Leadership Development Plan Template for Nonprofit Leaders

A development plan sat on Maria’s desk for eight months. It was beautifully formatted, thoughtfully written, and completely untouched since the day her previous executive director helped her create it. When I asked what happened, she sighed. “Life happened. We had a funding crisis, then a board transition, then COVID. The plan just… disappeared.”

Maria’s story isn’t unusual. I’ve seen variations of it play out across dozens of nonprofit organizations. Leaders genuinely want to grow. Organizations genuinely want to develop their people. Yet somehow, the gap between intention and action swallows most development plans whole.

The problem isn’t motivation or commitment. It’s that most development planning approaches were designed for corporate environments with dedicated HR departments, robust training budgets, and predictable schedules. Nonprofits operate in a different reality—one where next quarter’s priorities depend on this quarter’s grant decisions, where “professional development budget” often means whatever’s left after program expenses, and where the executive director might also be the HR department, the IT support, and the occasional event planner.

What nonprofit leaders need isn’t another generic template borrowed from the corporate world. They need a development planning approach built for their actual constraints and opportunities. That’s what we’re going to explore together.

Why Most Development Plans Fail in Nonprofit Settings

Before diving into what works, let’s be honest about what doesn’t. Understanding these patterns helps you avoid them.

The Shelf Plan Trap

This is the most common failure pattern I encounter. A leader creates an impressive development plan—perhaps during an annual review or a strategic planning retreat. The plan includes thoughtful goals, reasonable timelines, and even specific action steps. Then it goes into a drawer, a folder, or a forgotten corner of a shared drive.

The Shelf Plan looks like productivity. It feels like progress. But it’s actually a sophisticated form of procrastination. The act of planning substitutes for the harder work of implementation.

A development plan that never leaves the page isn’t a plan at all—it’s a wish wearing business casual.

What causes Shelf Plans? Usually, they’re too ambitious, too disconnected from daily work, or created without the accountability structures needed to survive first contact with reality. The plan assumes a version of your schedule and energy that doesn’t actually exist.

The Solo Journey Trap

The second pattern is subtler but equally destructive. A motivated leader creates a solid development plan and genuinely tries to implement it. But they do so entirely alone, without their manager’s active involvement, without organizational support, and without connections to their actual work.

Development becomes something that happens in the margins—early mornings, late nights, weekends stolen from family. This approach might work for a month or two. It rarely survives a full quarter.

The Solo Journey fails because sustainable development requires organizational integration. Your growth needs to matter to more people than just you. Your manager needs to create opportunities for you to practice new skills. Your organization needs to see your development as an investment in mission capacity, not a personal indulgence.

The 70-20-10 Model: Development That Actually Happens

Research from the Center for Creative Leadership, based on thirty years of studying how executives learn, offers a framework that transforms development from an event into a way of working. The 70-20-10 learning model suggests that meaningful professional growth comes from three sources in a specific ratio.

Seventy percent comes from challenging experiences and assignments—the actual work you do. Twenty percent comes from developmental relationships—coaches, mentors, peers, and supervisors who support your growth. Only ten percent comes from formal training—workshops, courses, and structured learning programs.

This ratio has profound implications for nonprofit leaders. It means you don’t need a massive training budget to develop your people. It means the stretch assignment you give your program director matters more than the conference you send them to. It means your one-on-one meetings might be the most powerful development tool in your organization.

The best development doesn’t happen in training rooms—it happens in the messy middle of real work, with real stakes, and real support.

For nonprofits operating with limited resources, 70-20-10 is liberating. Your constraint isn’t budget—it’s intentionality. Are you deliberately creating challenging assignments? Are you building developmental relationships into your organizational culture? Are you using formal training strategically to amplify the other ninety percent?

Anatomy of an Effective Nonprofit Development Plan

A development plan that actually drives growth includes six core components. Let’s examine each through a nonprofit lens.

Current State Assessment

You can’t plot a course without knowing your starting point. Effective assessment goes beyond listing your current skills. It requires honest evaluation of where you are relative to where you want to go.

Start with your performance in your current role. What do you do exceptionally well? Where do you struggle? What feedback have you received consistently—the themes that keep showing up across different contexts and relationships?

Then examine your readiness for the role you aspire to. If you’re a program manager hoping to become a director, what capabilities does that role require that you haven’t yet demonstrated? If you’re an executive director considering your next chapter, what skills would open new possibilities?

The gap analysis from assessment tools can provide structured frameworks for this evaluation. The goal isn’t self-criticism—it’s clear-eyed understanding of the distance between current reality and desired future.

Future Role Visioning

Where do you want to be in three years? Not just what title you want, but what kind of leader you want to become. What impact do you want to have? What capabilities do you want to possess?

For nonprofit leaders, this visioning should connect personal aspiration to mission impact. How does your growth serve the communities your organization exists to support? This connection isn’t just motivational—it’s practical. Development goals tied to mission outcomes are easier to fund, easier to justify to boards, and more likely to receive organizational support.

Be specific in your visioning. “I want to be a better leader” isn’t actionable. “I want to confidently lead our organization through our first capital campaign” gives you something concrete to work toward.

Gap Analysis and Priority Setting

With current state and future vision clear, the gap becomes visible. The temptation is to try closing every gap simultaneously. Resist this temptation.

Identify three to five priority development areas. These should be capabilities that would significantly impact your effectiveness and are feasible to develop given your constraints. A gap that would take five years and fifty thousand dollars to close might be real, but it shouldn’t be your priority if you’re planning for the next twelve months.

For each priority area, get specific about what “good enough” looks like. You don’t need to become the world’s best public speaker—you might just need to deliver board presentations without visible anxiety. Define success in terms of observable behaviors, not abstract qualities.

Development Activities: Applying 70-20-10

This is where most plans go wrong. They fill the activities section exclusively with formal training—conferences to attend, courses to complete, books to read. Remember, that’s only ten percent of how development actually happens.

For each priority development area, identify activities across all three categories.

The 70% (Challenging Experiences): What projects, assignments, or responsibilities would stretch your capabilities? Could you lead a cross-functional initiative? Take on a board committee presentation? Manage a grant application in a new program area? These experiences should be genuinely challenging but not overwhelming—stretch, not snap.

The 20% (Developmental Relationships): Who can support your growth in this area? This might include formal coaching relationships, informal mentoring connections, peer learning groups, or simply regular conversations with colleagues who excel where you’re trying to grow. If you’re working with coaching in development plans, this becomes a structured component of your growth strategy.

The 10% (Formal Learning): What specific training, courses, or educational experiences would provide foundation or acceleration? Be strategic here. That expensive conference might be less valuable than a focused online course that addresses your specific gap. The goal isn’t accumulating credentials—it’s building capability.

Timeline and Milestones

Vague timelines produce vague results. Your plan needs specific milestones—checkpoints that let you know whether you’re making progress.

Start with quick wins: What can you accomplish in the next thirty days that would demonstrate momentum? Quick wins build confidence and create evidence that this plan is different from all the plans that came before.

Then map six-month milestones, one-year outcomes, and if relevant, three-year vision markers. Each milestone should be specific enough that you’ll know whether you’ve achieved it. “Improve communication skills” isn’t a milestone. “Successfully facilitate three board meetings with positive feedback from board chair” is.

Accountability Structure

Here’s where most nonprofit development plans have a fatal gap. They specify what the leader will do but not how the organization will support accountability.

Your plan needs to identify:

Who will you check in with, and how often? This should be at least monthly, ideally with your direct supervisor. Development shouldn’t be a side conversation—it should be a standing agenda item in your regular one-on-ones.

How will you track progress? A simple system—even a quarterly self-assessment—keeps development visible. What gets measured gets attention.

What will you do when life inevitably disrupts your plan? Build in explicit protocols for adjusting your plan when circumstances change. A plan that can’t adapt to reality won’t survive contact with reality.

The Manager’s Role: Making Development Stick

If you supervise others in your nonprofit, your role in their development is more important than any training program you could provide. Research consistently shows that manager engagement is the multiplier that determines whether formal learning translates into changed behavior.

Before Development Activities

Meet with your team member to align expectations. What do they hope to learn? How will they apply it? What support will they need from you to implement new skills? These conversations take fifteen minutes and multiply the impact of development investments.

During Development

Create protected time. If someone is supposed to be completing an online course, don’t schedule over their learning time. If they’re working on a stretch assignment, resist the urge to jump in and “help” in ways that deprive them of learning opportunities.

Provide real-time coaching. When you see your team member practicing a new skill, offer immediate feedback. Don’t wait for the annual review to tell them what’s working and what needs adjustment.

After Development Activities

The most critical period is the first thirty days after formal training. This is when new knowledge either transfers into behavior or fades into forgotten content. Schedule follow-up conversations. Create immediate opportunities to apply learning. Ask what they discovered and how they plan to use it.

Your investment in a team member’s development is an investment in your organization’s capacity to advance its mission—not a personal favor.

Organizational Implementation: Beyond Individual Plans

For development planning to become organizational culture rather than individual initiative, you need systems that support it.

Creating Development Rhythms

Build development conversations into your organizational calendar. Quarterly check-ins where every staff member reviews their development plan with their supervisor. Annual planning sessions where individuals update their goals aligned with organizational strategy. These rhythms normalize development as ongoing practice rather than occasional event.

Connecting to the PATHWAYS MAP™

Individual development plans work best when they connect to a broader understanding of leadership growth in your organization. The PATHWAYS MAP™ framework provides a visual structure for how leaders progress from emerging roles through executive leadership. When staff members understand the pathway, they can set development goals that move them intentionally along it.

For emerging leader goals, the plan might focus on building foundational management skills. For senior staff preparing for director roles, it might emphasize strategic thinking and cross-functional leadership. The individual plan connects to the organizational pathway.

Addressing Resource Constraints

Let’s be realistic about nonprofit resources. You probably don’t have a training budget that matches your corporate counterparts. That’s okay—remember, seventy percent of development happens through experience, not expenditure.

What you can do:

Reallocate existing work as developmental opportunity. That grant application could be a stretch assignment for a rising program manager. That board presentation could be leadership development for your development director. You’re already doing this work—be intentional about who does it and what they’re learning.

Leverage free and low-cost learning. Webinars, online courses, books from the library, peer learning groups with colleagues from other organizations. The ten percent of formal learning doesn’t have to be expensive to be effective.

Build reciprocal mentoring relationships. You have expertise others want. Others have expertise you want. Informal mentoring costs nothing but attention. For a more detailed leadership development planning process, resources exist that can guide your approach.

Using the Template: Getting Started This Week

The Leadership Development Plan Template accompanying this article provides a structured format for everything we’ve discussed. But a template is just a tool—its value comes from how you use it.

Here’s my challenge to you: This week, complete just two sections of the template. Start with your current state assessment—an honest evaluation of where you are right now. Then complete your future role visioning—a clear picture of where you want to be.

Don’t worry about the gap analysis or activities yet. Don’t try to build the complete plan in one sitting. Start with clarity about where you are and where you’re going. Everything else follows from there.

If you’re a manager, complete your own plan sections first. You can’t effectively support others’ development if you haven’t engaged seriously with your own. Your credibility as a development champion comes from personal experience with the process.