LEAD 6011 Module 5 Leadership Growth Plan Example

Listen Before Deciding, Grant Leadership Out Loud: A One-Year Leadership Growth Plan Built From Four Modules of Reflection

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6011: Leadership as a Reflective Practice

Module 5 Assignment

Instructor Name

November 9, 2026

Introduction

Four modules of this course have given me a fairly clear picture of how I lead seven health educators and two community health workers in a county health department. My working definition treats leadership as a process between people. A Gibbs reflection on a poorly attended heat-safety meeting showed me overriding a community health worker under pressure. An authentic leadership assessment found my largest self-other gap on balanced processing. And a coded journal showed that I reflect deeply only when something unsettles an assumption. This paper turns that evidence into a one-year growth plan.

Leader Development and Leadership Development

Day (2000) distinguished leader development, which builds an individual's capacities such as self-awareness, self-regulation and self-motivation, from leadership development, which builds the relationships and networks through which people lead together, the social capital of an organization. He reviewed practices that serve each, including multisource feedback, coaching, mentoring, networking, job assignments and action learning, and argued that organizations need both. Fourteen years later, Day et al. (2014) reviewed a quarter century of research and emphasized that development unfolds over long periods, unevenly and through experience, which suggests that a one-year plan should aim at habits that can keep growing rather than at a finished state.

The distinction suits my evidence. Two of my needs are individual: deciding with more balanced processing and reflecting under pressure. The third is relational: making leadership in my section something that people without titles can exercise and be seen to exercise.

Goal 1: Balanced Processing Before Decisions

By next November my raters' average on balanced processing will be within half a point of my self-rating, down from a gap of nearly one point. The practices are the ones already begun: holding back my own opinion until others have spoken, and asking a named likely critic for the strongest counterargument before decisions that affect community work. The journal showed these practices appearing in five of nine meetings by week six; the target is every planning meeting by March. The measure is the same six raters on the same instrument, plus a simple log of meetings in which I stated my view last. A narrower gap could come from my self-rating falling as well as from others' ratings rising, and either would be progress, because the aim is an accurate picture of how I decide, not a flattering one.

Goal 2: Reflection Under Pressure

My journal entries written under time pressure were almost always descriptive. The goal is that at least half of entries about pressured weeks reach the reflection level or higher on Kember's scheme, coded by a colleague who does not know which week each entry came from. The practice is a change in timing: I write the same day something jolts me, not on a fixed schedule, and close with a sentence that names the assumption in play. I will also keep a two-line note on my phone for the rushed days, since a short honest note written the same day is more useful than a long one written on Friday. The summer heat campaign, with its grant deadline, will be the real test of this goal, and I have marked those six weeks on the calendar as the period to watch most closely.

Goal 3: Granting Leadership Out Loud

DeRue and Ashford (2010) argued that leadership identities are built through a social process in which people claim leadership and others grant it, and that these claims and grants, repeated over time, decide whom a group treats as its leaders. In my section, the community health workers lead constantly and are rarely granted the identity. The third goal is relational: by the end of the year, each of the two community health workers will have led at least two planning meetings and one community event from design to evaluation, with that leadership named in staff meetings and in the section's annual report. The measure is simple to count, and its effect can be seen in whether others begin to turn to them first.

What the Plan Leaves Out

Several goals were tempting and are deliberately left out. My raters scored me well on relational transparency and moral perspective, so the plan does not try to raise those scores further. I considered a goal on public speaking, which I dislike, and a goal on building relationships with county commissioners, which the deputy director would welcome. Neither came from the evidence gathered in this course, and adding them would spread effort across five goals when the research on development suggests that a few sustained practices matter more than many intentions. The three goals that remain share a thread: each concerns whose voice shapes what the section does. Keeping the plan narrow also makes the quarterly reviews manageable, since each review has only three questions to answer and each answer can be checked against a record rather than a memory.

Supports

No one changes habits alone. The deputy director has agreed to meet with me quarterly to review the plan, which brings in the upward relationship my journal showed I reflect on least. A peer in my doctoral cohort, a hospital education director, has agreed to trade journal entries once a month and code each other's for depth. Rosa, the community health worker whose advice I set aside in June, has agreed to tell me privately whenever she sees me consulting after deciding, which is the most useful support in the plan and the one that depends most on trust.

Quarterly Review

Each quarter I will review four things: the meeting log for Goal 1, a colleague's coding of a sample of journal entries for Goal 2, the count of meetings and events led by community health workers for Goal 3 and any comments Rosa has given me. At the end of the year the six raters will repeat the assessment. If a goal is clearly off track at the second review, I will change the practice, not the goal, since the goals come from evidence and the practices are guesses about how to reach them.

Risks

Two risks are predictable. Grant deadlines will return, and with them the pressure under which I revert to deciding alone; the plan's answer is the phone note and Rosa's permission to call me on it. The second risk is that granting leadership becomes a performance, with community health workers named as leaders while the real decisions stay with me. The test of Goal 3 is therefore not the count of meetings alone but whether their decisions in those meetings stand.

Conclusion

This course began with a definition of leadership as a process between people and ends with a plan to practice it. The plan's goals are modest and measurable: a narrower gap on one dimension, deeper reflection in the weeks I least want to reflect and leadership visibly shared with the people who already exercise it. A year from now the evidence will show whether the habits held, and the journal will be there to say why.

References

Day, D. V. (2000). Leadership development: A review in context. The Leadership Quarterly, 11(4), 581-613. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1048-9843(00)00061-8

Day, D. V., Fleenor, J. W., Atwater, L. E., Sturm, R. E., & McKee, R. A. (2014). Advances in leader and leadership development: A review of 25 years of research and theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), 63-82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.004

DeRue, D. S., & Ashford, S. J. (2010). Who will lead and who will follow? A social process of leadership identity construction in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 35(4), 627-647. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.35.4.zok627