Leadership

Leadership Learning and Development

 Reflective Questions
• What have been the key drivers for
you developing as a leader? Why
have these drivers helped you
develop as a leader?
• What might they be going forward?
Why?
 Triggers of Leadership
Development
• A significant leadership challenge at an early age (e.g. captain of a
sports team)
• Observing positive role models
• Mentoring, coaching and consultant relationships
• Experiential leadership development training courses
• Impact of negative role models
• MBAs and professional qualifications
• International and multicultural experiences
• Voluntary and community work
• Team sports
• Being thrown in the deep end

Turnbull and Bentley (2005)

Learning Leadership: Methods and
Sources
• Variety of conventional and unconventional
methods
• Need for learning by doing
• Feedback (e.g. 360) and training
• Leaders as teachers
• Business schools
• Leadership development models
• Reflecting diversity
Leadership Development
Evaluation
 Traditional Leadership
Development Evaluation?
 Traditional Evaluative Methods
• Competency and Behaviour Frameworks

• Kirkpatrick’s Framework

Step 1: Reaction - How well did the learners like the learning process?
Step 2: Learning - What did they learn? (the extent to which the learners
gain knowledge and skills)
Step 3: Behaviour - (What changes in job performance resulted from the
learning process? (capability to perform the newly learned skills while on
the job)
Step 4: Results - What are the tangible results of the learning process in
terms of reduced cost, improved quality, increased production, efficiency,
etc.?

• Does not take account of wider organisational impact and unforeseen

outcomes
 A Cultural Approach to Evaluation (Edwards and
Turnbull, 2013)

• Anthropological in Nature -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v
=A77HIQI3CYU

• Case examples:

1. A large Global organisation – researched over 18 months

2. A Master’s Degree Programme in Sustainable Development
3. A survey of Leadership Development in the Manufacturing Industry
in the UK
4. A UK University leadership and change programme
5. A leadership development programme for a regional sport
partnership
 Recommendations from Edwards and Turnbull
(2013)

1. Focus on all levels

2. Take an ethnographic perspective
3. Use biographical timelines
4. Use formal and informal data gathering
5. Use Socratic investigation
6. Reflect upon culture – stories, myths, history, symbols,
language, controls, power etc.
7. Start the evaluation at the design stage
Critical Approaches to Leadership
Learning
 Leadership Learning
• Leadership learning and development has taken a more critically reflexive
turn in recent years (see Edwards et al., 2013)

• Liminality and Leadership Learning and the

Monsters of Doubt (Hawkins and Edwards,
forthcoming)
 Becoming a leader – Kempster
and Stewart (2010)
• Research into and evaluation of leadership development
programmes has been limited so far and lacking in rigour
• Kempster and Stewart’s contribution is part of a new trend to
enhance our insight into leadership development in a more
rigorous way
– An autoethnographic study of a manger becoming a leader (executive
level)
– Leadership development through situated learning of leadership
practice
– Situated means within a historical and social context and through
interaction with notable others
– By adopting a leadership role, we engage in behaviours that we have
learned from experience in this context, then act and reflect on our
actions to inform these behaviours
 Leadership as Identity (Ford,
2010 and Ford et al., 2008)
• Performative role of leadership literature:
– Reading the literature has a lasting impact on who we think
leaders are and how they should be
– Leaders are largely portrayed as transcendental, perfect beings
and also as masculine competitive, aggressive, controlling and
self-reliant individuals
– Increasingly managers are asked to not just do a role but to
become leaders, i.e. adopt the identity prescribed by literature
• In reality nobody can live up to the expectations set by
the literature and in organisations
– We have multiple competing identities, not just one fixed one
– Leaders often have to ignore their preferred identity in favour of
the masculine, aggressive one they think is expected of them
 Resistance in Leadership
Development
• Carroll and Nicholson (2014) explore issues of resistance
and struggle in leadership development.
• They see resistance as an important part of leadership
development and when harnessed as part of the learning
process, they suggest it is an important part of the learning
process in leadership development.
• By looking at resistance and struggle in this way Carroll and
Nicholson challenge those that see leadership development
participants as compliant and malleable as has been
resonating within the functionalist discourse highlighted as
pervasive in the literature by Mabey (2013).
 What does this mean for
leadership development?
• Avoid presenting leadership as a fixed role or identity that
we can adopt and develop
• Encourage awareness of different possible selves as
leaders, followers and both
• Deal with emotions and anxieties during process of
becoming and being a leader
• Strengthen voices of alternative leadership models than
the masculine, competitive, aggressive, self-reliant
individualist one
• Reconnect with context and community and become
inclusive and welcoming of critical and creative views of
others
 Arts-Based methods in Managerial
Development (Taylor and Ladkin, 2009)
• Tools based on traditional logic and rationality assume that world is
stable, knowable and predictable – this is limiting
• Non-logical activities enable people to solve problems and enact their
potentials
– Accessing intuitions, feelings, stories, improvisation, experience,
imagination, active listening, awareness in the moment, novel words and
empathy
• Contribution of arts-based methods to development of managers and
leaders:
– Skills transfer – learning artistic skills that can be applied to org setting
– Projective Technique – accessing inner thoughts and feelings
– Illustration of essence – apprehend essence of a concept, situation, tacit
knowledge
– Making – deeper experience of personal presence and connection to
counteract feelings of disconnect and fragmentation amongst leaders
 References
• Carroll, B. and Nicholson, H. (2014) Resistance and struggle in leadership development. Human Relations, 67(11): 1413-1436.
• Collinson, D. and Tourish, D. (2015) Teaching leadership critically: New directions for leadership pedagogy. Academy of Management
Learning & Education, 14(4): 576-594.
• Day, D.V., Fleenor, J.W., Atwater, L.E., Sturm, R.E. and McKee, R.A. (2014). Advances in leader and leadership development: A review
of 25 years of research and theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1): 63-82.
• Edwards, G.P., Elliott, C., Iszatt-White, M. and Schedlitzki, D. (2013) Critical and alternative approaches to leadership learning and
development. Management Learning, 44(1): 3–10.
• Edwards, G.P. Elliot, C., Izsatt-White, M., and Schedlitzki, D. (2015b) Using Creative Techniques in Leadership Learning and
Development: An Introduction. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 17(3): 279-288.
• Edwards, G.P. and Turnbull, S. (2013) Special issue on new paradigms in evaluating leadership development. Advances in Developing
Human Resources, 15(1): 3–9.
• Gagnon, S. and Collinson, D. (2014) Rethinking global leadership development programmes: The interrelated significance of power,
context and identity. Organization Studies, 35(5): 645-670.
• Hannum, K.M. and Craig, S.B. (2010) Introduction to the special issue on leadership development evaluation. Leadership Quarterly, 21:
581–582.
• Hawkins, B. and Edwards, G. (2015) Managing the monsters of doubt: Liminality, threshold concepts and leadership learning.
Management Learning, 46(1): 24-43.
• Kempster, S. and Stewart, J. (2010) Becoming a leader: A co-produced auto-ethnographic exploration of situated learning of leadership
practice. Management Learning, 41(2): 205–219.
• Mabey, C. (2013) Leadership development in organizations: Multiple discourses and diverse practice. International Journal of
Management Reviews, 15: 359-380.
• Nicholson, H. and Carroll, B. (2013) Identity undoing and power relations in leadership development. Human Relations, 66(9): 1225-
1248.
• Schedlitzki, D., Jarvis, C. and MacInnes, J. (2015) Leadership development: A place for storytelling and Greek mythology? Management
Learning, 46(4): 412-426.
• Smolović-Jones, O., Grint, K. and Cammock, P. (2014) Public leadership development facilitation and the crossroads blues.
Management Learning, 46(4): 391-411.
Reflections, thoughts,
questions?