Learning from work One of today s development methods provides candidates with opportunities to learn from their present work rather than taking them out of the workplace (and presumably herded to a stolid classroom) to learn. The goal is to integrate their experiences at the workplace with other (leadership) developmental techniques. The following are five steps on how you can draw up and start your own leadership development plan: a) Goal Identification You need to set goals for yourself. This is important for all plans because a goal determines your finish line, where you can say that you've succeeded. It can be as simple as improving you performance or learning valuable skills. Leaders are flexible individuals they are able to accept most situations and turn it into their advantage. There's an emphasis on this during training and hopefully you manage to absorb it into your work ethic. Being open-minded means more than being able to accept changes in your work environment this also means that you should be open to the chance that you ar mistaken. Look at your goals and look at yourself what traits and skills can help you reach those goals? What weaknesses will hinder you? What do you need to do change yourself to be able to reach your goals? d) Put The Plan In Action Get off your ass and do what needs to get done. This may all seem simple but trust me, it is probably going to be the most difficult thing you've ever done. Leadership personality One can imagine that the person who has the greatest success, heading the largest organization or corporation is the one that makes the best leader. It is possible. On the other end of the pole, could a person with a little drive or entrepreneurial skills end up being a leader? However, individual leadership development may be hard at first since it is not easy to deal with different personal characteristics that usually hinder the effectiveness of a person's leadership. Experts say that for an individual to enhance his or her leadership, he or she must undergo formalized programs to address issues and improve leadership competencies.