Your Simple Annual L&D Planning Checklist

5 questions to sharpen leadership and team capability planning for the year ahead

For many L&D and HR teams, annual development programme planning can feel like a balancing act. How do you best respond to immediate pressures while trying to invest in capability that will still matter in twelve months’ time?

Budgets are finite. Leaders are time-poor. Teams are under constant pressure to adapt. In this environment, the most effective development strategies are the most focused.

A small set of well-chosen questions can make the difference in picking the right focus that will genuinely shift behaviour and performance.

Below are five questions high-performing organisations should ask when planning leadership and team capability for the year ahead.

1. Where do our leaders and teams struggle most right now?

Before selecting programs, tools or frameworks, it’s worth pausing to identify your specific pressure points, not generic industry trends.

Common challenges include:

• Communication breakdowns across teams or levels
• Low trust or unresolved tension
• Slow or inconsistent decision-making
• Fatigue around change and competing priorities
• Misalignment between leaders, teams and strategy

The key is specificity. Rather than trying to “improve leadership” broadly, ask:

• Where is work getting stuck?
• Where is time or energy wasted or not exerted?
• Which behaviours are limiting performance right now?

Recommendation:
Anchor your planning in current, observable challenges. Development is most effective when it addresses lived experience.

2. Do our current programmes address how people work together?

Many capability programmes focus heavily on skills, processes and tasks. These are important, but they don’t fully explain why performance varies so widely between teams doing similar work.

How people prefer to work, how they communicate, how they approach risk and change and what they value at work all shape day-to-day outcomes.

When programmes overlook human dynamics, improvements are not as sustainable over time.

Recommendation:
Review your existing initiatives and ask:

• Do they help people understand their own work preferences and impact?
• Do they give teams a positive shared language to discuss difference to build respect, trust and build complementarity?
• Do they support better collaboration, not just better execution?

Sustainable capability growth depends on addressing how work happens, not just what needs to happen.

3. Which teams or leadership levels will have the greatest impact if we invest in them this year?

Not every team or leader needs the same level of investment at the same time. Trying to uplift everyone equally might mean you don’t have enough to go into as much depth where it matters most.

Be deliberate about where you focus:

• Key leadership transition points (first-time leaders, senior leaders taking on broader scope)
• Teams working in complex, cross-functional or high-risk environments
• Groups experiencing rapid change, growth or restructuring

Recommendation:
Identify where a capability uplift will create the strongest ripple effect across the organisation. Targeted investment with specific goals often delivers greater returns than generic programs.

4. How will we sustain capability beyond a single workshop or intervention?

One-off sessions create insight, but insight alone rarely changes behaviour. Without reinforcement, new ways of working tend to erode under everyday habits and productivity-pressure.

Sustained capability is built through:

• Refreshers that reconnect people to core insights
• Diagnostics that highlight progress and gaps
• Follow-up tools that support application over time
• The adoption of a shared language that teams continue to use day to day

Recommendation:
Plan for continuity, not just delivery. Consider how capability will be reinforced six, twelve and eighteen months after the initial intervention.

5. How will we know this investment has worked?

Capability development can be difficult to judge because success definition was too broad or loose. Clear success measures make it easier to adjust, improve and demonstrate value.

To go beyond participation satisfaction, ask:

• What behaviours should we see more (or less) of?
• What decisions should happen faster or with greater confidence?
• How should team interactions change over time?

Recommendation:
Define success early. Even qualitative indicators, if agreed upfront, provide a stronger basis for evaluating impact and refining your approach.

Planning with Intention

When leadership and team capability planning is guided by these five questions, development efforts become:

• More targeted
• More relevant to your workplace
• Easier to sustain
• More clearly aligned to organisational outcomes

They also help L&D and HR teams move from “delivering programmes” to shaping capability with purpose and clarity.

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