Accelerating Your Development as a Leader: A Guide for Leaders and Their Managers

How You Can Help

Some individuals have difficulty formulating well-defined career targets. While the goal of “moving into a broader leadership position” may sound reasonable, it is simply not detailed enough to provide a good anchor point for a professional development plan. By making use of a few open-ended questions (for additional guidelines, refer back to the examples provided in Chapter 2), you can encourage a career planner to put more thought into her gap analysis, to allow her to focus energy on a few key value-laden development actions.

Sometimes career planners undermine their development efforts by performing only a cursory review of potential career targets. They may, for example, automatically define a career target in terms of a ...