Key Takeaways
- A leadership development plan turns assessment data into one or two behaviours a leader will practise, with support, a deadline and a way to check progress.
- Most assessments fail between the report and the plan. The fix is a structured debrief and a plan that fits on one page.
- Assessing current competencies and assessing potential are different jobs. Use different methods, and never let one stand in for the other.
- Aggregate individual results across a cohort to design programmes around the real gaps in your leadership population.
- Measure the plan, not the assessment: behaviour change seen by others, then business results. A re-measure is not optional.
A leadership development plan is a short, written commitment that turns assessment results into action: one or two priority behaviours, why they matter in the leader’s current role, what they will practise, who will support them and how progress will be checked. The assessment shows the gap; the plan is how the gap closes. This guide explains how to build that link for individual leaders and for a whole cohort, as FocusU does in its leadership development work.
Why most leadership assessments never become development
Organisations spend real money on assessments and then stop at the report. The leader reads it, feels a mix of validation and discomfort, and goes back to work. Six months later, nothing has changed except the shelf the report sits on.
Three things usually go wrong. The debrief is skipped or rushed, so the leader is left to interpret the data alone. The plan lists every low score, so nothing gets real attention. And no one other than the leader is involved, so there is no practice, no feedback and no accountability. Each of these is a design failure, not a leader failure.
From leadership assessment to development: the sequence
The order matters. Each step depends on the one before it.
- Start with the business need. What must your leaders do differently in the next 12–18 months? A leadership training needs assessment answers this before you choose any instrument; our guide to training needs assessment covers the method.
- Choose the assessment to fit the question. Behaviour as others see it calls for a 360. Self-insight calls for a psychometric profile. How the top team works together calls for a team assessment. Readiness for a bigger role calls for a potential assessment.
- Debrief with a skilled facilitator. The debrief turns data into a small number of priorities. Without it, leaders either fixate on their lowest score or dismiss the whole report.
- Choose one or two priority behaviours. Pick the ones that would make the biggest difference to the leader’s current role, not the ones with the lowest numbers.
- Write the plan. One page, using the structure below.
- Practise, with support. Most behaviour change happens on the job, through deliberate practice, feedback from the manager and, where it helps, coaching.
- Re-measure. After nine to twelve months, check whether the people around the leader see a difference.
What goes into a leadership development plan
A good plan is short enough that the leader and their manager will actually use it. Seven elements are enough:
| Element | What it contains | Illustrative example |
|---|---|---|
| Priority behaviour | One specific, observable behaviour drawn from the assessment | Asks for input from the team before taking decisions |
| Why it matters now | The link to the leader’s current role or business goal | The team is growing and decisions are bottlenecked on one person |
| Baseline | What the assessment showed | Direct reports rated this lower than any other behaviour; self-rating was high |
| Practice actions | What the leader will do differently, and where | Opens every weekly review by asking two team members for their view first |
| Support | Who helps and how | Manager gives monthly feedback; three coaching sessions |
| Check-in points | When progress is reviewed | Monthly with manager; mid-point pulse check with the team |
| Success measure | How everyone will know it worked | Improvement on this behaviour in the re-measure; fewer decisions escalated |
Notice what is missing: a long list of courses. Training can support a plan, but the plan is about behaviour in the leader’s real work, not a catalogue of learning activities.
How assessment outcomes shape a personalised plan
The assessment decides what the plan focuses on; the leader’s role decides how. Two leaders with the same low score on, say, recognising others’ contributions may need very different practice. A plant head running shift operations and a regional sales head managing remote teams will work on the same behaviour in different settings. Personalisation comes from the debrief conversation, not from the report itself.
Assessing leadership competencies vs leadership potential
Most confusion in leadership assessment comes from mixing up three different questions. Each needs its own method:
| Question | What you are assessing | Typical methods | Use it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| How well does this leader lead today? | Current competencies and behaviour | 360 feedback, manager observation, performance evidence | Development plans |
| Could this person lead at a bigger scale? | Leadership potential | Structured talent reviews, potential inventories, assessment or development centres | Building a succession pipeline |
| Are they ready now for a specific role? | Readiness | Assessment-centre exercises and simulations built around the target role, plus track record | Promotion and appointment decisions |
The common mistake is treating strong current performance as proof of potential. Many excellent individual performers struggle when the job shifts from doing the work to building the people who do it. A potential assessment looks for signals that predict growth, such as learning agility, openness to feedback and the ability to influence without authority.
How leadership assessments help identify future leaders
Used across a population, assessments make potential visible earlier and with less bias. Instead of relying on who a senior leader happens to notice, you compare people on the same evidence. Pair the data with structured, moderated talent conversations, which we cover in more detail in pointers for identifying leadership potential. Keep development data and selection data separate: a 360 collected for development should not quietly become a promotion input.
Which assessment formats work for strategic leadership
Strategic capability is the hardest thing to assess with a questionnaire, because it is about how a leader thinks under ambiguity, not how often they do a particular behaviour. Formats that work better:
- Business simulations and case exercises, where leaders make trade-offs under time pressure and trained observers watch how they reason.
- Experiential exercises, which surface how a leader frames a problem, involves others and commits to a direction, in a setting closer to real work than a survey.
- Structured interviews about past decisions, probing how the leader handled uncertainty and what they learned.
- 360 feedback as a supplement, since peers and senior stakeholders see strategic behaviour that direct reports may not.
From individual plans to team and organisation
Individual plans are only half the value. Aggregated across a cohort, assessment data shows which behaviours are weak across your leadership population. That tells you where a programme should focus, and it prevents the familiar pattern of generic content delivered to everyone.
Assessments also improve how teams work, but only when the team is assessed together. When a leadership team shares its results, members understand each other’s styles and can name the patterns that slow them down. The Five Behaviors® assessment is built for this; here is how the Five Dysfunctions assessment works.
Best practices for implementing a leadership assessment programme
- Communicate the purpose before launch. Tell participants and raters what the data is for, who will see it and what it will never be used for.
- Involve the leader’s manager. The manager is the single biggest influence on whether practice happens.
- Budget for the debrief and the follow-through, not just licences.
- Keep plans to one page and one or two priorities.
- Schedule the re-measure at the start, so it actually happens.
- Use aggregated data to shape the programme, while protecting individual confidentiality.
Common pitfalls in leadership skill evaluations
- Choosing the tool before the question. A popular instrument that measures the wrong thing produces confident, useless data.
- Using development data for appraisal. Raters stop being honest within one cycle.
- Handing over reports without a debrief. Difficult feedback without support creates defensiveness, not change.
- Plans that try to fix everything. Eight priorities means none.
- Treating the assessment as the intervention. Insight is not behaviour change.
- No re-measure. Without it, you cannot tell whether the investment worked.
How to measure the ROI of leadership assessment
An assessment on its own has no return; the return comes from the development it triggers. So measure the plan and the programme, at increasing levels of evidence:
- Completion and engagement: did leaders complete the debrief and write a plan?
- Behaviour change: do raters see a difference in the re-measure, especially on the priority behaviours?
- Business indicators: did the outcomes the plan was linked to move, such as team retention, engagement scores or decision speed?
Agree these measures with business leaders before the programme starts. FocusU designs measurement into every engagement as part of its learning design process, using Will Thalheimer’s LTEM framework. For what the wider evidence says about leadership training outcomes, see does leadership training actually work.
How FocusU connects assessment and development
FocusU’s leadership journeys use assessment as an input, never as the product. Leading by Intent uses the LPI® 360 followed by a confidential debrief, a shared session, optional coaching and a re-measure. The Leadership Challenge® builds a common leadership model across emerging and mid-level leaders. Both sit inside a learning design process that moves from preparation to delivery, learning transfer and measuring impact.
Frequently Asked Questions
Debrief the assessment, choose one or two priority behaviours, and write a one-page plan covering the behaviour, why it matters now, practice actions, support, check-in points and a success measure. Involve the leader's manager and re-measure after nine to twelve months.
The assessment shows which behaviours to work on; the leader's role and context decide how. A skilled debrief connects the two, so two leaders with the same score can have very different practice plans.
Assessed across a population, they let you compare people on the same evidence rather than on visibility to senior leaders. Combine potential assessments with structured, moderated talent reviews, and keep development data separate from selection decisions.
Potential is usually assessed through structured talent reviews, potential inventories and development centres. Readiness for a specific role is better assessed through simulations and assessment-centre exercises built around that role, combined with track record.
Simulations, case exercises and experiential activities observed by trained assessors, supported by structured interviews about past decisions. Questionnaires alone capture strategic thinking poorly.
For selection and succession decisions, assessment-centre specialists and global talent consultancies such as DDI and Korn Ferry are widely used. For development-focused assessment linked to a leadership journey, look for providers that include the debrief, coaching and re-measure, as FocusU does.
When a team takes an assessment together and discusses the results openly, members understand each other's styles and can name the patterns that slow them down. Team assessments such as The Five Behaviors® are designed for this.
Measure the development the assessment triggers: plan completion, behaviour change in the re-measure, and movement in the business indicators the plans were linked to. Agree these measures before the programme starts.
FocusU's case studies can be filtered by Better Leaders. When evaluating any provider, ask for an anonymised example that shows the assessment, the development plan and the re-measure, not just participant feedback.
The bottom line
An assessment tells you where a leader stands. A leadership development plan is what moves them. Keep it to one or two behaviours, involve the manager, support the practice and re-measure. If you want help designing a bespoke assessment and development approach for a leadership cohort, talk to the FocusU team.
About the author
