Personal Leadership Development Plan(PLDP) - Management Assessment

Task

This task begins as part of Week 1 and continues throughout the course, leading to the development of a personal leadership development plan (PLDP). Leadership Self-insight: Every week you were asked to do a short self-assessment quiz from your text. You were asked to reflect carefully on the outcome of each quiz and to identify some practical actions you can take to improve your own leadership ability. The objective of this exercise was to help you to build self-awareness and identify leadership attributes that represent strengths and weaknesses and opportunities to improve. You were expected to go beyond your own leadership development needs and consider future challenges you or your organisation could face. What leadership skills would you need to address these challenges? You were also asked to discuss this issue with an experienced colleague and/or mentor. PLDP requirements:

1. Bring together the outcomes from your leadership self-insight quizzes Interpret the results of the self-insight quizzes. You need to do this holistically and see how the
insights from individual quizzes can be comprehensively presented. Consider the implications for leaders in today’s complex and turbulent environments. Acknowledge sources as required. The purpose of this step is to gather information on your key leadership strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement that you need to present as part of your PLDP.

2. Provide a succinct summary of your key strengths and weaknesses Include a brief summary of your key leadership strengths and weaknesses at the beginning of your plan (based the outcomes of your leadership self-insight quizzes). This can help to link your developmental objectives and actions with your developmental needs. It is also a useful communication mechanism when you discuss your plan with a supervisor or mentor.

3. Assess the need for more information on your behaviour.  You may decide at this point that you need additional information from your colleagues on your strengths and weaknesses as a leader, rather than rely solely on the outcomes of reflection and self-assessment exercises. There are several options for doing this: causal conversations, informal interviews, previous performance evaluations. Consider how your perceptions of yourself are similar/different from the perception of your colleagues.

4.Articulate your vision for developing as a leader In one sentence, describe your aspiration as a developing leader. For example, you may wish ‘to be a leader who is ethical, collaborative and continuously learning’.

5.Specify your developmental objectives  Write down your developmental objectives. These should be specific and written in a way that allows progress to be measured (e.g. ‘to become a more effective team player, as assessed by my team members’). It is recommended that you include 3-5 objectives in your plan

6. Specify actions to achieve each developmental objective For each developmental objective, describe the actions you plan to take in order to achieve them.
These actions should be SMART (i.e. specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and linked to a timeframe). They could be a once-off action (to establish a mentoring relationship with Anne Smith by 30 September, or  an ongoing action is (to ask my colleagues for feedback on my leadership
behaviours after major projects are delivered)

7. Describe the resources that you will need to implement your plan  As you draft your plan, consider the resources you will need to fully implement it. Resources include assistance from key people (e.g. mentors and human resource specialists), time to implement actions, funds (e.g. to pay for specialist training or a coach) and guidance materials such as books

8. Describe the mechanisms you will use to get feedback on your  leadership behaviours and track your progress Such mechanisms may include: discussions with mentors or feedback from peers

9. Describe your strategy to review and revise your plan in future Your plan will need to be reviewed and updated in future. Describe how and when you will do
this. Annual reviews are typical. You may wish to link this review process to an existing one. For example, if you currently have a professional development plan that is regularly reviewed as part of your organisation’s human resource management system, you could link your leadership development plan to this system.

10. Discuss your plan with your supervisor/mentor. What recommendations were made? What revisions did you make?