What Is Leadership and Leadership Development?
Last Updated: October 25, 2026
Quick Summary
Leadership is the practice of influencing people toward a shared goal, while leadership development is the deliberate process of building that capacity over time. Leader development grows one person's skills; leadership development grows the collective capacity of a team or organization. Development that sticks requires assessment, practice, feedback, and reinforcement woven into daily work.
- Target five to seven leadership competencies tied to your organization's actual strategy.
- Write development goals as behaviors, not outcomes, and keep the plan to one page.
- Roughly 70 percent of learning happens on the job, 20 percent through relationships, 10 percent through courses.
- Collect a short self-assessment, observer rating, and business metric snapshot before the first session.
- Name a specific executive sponsor who attends the opening session and reviews results.
Table of Contents
- Leadership and Leadership Development: The Difference That Changes Your Strategy
- The Core Leadership Competencies Every Development Plan Should Target
- What Leadership Development Examples Look Like in Practice
- How to Build a Leadership Development Plan That People Actually Follow
- The 70-20-10 Rule for Leadership Development, Explained Honestly
- Leadership Development Best Practices That Survive Contact With a Busy Calendar
- Coaching and Mentoring: The Multiplier Inside Every Program
- Personalizing Development by Career Stage and Role
- Remote and Hybrid Leadership Development That Still Builds Trust
- Inclusive Leadership and Equitable Access to Growth
- Succession Planning and Building a Leadership Pipeline
- How to Measure ROI on Leadership Development
- Common Program Failures and How to Prevent Them
- Start Your Coach Training With Imagine Coaching Academy
- Frequently Asked Questions
Leadership and Leadership Development: The Difference That Changes Your Strategy
Leadership is the practice of influencing people toward a shared goal, while leadership development is the deliberate process of building that capacity over time.
Here is the distinction that matters most. Leader development grows one person's skills.
Most programs fail because they invest in the first and expect results from the second.
Below, we break down the competencies, the plan structure, the honest version of the 70-20-10 rule, and the measurement approach that turns development from a cost line into a business case.
The Core Leadership Competencies Every Development Plan Should Target
Leadership competencies are the observable skills and behaviors that separate effective leaders from ineffective ones.
The most useful competency models stay short. Pick five to seven behaviors tied to your organization's actual strategy, then build assessment and coaching around them.
Communication, influence, decision-making, and emotional intelligence cover the majority of what frontline and emerging leaders need. Executive development adds strategic thinking and the ability to build a leadership pipeline beneath them.
Communication, Influence, and Decision-Making
Communication is the skill most leaders overrate in themselves. The common mistake is treating communication as transmission, when it is really reception.
Influence differs from authority. Authority gets compliance. Influence gets commitment, and it travels further in a hybrid workplace where a leader may never share a hallway with half their team.
Decision-making improves through structured reflection. After a significant call, effective leaders note what they knew, what they assumed, and what they would check next time.
Emotional Intelligence and Self-Awareness
Emotional intelligence is the capacity to recognize and manage your own emotions and respond well to the emotions of others.
Assessment tools help, but feedback from people who work with the leader daily helps more. A 360-degree review, done honestly and reviewed with a coach, surfaces the gap between how a leader sees themselves and how their team experiences them.
For leaders who want to go deeper here, our article on increasing leadership confidence and emotional intelligence walks through the coaching approach in detail.
What Leadership Development Examples Look Like in Practice
Leadership development examples range from formal programs to everyday practices, and the best strategies blend several at once. Seeing concrete examples makes the abstract idea of "developing leaders" easier to plan for.
Consider a few patterns we see repeatedly:
- A monthly peer coaching circle. Six managers meet for ninety minutes, each brings one live challenge, and the group asks questions rather than gives advice. Cost is nearly zero; the behavior change is substantial.
- Stretch assignments with a safety net. An emerging leader owns a real project with a defined scope, a budget, and a mentor who reviews progress weekly.
- Observed coaching labs. Leaders coach a peer while an experienced coach observes and gives feedback afterward. This is the fastest way to improve actual coaching skill.
The pattern across strong examples is practice with feedback. Lectures inform. Practice transforms. If a development activity has no element of doing and no element of feedback, treat it as information, not development.
How to Build a Leadership Development Plan That People Actually Follow
A leadership development plan is a written document that names specific goals, the activities that will build toward them, and the dates and people responsible for review.
Most plans die because they are too long and too disconnected from the leader's actual week.
We recommend a simple structure:
- Name two or three development goals tied to business outcomes, not abstractions.
- Identify one practice per goal the leader can do weekly inside existing work.
- Assign a thinking partner, a coach or mentor who reviews progress.
- Set a review cadence, usually monthly, with a quarterly deeper check.
- Write it on one page and keep it where the leader will see it.
For structuring the review conversations themselves, the GROW model guide gives a practical framework for goal setting and reflection that keeps check-ins focused.
Assessment, Goals, and Review Cadence
Assessment comes first, and it does not need to be elaborate. A self-assessment, a short 360, and a conversation with a trusted colleague will surface the two or three behaviors worth working on.
Goals should be written as behaviors, not outcomes. "Run one coaching conversation per direct report each month" is a behavior a leader controls.
Review cadence is where most plans quietly fail. Put the check-in on the calendar before the plan is finalized.
The 70-20-10 Rule for Leadership Development, Explained Honestly
The 70-20-10 rule for leadership development holds that roughly 70 percent of learning happens through on-the-job experience, 20 percent through relationships and feedback, and 10 percent through formal courses (The 70-20-10 Model for Learning and Development). It is a useful planning heuristic, not a precise formula.
The percentages are often treated as gospel, which they are not. They are a reminder that formal training is the smallest slice of how leaders actually grow, and that development strategy should invest accordingly.
Here is how we would apply it in practice:
| Learning Channel | Share | What It Looks Like | Common Mistake |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-the-job experience | ~70% | Stretch assignments, leading a real project, handling a difficult conversation | Assigning work with no reflection or feedback |
| Relationships and feedback | ~20% | Coaching, mentoring, peer circles, observed practice | Skipping this because it feels slow |
| Formal training | ~10% | Courses, certifications, workshops, reading | Treating this as the whole program |
The honest caveat: experience alone does not develop leaders. A leader can repeat the same year of experience ten times and learn little. What converts experience into development is reflection and feedback, which is why the 20 percent slice punches far above its weight.
Leadership Development Best Practices That Survive Contact With a Busy Calendar
Leadership development best practices share one trait: they fit into the work leaders already do.
Start with the calendar, not the curriculum. Ask a leader what they already do weekly, then attach development to those activities. A one-on-one meeting becomes a coaching conversation.
A few practices that hold up:
- Keep sessions short and frequent. Thirty minutes monthly beats a full-day retreat that never gets scheduled again.
- Make it social. Leaders who develop alongside peers are far more likely to continue than those working alone.
- Tie development to a real deliverable. Learning attached to a project the leader cares about gets prioritized automatically.
Watch out: the most common failure is launching with enthusiasm and no reinforcement. Development without a review rhythm fades within weeks, and leaders learn that the program was optional.
Coaching and Mentoring: The Multiplier Inside Every Program
Coaching and mentoring are the relationship layer that turns information into behavior change. Coaching draws out the leader's own thinking through questions; mentoring shares experience and guidance.
Coaching works best when the leader already has the raw materials and needs clarity.
Mentoring works best when the leader needs perspective from someone who has walked the path. The limitation is availability and fit; senior mentors are scarce and not every pairing clicks.
The strongest programs use both, plus peer coaching, which scales the relationship layer without requiring senior leaders' time. For a step-by-step structure you can apply immediately, see our guide on how to structure a coaching session.
Personalizing Development by Career Stage and Role
Personalized development matches the intervention to the leader's career stage and current role.
For emerging leaders, focus on the transition from doing to leading.
For mid-level managers, the focus shifts to leading through others and managing across functions.
For senior executives, executive development centers on enterprise-level judgment, succession, and building the leadership pipeline below them.
Role matters too. A frontline supervisor in operations and a director in a professional services firm face different demands.
Remote and Hybrid Leadership Development That Still Builds Trust
Remote and hybrid leadership development must build trust deliberately, because the informal moments that used to do it are gone.
Trust in distributed teams comes from consistency and visibility. Leaders who show up on time, follow through on commitments, and communicate proactively build it.
Practical approaches that work:
- Virtual peer coaching circles with a fixed agenda and rotating facilitation.
- Observed coaching over video, where a coach watches a live conversation and debriefs afterward.
- Asynchronous reflection prompts between sessions to keep learning active.
The mistake is assuming remote development is a lesser version of in-person work. Done well, it removes travel barriers and makes development accessible to leaders who could never attend a multi-day retreat.
Inclusive Leadership and Equitable Access to Growth
Inclusive leadership development ensures that access to growth does not depend on proximity, sponsorship, or schedule flexibility.
Audit who actually gets developed. If the same profiles keep appearing in high-potential programs, the pipeline is narrowing before it should.
Then remove the barriers.
Inclusion here is not a separate initiative. It is a design choice about who the program is built for, made at the planning stage.
Succession Planning and Building a Leadership Pipeline
Succession planning is the process of identifying and developing people who can step into critical roles when they open.
Most organizations treat succession as a document created once and filed away. The better approach is a living process.
Pipeline thinking extends further down.
The test of a pipeline is readiness, not names. Ask of each successor: what experiences do they still need, and who is responsible for providing them?
How to Measure ROI on Leadership Development
Measuring return on investment on leadership development starts with defining what success looks like before the program begins. Without that baseline, any result can be claimed and none can be proven.
We use a four-level approach adapted from the training evaluation tradition, tracking reaction, learning, behavior, and results:
| Level | What You Measure | Example Signal | When to Collect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reaction | How participants experienced the program | Session feedback, relevance ratings | End of each session |
| Learning | Whether skills actually improved | Pre/post assessment, observed coaching scores | Before and after the program |
| Behavior | Whether on-the-job behavior changed | 360 feedback shifts, manager observations | 60 and 120 days after |
| Results | Whether business outcomes moved | Retention, engagement, internal promotion rates | 6 and 12 months after |
The honest limitation: results-level attribution is hard. Leadership development affects retention and engagement alongside many other factors. The practical answer is to track leading indicators, such as internal promotion rates and voluntary turnover among high-potential leaders, and to compare cohorts over time rather than claiming a single causal number.
Build the Baseline Before the First Session
A baseline is the set of measurements you take before anyone attends a single session. Without it, you cannot show movement, only opinion. Three baseline instruments cover most needs:
- A short self-assessment of the target competencies, scored on a simple frequency scale (for example, how often the leader practices a behavior in a typical week).
- A brief 360 or manager observation on the same behaviors, so you have an outside view to compare against the self-view.
- A business metric snapshot for the team or unit the leader oversees, voluntary turnover, engagement survey scores, internal promotion counts, and any team performance measure the organization already tracks.
Keep the baseline short. A ten-minute self-assessment and a five-question observer form get completed. A forty-page diagnostic does not.
Set Follow-Up Intervals That Match the Behavior
Different outcomes move on different clocks. Reaction data is collected at the end of each session. Learning data is collected immediately before and after the program.
A common pattern is to collect behavior data at 60 and 120 days, then compare the two. If behavior moved at 60 days but slipped by 120, the reinforcement system is weak, not the training.
Define the Metrics Precisely
Vague metrics produce vague claims. Define each one before the program launches:
- Retention: voluntary turnover among program participants versus a matched comparison group over the same period.
- Engagement: the specific survey items tied to manager effectiveness, not the overall engagement index, which is too broad to attribute.
- Internal promotion rate: the share of participants promoted into a leadership role within twelve months, compared with the prior cohort or a similar group.
Compare Cohorts, Not Anecdotes
The strongest practical method is cohort comparison. Track the first group through the program, then compare their behavior and results data against a similar group that has not yet attended. This is not a controlled experiment, but it is far more credible than a single success story. Over two or three cohorts, patterns emerge that a one-time survey cannot reveal.
For leaders weighing executive coaching specifically, our guide to the benefits of ICF coaching for executives lays out the evidence and the business case in more detail.
Common Program Failures and How to Prevent Them
Common program failures are predictable, which means they are preventable. Most stem from design choices made at the start, not from poor facilitation later. The five we see most often share a root cause: the program was treated as an event rather than a system.
1. Weak Executive Sponsorship
When senior leaders do not visibly participate, the program reads as an HR initiative and quietly loses priority.
Prevention: Name a specific executive sponsor, not a committee. Ask that sponsor to attend the opening session, speak about why the program matters in business terms, and review results at the same cadence as other operational reviews. Sponsorship is visible behavior, not a signature on a charter.
2. One-Off Training
A single workshop delivers information and then stops. Without practice and reinforcement, the learning decays within weeks, the classic forgetting curve. The failure is not the workshop itself; it is treating the workshop as the whole program.
Prevention: Design every formal session with a follow-up assignment, a peer check-in, and a review date on the calendar before the session ends. If a session has no reinforcement attached, do not schedule it.
3. Poor Manager Follow-Through
Development delegated entirely to HR rarely changes behavior, because the leader's direct manager is the person who shapes daily priorities. When managers do not discuss development in one-on-ones, participants learn the plan is optional.
Prevention: Make the manager part of the plan. Give managers a short guide with three questions to ask in their next one-on-one, and ask them to confirm the check-in happened.
4. Training Without Practice
Information delivered without application does not build skill. A leader can watch a coaching demonstration and still freeze in a real conversation. Skill requires repetition with feedback.
Prevention: Include observed practice in every skill-building session. A peer coaches while an observer gives feedback afterward. If the budget does not allow an external observer, pair participants and use a simple feedback form.
5. No Measurement Baseline
Without a starting point, results cannot be shown, and programs that cannot show results get cut at the next budget cycle. The failure is not the lack of a sophisticated evaluation, it is the absence of a simple baseline taken before launch.
Prevention: Collect a short self-assessment, a brief observer rating, and a business metric snapshot before the first session. Review behavior data at 60 and 120 days and results data at six and twelve months.
A Diagnostic Habit
At each quarterly review, ask three questions: Did the sponsor show up? Did the manager check in? Did behavior data move? If any answer is no, fix that layer before adding new content. Most program failures are reinforcement failures, and reinforcement is a design choice.
Start Your Coach Training With Imagine Coaching Academy
The development strategies above work best when someone in the organization can actually coach. That is the gap Imagine Coaching Academy exists to close.
Our 75-hour ICF Certified Coach Training program combines live instruction, on-demand modules, and hands-on performance labs. For leaders who want to build coaching skill into their management style, our ICF Certified Coach Training is the natural next step.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the 5 C's of leadership development?
The 5 C's commonly cited in leadership development work are competence, character, communication, collaboration, and commitment. Competence covers the technical and strategic skills a role demands. Character is integrity and consistency under pressure. Communication is clarity in writing and speaking. Collaboration is how well a leader builds and sustains teams. Commitment is follow-through on goals over time. Treat the list as a self-audit: rate yourself honestly on each, then pick one to work on for a quarter rather than all five at once.
What is the 70-20-10 rule for leadership development?
The 70-20-10 rule for leadership development is a rough guide to where learning comes from: about 70 percent from on-the-job experience, 20 percent from relationships such as coaching and mentoring, and 10 percent from formal courses. It is a planning heuristic, not a precise measurement. In practice, use it to check your budget balance. If nearly all your spend goes to classroom sessions and nothing changes in how leaders are assigned stretch work or given feedback, the program will struggle to change behavior.
Can you give me some examples of leadership development?
Common leadership development examples include stretch assignments such as leading a cross-functional project, a 360-degree feedback review with a follow-up plan, peer coaching circles, mentor matches with a senior leader, structured book or case discussions, job rotation across departments, and observed coaching labs where a leader practices a real conversation and gets feedback. The strongest examples share one trait: they put the leader in a real situation with a real consequence, then add reflection and feedback afterward.
How can coaching support leadership development?
Coaching supports leadership development by turning insight into action. A coach asks questions that surface a leader's blind spots, holds them to commitments between sessions, and gives candid feedback on real situations rather than hypothetical ones. Coaching also scales well for executives who cannot block weeks for a course. Many organizations pair coaching with formal training so the course supplies the framework and the coach helps the leader apply it to their own team, calendar, and goals.
How can leaders measure progress in leadership development?
Measure progress at three levels. First, behavior: are the specific habits you targeted showing up, tracked through 360 feedback or manager observation. Second, team outcomes: engagement scores, retention, and goal completion for the leader's team. Third, business results: the metrics the leader's area owns. Set the baseline before the program starts so you have something to compare against. A practical ROI framework compares the value of measured improvements against total program cost, including time away from work.
How do you create an effective leadership development program?
Start with an assessment of development needs tied to business goals, not a generic skills list. Then write individual development plans with two or three specific goals per leader. Mix experiences, relationships, and formal learning, and build in a review cadence so progress is discussed, not assumed. Assign coaches or mentors, and train managers to give feedback. Finally, define how you will measure success before launch. Programs that skip the measurement design stage usually cannot show results, which makes them the first thing cut in a tight budget.
What skills should a leadership development program teach?
Prioritize communication, decision-making, emotional intelligence, coaching conversation skills, and the ability to set and cascade clear goals. Frontline and emerging leaders need feedback and delegation skills most. Senior leaders usually need influence, strategic thinking, and how to develop other leaders. The mistake is teaching the same curriculum to every level. Match content to the leader's career stage and the specific gaps your assessment surfaced, and keep the total number of focus skills small enough to practice.
The challenge is not knowing that leadership development matters. It is finding a way to build coaching capacity inside a schedule that is already full. Imagine Coaching Academy gives leaders that capacity through live sessions, on-demand modules, and hands-on performance labs designed for working professionals. Explore our coach training program and get started with Imagine Coaching Academy to turn everyday conversations into development that lasts.
