Welcome to the first module in the Action Planning Course. This course is one of three in the Leadership Development for Engineers specialization. The preferred order to take the courses is the self-awareness course first, followed by relationship management and then this one on action planning. In this module, we'll begin with looking at the leadership development plan. We'll look at this from two perspectives. First is, how do you take personal ownership of your own plan so that you get the best out of those things that need to be done to improve your leadership skills? Secondly, we'll look at it from the perspective of the leader. What are the things that you can do to help your followers develop as leaders as well? So with that in mind, let's proceed to my leadership observation for this module. People who don't want to be leaders generally don't make good leaders. We'll follow that up at the end of the module with the second half of the observation. Let's take a look at our objectives for this module. First, we'll look at prioritizing leadership competencies. In the first course in this specialization, we looked at the RCEL leadership framework. We'll draw extensively on that as we work on our leadership competencies in this module. If you have a framework that your particular organization uses, feel free to use that as you develop your action plan. We'll assess those competencies and identify what our current skill is, and what the target skill is that we need to achieve in order to be most effective. We'll select certain competencies for further development. We can't select them all, so we'll have to prioritize those in such a way that we can pick the right ones for current work. Then we'll prepare goals for each of those that are well-structured. And we'll have a separate module in this specialization devoted exclusively to how to set smart goals. Lastly, we'll summarize those steps that need to be taken in order to have an effective action plan. As we work throughout this module and the specialization, we'll be targeting those things that you need to be doing to have a documented, well-structured action plan that you can implement and achieve results in the near term.
