managers. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report for 2026 shows manager engagement fell nine points after 2022 and hit 22 percent in 2025, so an unowned plan leaves your most stretched people carrying the gap alone.

Use This Leadership Development Plan Template

Copy this into a shared document and fill it in with the CEO, HR, the manager, and the person in the room. If you can’t fill in a row, you’ve found the next conversation you need to have.

Ten rows. One page. That’s the whole plan.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are short answers to what founders and HR leaders ask most about building one of these plans.

Start With the One Leader You’re Betting On

I opened by saying most plans are training calendars for work skills. The plans that work start with an honest look at five leadership skills, name the mindsets underneath, and give the CEO clear ownership.

So here’s what I want you to do today, before you close this tab. Grab a pen and paper, give yourself ten minutes, and write down the two or three people in your next class of leaders.

Not next quarter. Today.

Then circle the one you’d bet on first. Assess that person honestly, name what needs to shift, and decide who owns what before the first session.

Who’s the one leader you’re betting on? What will they own a year from now that you still own today?

Are you ready to let them?

Ready to build a plan for your next leader?

Lead with courage.