Executive MBA Program
Leadership Development Plan Guide
Date:
Name:
The Leadership Development Plan (LDP) is provided to help you consciously and
thoughtfully guide your leadership development during the EMBA program. Deliberate,
intentional consideration of your development will increase your success in achieving
your long-term career objectives and becoming a better leader. Your LDP will also help
guide your executive coaching experience.
Long-Term Career Objectives
To guide your short-term individual development, it is helpful to consider your long-term
career objectives. Use the following two exercises as ways to identify what is most
important to you personally as you pursue your career and your own development.
How do You Want a Retrospective on Your Career to Read?
Imagining what we’ll look back on as the most meaningful and important parts of our
career is a useful way of getting a read on what we most value in our career. Imagine
one of the two following scenarios when you reach a milestone birthday, let’s say your
70th birthday. First, you might imagine that your son or daughter, grandson or
granddaughter, or someone else close to you has decided they want to write your brief
personal history. As part of this, they want to interview you and others about your
career and then write a short essay about it. Alternatively, you might imagine that a
reporter from the local paper is going to interview you and others to write an article
about your career achievements.
Consider what you hope that you, your family, friends, co-workers, community contacts
and others who are important to you would say at that point in your career. Now step
into the shoes of the person close to you or the reporter and write the piece that you
hope would be written.
Boise State University EMBA Leadership Development Plan
September, 2012
Career Retrospective Essay
Boise State University EMBA Leadership Development Plan
September, 2012
What Have Been Your Most Satisfying Professional Experiences So Far
Reflect on what have been your two or three most satisfying or meaningful career
experiences so far. You might think of these as “heart of the target” experiences, the
experiences which best reflect the kinds of professional contributions you most want to
make. Below describe each experience and what it was about that experience that
made it so satisfying.
Satisfying Professional Experience #1
Boise State University EMBA Leadership Development Plan
September, 2012
Satisfying Professional Experience #2
Boise State University EMBA Leadership Development Plan
September, 2012
Satisfying Professional Experience #3
Boise State University EMBA Leadership Development Plan
September, 2012
Actions to Take to Focus More on Those Kinds of Experiences
Each career includes work that feels closer to the heart of the target as well as other
work that feels more distant from the target. Consider what actions you should take,
what changes could make, to increase over time the proportion of your professional
work that is at the heart of the target for you and describe them below.
Boise State University EMBA Leadership Development Plan
September, 2012
Making the Most of Your LVI Feedback
Your LVI results can provide rich insights into how you can become a more versatile
and effective leader. To make the most of those results requires reflection. Below are
several exercises to help you make the most of your feedback.
Coming to Conclusions
1. On balance, how do you feel about the feedback you received? (It is normal to feel a wide range of
emotions, even some contradictory ones.)
2. What did you already know about your leadership that was confirmed or further clarified in the
feedback?
3. What messages in the feedback were new to you—things that you either weren't already aware of or
didn't fully appreciate?
4. Was there anything in your feedback that was confusing or that you would like to seek further clarity
about?
Boise State University EMBA Leadership Development Plan
September, 2012
Change Agenda
Your LVI feedback is useful to the extent that it helps you develop a change agenda for how you can
approach leadership differently in the future that it helps you execute against that agenda. Given your longterm career objectives and your LVI feedback, what two or three (at most) specific behavior changes are
you motivated to make? For each, develop a change agenda using the framework below.
Goal #1
State the Goal
Describe the adjustment to be made
Describe
current
situation
What am I doing and what is the consequence of that? What am I dissatisfied with?
Why?
State the target
In an ideal world, how would things be different? What would it look like if I made
this change? What would I be doing differently—more often or less often—and
what impact would that have?
Boise State University EMBA Leadership Development Plan
September, 2012
Outline a plan
How will I bring this change about? What will I do to change my behavior, mindset,
and attitude? What, concretely, am I going to do? And by when?
Enlist help
Who can I use as a counterweight (to "catch" me from going overboard) or
complement (to "compensate" for what I'm not doing enough of personally)?
Who can I use as a role model—someone who embodies the change I want to
make? How?
Monitor
progress
How will I know if I am making progress? What will be my observable metrics for
success? What will others have to say, what things will happen, what won't happen,
if I am making these changes?
Boise State University EMBA Leadership Development Plan
September, 2012
Boise State University EMBA Leadership Development Plan
September, 2012