Your personal development plan: run it like the R&D budget for your leadership

Every serious company protects its R&D budget. Even in a hard year, boards argue about the size of it, not about whether it should exist, because without it the products of three years from now never get built. Then I look at the calendars of the people running those companies and find no equivalent line for the leader. Their own development is funded from whatever is left over, which in the top job is nothing.

That is not a moral failing. It is what the role does to time. When Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked how CEOs of large companies spent their time, they found that the leaders’ own professional renewal and development was often the biggest casualty of a packed schedule. The calendar does not hate your growth. It simply has no line for it.

So here is the claim. A senior leader’s development plan works when it is run like an R&D budget: one quarterly theme, small daily reps inside real work and a short weekly review. Long competency lists fail. Small, specific, inspected plans compound, quietly, alongside the company’s growth.

This article goes one level deeper than the closing section of the price tag of leadership chapter. That chapter makes the case for a plan you will actually keep. Here I want to show you how to build and run one.

Why most development plans die by March

Most development plans I am shown were written in good faith in January and abandoned by March. They fail for three predictable reasons.

They are vague. “Be more strategic.” “Improve executive presence.” “Delegate more.” These are directions, not goals. The research on this is old and unusually consistent. A 1980 review of goal-setting studies by Edwin Locke, Karyll Shaw, Lise Saari and Gary Latham found that 99 out of 110 studies showed specific, hard goals producing better performance than medium, easy, “do your best” or no goals, a success rate of 90%. “Be more strategic” is a “do your best” goal in a good suit.

They are too long. A plan with nine development areas is a list of everything you might one day improve. It cannot compete with a week of board preparation and customer escalations, so it loses every time.

They are separate from the work. Development that happens in a workshop twice a year and nowhere else is entertainment. Senior leaders do not have spare hours for practice. They have meetings, decisions and conversations, and that is where the practice has to live.

Quarterly themes, daily reps, weekly reflection

The structure I use with senior leaders has three layers, each with its own cadence. Think of it as the R&D cycle for one person: a research question, experiments, and a review of what the experiments taught you.

A quarterly theme. One area of growth, chosen because it is currently costing the business something. The thirty focus areas I use are a menu, not a curriculum. Pick the one that is leaking into the P&L right now: the decision that keeps coming back, the conversation you keep postponing, the meeting that keeps drifting into updates. Write it as a sentence a sceptical chair could test. “By the end of the quarter, decisions in my area are made once, by the named owner, and not reopened by me.”

Daily reps. Small, specific practice moments inside real work. The most reliable way I know to make them happen is to write them as if-then plans: “If someone brings me a decision that belongs to them, then I ask what they recommend before I say anything.” Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran’s meta-analysis of this technique found that, across 94 independent tests, implementation intentions had a positive effect of medium-to-large magnitude (d = .65) on goal attainment. An if-then plan does the deciding on a calm day, so you do not have to decide again when the moment arrives at speed.

The reps need to stretch you. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues argued that expertise comes from deliberate practice, which focuses on tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort, with a well-informed coach to guide it. For a CEO, beyond comfort usually means saying less in the meeting, not more.

Weekly reflection. Ten minutes, at the same time each week, with three questions: Where did I practise? What happened? What will I change next week? This is the observe, adjust, advance loop in miniature. Reflection is what turns repetition into learning instead of habit for its own sake.

Be patient with the timing. In a study of how habits form in everyday life, Phillippa Lally and colleagues found that the time participants took to reach their peak level of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days. The behaviours in that study were simple ones, like drinking water with lunch. Changing how you run a meeting is not simpler. The same study also found that missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour did not materially affect the habit formation process. One bad week does not reset the quarter.

Compounding alongside the company

The point of an R&D budget is compounding. Each year’s work makes next year’s possible. The same is true of a development plan, but only if the themes connect. A pattern I see often: a leader works on delegation in one quarter, then on executive presence in the next, then on strategy, and none of the three ever meets the others. A better sequence follows the company. If the business is about to double its headcount, the themes for the next year might run from letting decisions sit with owners, to building the leadership team that can carry them, to transferring a vision that team can repeat without you.

Tie each theme to something the business needs in the next 12 months, and tell the chair what it is. Not as a confession, but as you would tell them about any other investment. A board that knows you are deliberately building your capacity to run a bigger company will usually back it. A board that only hears about your development when something goes wrong will treat it as remedial.

Finally, make your plan visible in the culture. Your team will copy what you practise, not what you announce. A CEO who works on asking before telling, and visibly holds back in meetings, gives everyone else permission to do the same. That is when your growth starts to compound alongside the company’s.

Arguments

The case for

The evidence for each layer is strong on its own. Specific, hard goals beat vague ones in the large majority of studies. If-then plans close much of the gap between intention and action. Deliberate practice with a coach builds expertise faster than experience alone. And habits form through repetition in a consistent context, with room for the odd miss. Put together, these suggest a development plan should be specific, small, embedded in daily work and reviewed often, which is exactly what most plans for senior leaders are not.

The case against

The fair objection is that senior leaders grow mostly through experience, not plans. The hard assignment, the crisis, the failed launch: these shape leaders more than any notebook, and a tidy quarterly theme can feel artificial next to them. There is also a risk that a plan becomes another performance metric, something to tick off rather than live, and that focusing on one theme means neglecting a weakness that suddenly matters. Some leaders, especially founders, find that structure dulls the instinct that got them here.

Where I stand

I agree that experience is the main teacher. A plan does not replace it. What a plan does is make sure you learn from the experience you are already having, instead of simply surviving it. When a crisis arrives mid-quarter, it often becomes the best practice ground for the theme rather than a reason to drop it. In my seven-step coaching process, the theme is chosen at step two, Awareness, from what others actually experience of your leadership; the reps and weekly reflection are the heart of step five, Improvement; and at step six, Impact, we connect the change to measures the business already tracks. A plan nobody else can see in your behaviour is not finished.

Try this: a one-page plan in 60 minutes

Block an hour this week, away from your desk.

1. Choose the theme (15 minutes). List three behaviours currently costing the business something. Pick one. Write it as a sentence a sceptical chair could check at the end of the quarter.
2. Write three if-then reps (15 minutes). Each one names a real situation in your week and the new behaviour. “If a direct report asks me to decide, then I ask for their recommendation first.”
3. Book the review (5 minutes). Ten minutes every Friday for the next 13 weeks, in the calendar now.
4. Pick your mirror (5 minutes). One person who will read the page and ask about it every month.
5. Define the evidence (10 minutes). What will other people notice by week 13 without you telling them?
6. Tie it to the business (10 minutes). Write one line on why this theme matters for where the company is going next year.

Then reflect:

• Where does my development currently sit in my calendar, if anywhere?
• Which behaviour of mine is my team quietly working around?
• What would I practise if I knew nobody would rate me on it?
• Who could tell me, honestly, whether the plan is working?
• What theme would the company need from me in a year’s time?

Where to go next

This plan is the third part of a chapter that starts with cost. Counting the cost of leadership shows how to budget energy, privacy and visibility so the plan has fuel, and deal with discouragement gives you a reset for the weeks when the plan stalls. For the goal-setting method behind the quarterly theme, read goal setting successfully; for choosing the theme in the first place, self and team awareness is the right start.

The sporting version of this cadence, training blocks and all, is on from elite sport to the boardroom, and Eddy Merckx’s profile is a reminder that even dominant performers need teachers when they change arenas. If you want a coach to hold the weekly review with you, that is the core of personal development coaching. Book a 30-minute conversation and bring the three behaviours you would most like to change.