Four Leadership Development Plan Mistakes That Could Be Stalling Your Path to the C-suite—And How to Avoid Them

If you’re ambitious about what comes next in your leadership journey—whether that means taking on more responsibility in your current role or moving into a position with greater scope—you likely have an individual development plan in place. You may have spent time setting thoughtful goals and identifying what you need to work on to achieve them. You may have even taken initial steps to gain new experiences and exposure that will help advance your leadership career.

But as the year progresses, your workload grows, expectations increase, and the pressure to deliver intensifies. And you don’t want your performance to slip. And so, almost imperceptibly, your own development starts to take a back seat to more immediate concerns.

When I work with leaders who aspire to the executive team, I see this frequently. They have ambition. They have intent. They have a track record of success. But despite the best-laid plans, their meticulous commitment to self-development frequently becomes something they hope to “get back to”.

As a result, highly driven leaders can be slow to develop the capabilities they will need to attain future roles and excel in them.

Our research reflects this tension. While 71% of next-generation leaders aspire to the C-suite, only 31% see a clear path forward in their current organization, and just 38% believe their current role leads there. What’s more, fewer than half of the leaders surveyed believe that their individual development plan has made a significant impact on their professional growth.

So, the question isn't whether you want to develop—it's whether your current approach to development is helping you make meaningful progress toward your objectives.

Over time, I’ve observed a few recurring mistakes in how leaders—especially those aiming for the C-suite—approach their development plans, and how you can avoid doing the same.

1. Treating your development plan like a performance plan

This is one of the most common development mistakes leaders make. They conflate a performance plan and a development plan, treating the documents as if they are two versions of the same thing. They are not.

A performance plan is about outputs. It evaluates what you will deliver in the year ahead and is often focused on near-term results. Development plans are different. They are about who you need to become to successfully operate at the next level.

Performance goals are also far easier to measure: you either hit the numbers, or you didn’t. Development goals are less clear-cut. They’re about how you think, how you show up, and how others experience you. They often involve mindset shifts, expanded perspectives, and behavioral adjustments. And because they are less tangible and less directly tied to incentives, they can easily fall by the wayside.

If you’re serious about progression, you need to treat these plans as two separate priorities. That starts with creating dedicated space for development, time that is non-negotiable even when performance pressure mounts.

2. Setting development goals that are too general to drive change

I often ask the leaders I coach to share their development objectives. Their responses are usually familiar: “Strengthen communication,” “Become more strategic,” “Think more like an enterprise leader.”

The challenge is that goals like these are too broad to change how you behave on a daily basis.

Development goals should be specific and describe observable shifts. If you aim to become more enterprise-minded, what will others see you do differently? Will you frame functional updates through the lens of long-term value creation? Will you proactively surface cross-functional trade-offs in executive discussions? Will you demonstrate greater comfort in debates about capital allocation or risk? If your goal is to strengthen communication, what will change? Do you simplify your narrative? Reduce reliance on slides? Make decisions and next steps more clear at the end of meetings?

It is your responsibility to work through questions like these when you’re crafting your development plan. What specifically does success look like in practice? How will it be measured? Who needs to observe the shift for it to matter?

3. Your approach to development is episodic rather than systematic

Many development plans follow the same pattern. At the start of the year, you set thoughtful goals, and you feel energized and focused. But, by the end of the first quarter, business demands intensify, your calendar fills up, and your development objectives slip down the list of things to do. In November, however, as reviews approach, your goals come back into focus.

Unfortunately, leadership development doesn't work in bursts. It builds through consistent practice: trying new behaviors, getting feedback, adjusting. If you only revisit your development plan once or twice a year, progress can easily stall.

The shift is to build development into your operating rhythm rather than treating it as a separate activity. At the beginning of each quarter, or even each month, pause and ask yourself: What will I commit to doing differently? Where will I actually test that? What evidence will I need that others have experienced a shift? Then, at the end of the quarter, reflect on how well you did this—or where you reverted to familiar ways of working when pressure increased.

4. You might not be getting the right feedback

At more senior levels of an organization, honest and actionable feedback can be hard to obtain. Your reports may filter what they say. Peers might hold back from sharing the unvarnished truth to avoid rocking the boat. People above you may be too busy to get granular.

If you’re not actively creating ways to get unfiltered feedback from people you trust to tell you the truth, you may be operating on false assumptions. And at the senior executive level, guessing isn’t enough. I often suggest identifying two or three people you trust and who see you in high-stakes moments. Be specific about what you’re working on, then ask targeted questions: “I’m trying to contribute earlier in executive discussions rather than waiting to be invited to speak. Did you see that shift today?” The more specific your ask, the more useful the feedback will be. When feedback becomes ongoing rather than something saved for formal reviews, development accelerates.

Finally, show people that giving you candid feedback is worth their time and effort. Stay open and appreciative, even when you don’t immediately agree with what you hear. If people experience you as argumentative or defensive, they will quickly become less willing to tell you what you need to know.

Authors

Brian McMahon, Ph.D. is a leadership advisor at Russell Reynolds Associates. He is based in San Diego.