Ask a room of senior leaders what they'd like to improve, and the list of answers will be longer than your arm and equally as varied. Why? Because there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to leadership management.

There’s also no way to tackle every single issue at once, and if you try, you’re buying a one-way ticket to leadership burnout. Instead, it’s about identifying the different levers of leadership and understanding how each one reacts when another is pulled.

Which is exactly what we’ll explore in this article. Starting with some of the reasons leadership development plans often fail to go the distance.

Why Your Leadership Development Plan Keeps Stalling

Most leadership development efforts fall apart due to a lack of consistency, a lack of accountability, or both. This is because leaders tend to approach their own growth the same way they approach fitness after New Year's Day.

Lots of good intentions, a big old bout of enthusiasm, followed by gradual abandonment when other things need your attention.

That’s why leadership development without accountability is basically just expensive self-help. And it’s why the leaders who make it stick treat their development like a board meeting with themselves. This means setting agendas, tracking progress, and making decisions based on what to do and change.

Introducing The Five Levers of Leadership

At My Daily Leadership, we like to measure leaders against five levers: Self, People, Company, Strategy, and Leadership Development. Each is valuable on its own, and none of them operate in isolation. As a result, trying to move all five at the same time rarely works, so we encourage you to pull hard on one and watch the others follow.

Think of it like this: Instead of asking "how do I develop as a leader?" Ask "which lever is currently costing me the most?"

Now, let’s step into discomfort.

Embracing Discomfort

When setting out a leadership development plan, it’s natural to drift into the areas you’re already good at. This feels nice and cozy, but it’s rarely where the growth comes from.

Here are the four zones we see leaders falling into, and why discomfort is so important:

1. The comfort zone, where you feel calm and in control, but nothing grows.
2. The fear zone, where the stakes feel high, the clarity low, and where most leaders turn back.
3. The learning zone, where you start asking better questions and picking up new skills.
4. The growth zone, where new capability turns into consistent performance, and you begin developing others in that area.

As you can see, there’s no growth in your comfort zone, and there's no comfort in your growth zone. So, treat discomfort as your development GPS, and when an area feels awkward, uncertain, or mildly terrifying, that's a sign you're probably heading in the right direction.

Building a Personal Leadership Development Plan That Lasts

Knowing how to develop as a leader is less about ambition and more about design. So, here’s what developing a personal leadership development plan might involve:

Start with evidence, not instinct

For most leaders, your sense of your weakest lever is an educated guess, at best. A robust leadership assessment, however, gives you something more real to work from.

Pick one lever

A personal leadership development plan built around a single focus area actually gets finished. One built around five gets abandoned by March. We know which one we’d choose!

Put it in the diary

If your personal leadership development isn't scheduled, chances are, it isn't happening. So, get it in the diary and thank us later.

Get someone to hold you to it

This one works best with an executive coach who tells you the truth, asks uncomfortable questions, and reminds you what you said you'd do. Good ones cost money, but if you think hiring professionals is expensive, try hiring amateurs.

Review, then pick the next lever

Developing as a leader is a loop, not a launch. So, close one gap and the next one becomes obvious.

Final Thoughts

If you, as the leader, aren’t developing, then your business isn't either. You may not notice it this month, but give it eighteen, and you'll be wondering why execution is stalling, and the strategy isn't panning out.

The good news is that you don't need to fix everything. You just need to find the one lever that's holding the rest back and pull it properly. Everything else gets easier from there.

Find Out More

Want to know which lever to yank on? Our Leadership Insights Scorecard will help you to discover your lowest-scoring lever and set a leadership development plan that actually gets done. Niiiiice!