Self development and leadership: becoming the manager you want to be

When we think about becoming a better manager or leader, it can be tempting to focus first on the skills we need to acquire.

Perhaps you want to communicate more effectively, manage conflict with greater confidence, motivate your team or prepare yourself for greater responsibility.

But professional development also starts somewhere more personal: understanding yourself.

How do you respond when things do not go to plan? What assumptions do you make about other people? How well do you listen? What matters most to you? And how does your behaviour affect the people around you?

These are not always comfortable questions. But asking them can be an important part of becoming a more thoughtful, self aware and effective leader.

Why self development matters in leadership

Leadership is not something we finish learning.

Our responsibilities change. Teams change. Technology changes. Organisations change. Our own ambitions and priorities change too.

Continuing professional development gives us an opportunity to respond to those changes rather than simply relying on management habits we have developed over time.

It can help you recognise what you already do well, identify areas where you would like to improve and make deliberate choices about the kind of manager or leader you want to become.

This matters for the people around you too. The way managers communicate, listen, allocate work, respond to difficulties and support development can all influence people’s experience of work.

Self development, then, is not simply about career progression. It is also about becoming more aware of the impact you have on others.

Self development starts with your leadership identity

Before deciding what you need to improve, it can be useful to understand what has already shaped you as a leader.

Your leadership identity develops through your values, beliefs, strengths and experiences. It influences how you make decisions, build relationships, respond to pressure and how other people experience your leadership.

Think about your own leadership story.

Who has influenced you? Which experiences have taught you the most? What have previous managers shown you about good leadership? Have you also experienced behaviours that made you think, “That’s not the kind of leader I want to be”?

Our experiences can leave us with assumptions about what leadership should look like. Reflection gives us an opportunity to examine those assumptions and decide which ones we want to carry forward.

That is where self development can become intentional rather than simply reactive.

Self development is not the same as simply doing more

There can be a tendency to think about personal development in terms of constant improvement: another goal, another skill and another achievement.

But effective development does not necessarily mean adding more to your workload.

Sometimes development means learning to prioritise. Sometimes it means delegating. It could involve listening more carefully, setting clearer boundaries, challenging an assumption or recognising that the way you have always approached something is no longer serving you or your team particularly well.

It can also mean recognising the limits of individual resilience.

Workplace wellbeing is not simply a matter of asking people to cope better. Workload, autonomy, relationships, support, role clarity and working culture all matter.

For managers, this creates an important distinction: developing yourself can help you manage pressure more effectively, but developing as a leader can also help you avoid creating unnecessary pressure for other people.

Start with self awareness

Self awareness can sound abstract until you begin asking specific questions about how you think, communicate and behave.

Try giving yourself some uninterrupted time to consider the questions below. You do not need to have an immediate answer to every one.

• How aware are you of your own values, emotions and behaviours?
• When you form an opinion about a situation, how do you check whether your assumptions are correct?
• How comfortable are you with being wrong?
• How do you respond to uncertainty or sudden change?
• What happens to your communication style when you are under pressure?
• How do you respond to disagreement or conflict?
• How well do you recognise how other people may be feeling?
• How often do you genuinely listen before deciding how to respond?
• What do you do to check that people have understood you?
• How comfortable are people challenging you or offering a different opinion?
• Do you know how your team experiences you as a manager?
• How regularly do you ask for feedback?
• When did you last change your behaviour because of feedback you received?
• What impact does your behaviour have on the confidence, wellbeing and development of other people?

You may find that some answers come easily. Others may highlight something you have never really considered before.

That is part of the value of reflection.

Are you leading by the values you believe in?

Values can provide an important foundation for leadership.

You might value fairness, trust, integrity, curiosity, empathy, accountability, growth or collaboration. But identifying a value is only the beginning.

The more revealing question is whether that value can actually be seen in the way you lead.

You might value openness, for example, but become less communicative when you are under pressure. You may believe strongly in developing other people, but find that immediate deadlines leave little time for meaningful development conversations.

Ask yourself:

• How do my values influence my decisions?
• Are those values visible in the way I communicate?
• When do I find it easiest to lead according to them?
• What pressures, environments or habits make that more difficult?
• What is one thing I could do to live those values more clearly at work?

The aim is not to become a perfect leader. It is to become more conscious of the gap that can sometimes exist between what we intend and what other people experience.

Development is about strengths too

Self development should not become an endless search for things that are wrong with us.

Understanding your strengths can be just as important as identifying areas for improvement.

Consider what colleagues regularly ask for your help with. What do people thank you for? What kind of work leaves you feeling engaged rather than depleted? Which qualities help you through difficult situations?

Perhaps you are particularly good at bringing people together. You might remain calm when circumstances become difficult, make complex information understandable or naturally create opportunities for other people to contribute.

Recognising these strengths is not about congratulating yourself. It can help you understand where you already make a positive contribution and how you could use those strengths more intentionally.

It can also help you identify where someone else’s strengths complement your own. Effective leadership does not require being good at everything.

Turn reflection into development

Reflection becomes particularly useful when it leads to action.

You do not need to create an enormous personal development plan or attempt to change everything at once. Choosing one meaningful area to work on can be a much more manageable place to start.

Perhaps you recognise that you tend to provide solutions before hearing the whole problem. Your development goal might be to practise listening and asking questions before offering advice.

Perhaps you avoid difficult conversations until a problem becomes unavoidable. Your goal might be to develop a more confident and constructive approach to feedback and conflict.

Or perhaps you have become so focused on delivering results that you rarely make time to discuss development with the people you manage.

Whatever you choose, make the goal specific enough that you can notice whether your behaviour is changing.

Use a simple development cycle

A useful approach is to treat personal development as a continuous cycle:

• Reflect: What is happening now, and what would you like to improve?
• Explore: What knowledge, skills, feedback or support could help?
• Act: Try a new behaviour or approach in your day to day work.
• Review: What changed? What worked? What did not?
• Adjust: Use what you have learnt to decide what you will do next.

This is less about reaching a final version of yourself and more about developing the habit of learning from experience.

Your development priorities will change as your responsibilities, circumstances and ambitions change. That is why reflection is something worth returning to throughout your career.

Ask other people what they see

Self reflection has one obvious limitation: we are looking at ourselves through our own eyes.

Feedback can help us see the difference between our intentions and our impact.

You might believe, for example, that you give people freedom to make decisions. Someone in your team might experience that very differently.

You may think you communicate clearly, while colleagues regularly leave conversations uncertain about what has been agreed.

Seeking feedback does not mean accepting every comment as fact. It means being curious enough to consider another perspective.

For managers and leaders, creating an environment in which people feel able to offer that feedback is itself an important area of development.

Development should support wellbeing, not compete with it

Learning and career progression can be positive and rewarding, but development should not become another source of pressure.

A thoughtful development plan should take account of your circumstances, responsibilities and capacity. Your goals can be ambitious without requiring you to sacrifice your wellbeing to achieve them.

The same principle applies when developing other people.

Good leadership is not about continually demanding more. It involves creating clarity, listening, supporting learning and recognising when workloads or expectations are becoming unrealistic.

Sometimes the most useful development question is therefore not “How can I do more?” but “What could I do differently?”

How do you want people to experience your leadership?

Perhaps the most useful measure of leadership development is not simply what you know, but how your leadership is experienced by other people.

Try asking yourself three questions:

• Why do I lead?
• What difference do I want to make?
• How do I want other people to experience my leadership?

These questions can help you think beyond job titles and career progression.

Perhaps you want people to experience you as fair and consistent. You may want to create an environment where people feel able to contribute ideas, ask questions or admit when something has gone wrong.

You might want to become more confident or decisive. Perhaps you want to listen better, handle difficult conversations more constructively or become better at helping other people develop.

Your answers can begin to turn a general ambition to “become a better leader” into something much more personal and meaningful.

From there, you can identify the knowledge, behaviours and skills that will help you become that leader.

Create your own leadership vision

You might find it useful to bring these ideas together into a simple leadership vision.

It does not need to be a corporate statement or something you show anyone else.

Think about what matters to you, what you already do well, where you want to grow and the impact you would like to have on the people around you.

Then try completing this sentence:

“As a leader, I want to…”

Your answer may change over time. In fact, it probably should.

A leadership vision is not a finished description of who you are. It can act as a point of reference as you encounter new responsibilities, challenges and opportunities.

Take your next step

You do not have to transform everything at once.

Choose one question in this article that made you stop and think.

Explore it further. Ask for feedback. Try something differently. Then review what happens.

If you have already completed our Leadership Identity Workbook, you can also return to the values, strengths and leadership vision you identified there. Consider what those reflections tell you about the next area of your professional development.

If you have not completed the workbook yet, you can download it free here and use it to explore your leadership story, values, strengths and the kind of leader you want to become.

And when you are ready to take a more structured approach, professional development can help you turn reflection into practical management and leadership knowledge and skills.

At Chase Business School, you can study CMI accredited management and leadership qualifications through flexible online learning. Shorter Award routes can provide a focused way to develop a particular area of your management practice, while Certificate and Diploma routes allow you to develop your knowledge across a broader range of management and leadership topics.

Wherever you decide to start, the aim is not to become someone else’s idea of the perfect leader. It is to understand yourself better, keep learning and become more intentional about the way you lead.

Discover CMI Level 5 courses in Management & Leadership to build your Leadership Skills and Identity.