Practical Action Plans to Improve Leadership Skills Across Various Scenarios

Bob Prosen likes to say he has a superpower. It may not be a sexy superhero trait like flying or x-ray vision, but it’s a skill any CEO or business leader should admire.

Prosen makes complex problems simple so companies can make faster, better decisions. That same approach is helpful when developing action plans to improve leadership skills.

“In business, when you try to implement something complicated, it’s very difficult, and every CEO would tell you that,” says Prosen, CEO of The Prosen Center for Business Advancement. “What we should do is break it down into some very basic things to get done.”

Prosen’s philosophy works not only for business growth, but for personal development as well. Leaders should have practical, structured action plans to improve leadership skills and grow personally and professionally. Whether you’re a first-time CEO or an experienced leader, having a well-defined plan can enhance your ability to navigate challenges, align leadership development with organizational goals, and drive meaningful change.

Developing that action plan may sound complex, but by taking Prosen’s philosophy to simplify the complex, leaders can quickly discover opportunities to learn and grow — all while pushing their company forward.

“One of the best ways to achieve goals is to actually set them,” says Barbara Trautlein, principal at Change Catalysts. “We all have very good intentions about what we’re going to accomplish, but so often the urgent takes precedence over the important, so if we have a structured action plan … (there’s) just a higher probability that it’s going to get accomplished.”

Assessing Current Leadership Competencies

Before you can develop an action plan to improve leadership skills, you need to first understand who you are as a leader. To do that, you need to conduct comprehensive self-assessments.

There are several assessment tools available in the business space. Prosen offered his perspective on when each tool should be used, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each:

• CliftonStrengths – For building on people’s natural talents and increasing morale.
• Culture Index – For building a performance-based culture and evaluating natural traits like autonomy and pace.
• DiSC – For improving communication, reducing friction, and increasing team collaboration.
• Hogan Assessments – For evaluating personality strengths and derailers under stress, often used in C-suite hiring.
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – For building mutual respect and understanding of personality differences.
• Predictive Index – For predicting performance and reducing turnover by matching people to job profiles.

Assessment Tools Overview

Gathering 360-degree feedback from colleagues is another way to identify strengths and areas for improvement. While that type of feedback is helpful, Prosen prefers assessment tools because they can provide a more detailed glimpse at who a person is. He particularly likes tools that determine how someone fits within a larger company culture.

Trautlein spent two decades consulting with clients when she realized that while each of those assessment tools has value, none identified how people lead change.

“I realized that people who were highly successful in other aspects of their career struggle to lead change, and organizations often fail to realize the benefits from the change initiatives that they hope for,” she says. “I realized that people are highly experienced with change but not experienced with change done right.”

Trautlein identified the need for change intelligence® (CQ®) and created the CQ System for Developing Change Intelligence. She also authored “Change Intelligence: Use the Power of CQ to Lead Change that Sticks.”

The CQ System helps people identify their change leadership style and helps them develop the awareness needed to more effectively contribute to change initiatives.

“We all have a role in driving change,” Trautlein says. “The CQ System helps us understand our approach to doing that, in what areas we’re strong, and in what areas we might overdo our strengths or have gaps. When we’re aware of that, we can then adapt our approach so that we can be more effective.”

Defining Clear and Measurable Leadership Goals

Whenever Prosen works with CEOs, he asks what their role is as a leader. The responses he gets routinely touch on the same topics: mentorship, strategy, or organizational direction.

Prosen listens carefully, then he tells them what he thinks a leader’s role should be.

“I believe the role of the leader is to ensure everyone who works directly for you wins,” he says. “When it comes down to people and your leadership skill set and your style, your job is to ensure they win. Because when they win, you win. And when everybody wins, the company makes more money.”

Making that winning possible is a key part of creating action plans to improve leadership skills. To do that, it is necessary to have alignment across the organization when it comes to individual goals and company objectives.

That alignment begins by recognizing the need for goals across three different categories, Prosen says: financial, customer, and employee.

“Very few businesses have specific customer goals for the year,” he says, “and very few have people goals either.”

Prosen suggests organizations have no more than 15 top goals — what he calls “the critical few” as opposed to “the important many.” Those goals should then cascade down throughout the organization. An employee who interacts directly with customers should have goals that align with those of the larger company while also supporting their direct supervisor.

Of the 15 goals, Prosen says companies should highlight three to five as their primary objectives for the year. Everyone who reports directly to the CEO should have goals that support those primary organizational initiatives.

“All of a sudden, you have alignment,” he says. “You have people working on the things that matter most.”

A key component of the process is to make sure goals are being measured.

“If they’re not measurable,” Prosen says, “they’re really not a goal.”

By measuring goals, it then becomes possible to determine if they are being met, and if not, what needs to be done to correct the situation.

“If we’re off course, how do we handle it? If we’re on course, will we stay that way?” he says. “That’s a whole operating system that I work with a lot of companies on, so they achieve extreme profitability.”

Developing Tailored Action Plans for Various Leadership Scenarios

It is crucial to acknowledge that every leader is different and every journey they’ve faced — either personally or professionally — is unique. However, when it comes to leading organizations, there are common scenarios leaders face. By developing tailored action plans for these leadership scenarios, an individual will have a far greater chance not only to succeed in the situation but also to help themselves and their company move forward.

Scenario 1: Leading organizational change

Trautlein’s entire company is built around leading organizational change. Change intelligence is all about confidently navigating change with minimal conflict and maximum collaboration.

“Often organizations have change management or project management or strategic planning methodologies, and they still struggle to lead change,” she says. “What I say is the gap is true change leadership. Building your change intelligence helps you build your ability to lead change, and that can complement all the change management tools they have in their toolboxes.”

To Prosen, the first step in developing an action plan to improve leadership skills while leading organizational change comes down to understanding context. It is up to the leader to communicate and explain the context of the change, specifically why it is being made.

Without that context, most people will resist the change, Prosen says, not because they’re against it, but because they don’t understand its necessity.

“Most people are resistant to change because it’s painful,” he says. “A great leader can demonstrate that the pain of change is less than the pain that they’re currently experiencing. If the pain of change is less, they’re more likely to change. You’ve got to be good at explaining how this makes everything better and what’s in it for them when we do it, as well as what’s in it for the business.”

Scenario 2: Enhancing team performance

Like Prosen’s view on the role of a leader, he believes the key to enhancing team performance is acknowledging the need for collaborative efforts within organizations.

“That’s why we have people,” he says, “or it would just be me. The team will not be successful if the team doesn’t win.”

Crucial to enhancing team performance is transparency. Prosen values open and direct communication, but when it comes to an action plan to improve leadership skills, that communication can never become personal.

“Be extremely hard on performance, but easy on people,” he says. “The minute your language changes where you’re attacking the person for poor performance, you lose the relationship. When you lose that respect, you’re in trouble.”

Prosen helps fellow business leaders build action plans to improve leadership skills by introducing a monthly operational review process for employees. The process is simple. Prosen recommends leaders implement a dashboard that features all measurable goals and objectives. If the results are better than expected, a green box appears. If the results are below expectations, the box is red.

Rather than asking why someone’s box is red, Prosen says the key to enhancing team performance is to ask when they will be green and what help they need from anyone else in the organization.

“We want them to be successful,” Prosen says, “because when they are successful and everybody else on the team is successful, we all win.”

Implementing and Monitoring Action Plans to Improve Leadership Skills

Trautlein believes in the 70-20-10 framework that says 70% of executive development comes from on-the-job experiences. That is why, when leaders establish timelines and milestones for new projects or initiatives, she believes that additional time should be allocated to focus on how they are learning and growing with the project.

“If they’re intentionally baking into their agendas the opportunities to sit back and reflect on where there might be disconnects or problems in the organization,” she says, “(they can) see how they are doing leading in all those ways.”

Creating a roadmap with specific deadlines and checkpoints is critical for an action plan — as well as for any organizational initiative. Having that timeline is important, Prosen says, but being able to execute against the timeline is what helps businesses stand out and succeed.

“Why does a competitor among five companies always do better than the others?” he asks. “They out-execute. They deliver what they say they’re going to do consistently all the time.”

Overcoming Challenges in Leadership Development

A key component in developing an action plan to improve leadership skills is balancing short-term tasks with long-term development. Trautlein thinks of it as dealing with “the urgent” versus “the important”.

While urgent issues come up, it is necessary to keep “the important” long-term development in mind.

“Any change opportunity, whether it’s a transformational initiative, an IT project, or a new product launch, is a pop-up learning lab to do two things: solve the problem and build capability for the future.”

Also critical to any action plan is understanding how to address resistance to change. It’s a topic Trautlein frequently addresses when talking about change intelligence, and one Prosen routinely hears about whenever interacting with CEOs.

The two agree that resistance often develops from a lack of understanding, so it’s important that leaders deliver the context for change Prosen previously mentioned.

“There are some fears or concerns or emotional reasons why people are resisting,” Trautlein says. “Leaders need to understand their role in sometimes unintentionally creating resistance in others and become more skilled and savvy to reframe what looks like resistance (and turn) their enemy into their ally.”

Once leaders understand why the resistance exists, they can build their skill set and adapt their behaviors so that the resister has what they need to effectively collaborate and drive change.

Elevate Your Leadership Journey with Vistage

Customizing action plans to improve leadership skills is an essential piece of a leader’s personal and professional growth. From conducting self-assessments to setting goals and tailoring strategies for specific situations like managing change or improving team performance, an action plan is what helps differentiate a leader looking to grow from a leader content with who and where they are.

Vistage can help you further develop your strategic action plan. From teaching you how to create and execute a successful strategic plan to identifying gaps in your planning process, Vistage helps leaders make better decisions and secure better results.

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