From the Publisher

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) is the world's largest institution devoted exclusively to leadership research and education. For more than three decades, CCL has studied and trained hundreds of thousands of executives and worked with them to create practical models, tools, and publications for the development of effective leaders and leadership. This second edition of The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development brings together the wealth of practical knowledge that CCL has gained from this experience. It explores the essence of leadership development, reveals how individuals can effectively enhance their leadership skills, and demonstrates what organizations can do to help build leaders and leadership capacity. The book also includes a companion CD-ROM that contains a library of classic CCL publications for practicing leaders.

Booknews

This handbook describes how individuals can enhance their leadership ability and how organizations can help. The 13 contributions discuss six methods of leadership development; the leadership development process; and contemporary topics such as leadership growth for women and people of color, cross-cultural leadership development, and the development of global leaders. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0787965294
  
• ISBN-13: 9780787965297
• Format: Textbook Hardcover, 560pp
• Publisher: Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated
• Pub. Date: October 2003
• Edition Description: Second
• Edition Number: 2
• Series: J-B CCL (Center for Creative Leadership), #25

• Table of Contents
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

OUR VIEW OF LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Ellen Van Velsor Cynthia D. McCauley

As in any discipline, the field of leadership development advances its understanding and practice by examining and reexamining fundamental questions. In leadership development, these central questions include the following:

What does it take to be an effective leader?

What aspects of a leader's talents are hard-wired, and what aspects are developable?

How do people learn important leadership skills and perspectives?

Do some people learn more than others from their leadership experiences?

What are the necessary ingredients for stimulating development in leaders?

What are the best strategies for enhancing leadership development?

Exploring these types of questions with our clients and colleagues has been the basis of the Center for Creative Leadership's efforts to advance the understanding, practice, and development of leadership. In the 1970s, CCL began experimenting with feedback-intensive leadership development programs-programs that provide participants with a heavy dose of feedback in a supportive environment. Over the years, we have refined these programs and added new components, developed more sophisticated feedback tools and methods, and studied the impact of our programs on the participants. We have also tried to understand how managers learn, grow, and change throughouttheir careers-not just from formal programs but also from the challenges in their working and nonworking lives, the relationships they cultivate, and the hardships they encounter.

We continue to invest energy and resources in efforts to understand and improve the leadership development process. For most of CCL's history, the essential question that has provided direction for both our research and educational activities has been, How can people develop the skills and perspectives necessary to be effective in leadership roles? Much of what we have learned from examining this question is contained in this handbook. More recently, we have broadened our research and practice beyond developing individuals to developing organizational capacity for leadership. What we are learning from this broader perspective on leadership development is also shared in the handbook.

In this introductory chapter, we present a framework for understanding what is to follow. We distill what we have learned into a model of leader development, and this model serves as scaffolding on which to place the concepts that are discussed in detail in the chapters that follow. We also discuss how and why our understanding of leadership development is expanding to include issues in addition to the development of the individual leader.

Assumptions and Model of Leader Development

We define leader development as the expansion of a person's capacity to be effective in leadership roles and processes. Leadership roles and processes are those that facilitate setting direction, creating alignment, and maintaining commitment in groups of people who share common work.

You should note three things about this definition. First, it is a definition of leader development, not of the more commonly used phrase leadership development. Most of our research and educational programs are directed toward developing the individual, so developing leaders is where we begin in describing our model. We will return to the broader concept of leadership development later in the chapter.

Second, we try to look at what makes any person effective in a variety of leadership roles and processes (rather than looking at the traits or characteristics of formal leaders). The assumption here is that in the course of their lives, most people must take on leadership roles and participate in leadership processes in order to carry out their commitments to larger social entities-the organizations in which they work, the social or volunteer groups of which they are a part, the neighborhoods in which they live, and the professional groups with which they identify. These leadership roles may be formal positions infused with authority to take action and make decisions (for example, a manager, an elected official, or a group's representative at a meeting), or they may be informal roles with little official authority (the team member who helps the group develop a better sense of its capabilities, the person who organizes the neighborhood to fight rezoning efforts, the whistle-blower who reveals things gone wrong). Leaders may actively participate in recognized processes for creating change (such as serving on task forces or project teams, identifying and focusing attention on problems or issues, or getting resources to implement changes) or more subtle processes for shaping culture (telling stories that define organizational values, celebrating accomplishments). Rather than classifying people as "leaders" or "nonleaders" and focusing our work on developing "leaders," we believe that all people can learn and grow in ways that make them more effective in the various leadership roles and processes they take on. This process of personal development that improves leader effectiveness is what we understand leader development to be about.

Finally, although it may go without saying, we should note that we do believe that individuals can expand their leadership capacities and that this effort to develop is worthwhile. A key underlying assumption in all of our work is that people can learn, grow, and change and that this learning and personal growth does enhance individual effectiveness. We do not debate the extent to which effective leaders are born or are developed. No doubt, leadership capacity has its roots partly in genetics, partly in early childhood development, and partly in adult experience. What we focus on here is what our experience has amply demonstrated: adults can develop the important capacities that facilitate their effectiveness in leadership roles and processes. People can use their existing strengths and talents to grow in their weaker areas and can significantly enhance their overall effectiveness through leader development work.

The core question, of course, is how to go about it. How do people acquire or improve their capacity for leadership? How do organizations help them in this process? A two-part model, illustrated in Figure I.1, reflects our attempt to summarize what we have learned thus far about the ingredients that go into leader development.

The three factors in part (a) of the model-assessment, challenge, and support-are the elements that combine to make developmental experiences more powerful. That is, whatever the experience, it has more impact if it contains these three elements.

We know that although leaders learn primarily through their experiences, not all experiences are equally developmental. For example, the first year in a new job is usually more developmental than the fifth or sixth year. Working with a boss who gives constructive feedback is usually more developmental than working with one who does not. A training program that encourages lots of practice and helps participants examine mistakes is usually more developmental than one that provides information but no practice. Situations that stretch an individual and provide both feedback and a sense of support are more likely to stimulate leader development than situations that leave out any of these elements. You can make any experience-a training program, an assignment, a relationship-richer and more developmental by making sure that the elements of assessment, challenge, and support are present.

Part (b) of the model shows that leader development is a process that requires both a variety of developmental experiences and the ability to learn from experience. The latter is an element that the individual brings to the development process. In the course of much of our work, we have noticed that people learn from similar experiences to differing degrees and in different ways. Although such variation is explained in part by the level of challenge that different people perceive in any experience, another factor is the individual's ability to learn from an experience. The ability to learn is a complex combination of motivational factors, personality factors, and learning tactics.

Part (b) of the model also shows that developmental experiences and the ability to learn have a direct impact on each other. Being engaged in a developmental experience can enhance a person's ability to learn, and being more readily able to learn can lead one to draw more development from any set of experiences. Thus although we conceptually separate the developmental experience and the learner in our model (the better to discuss them), they are in actuality closely interconnected: developmental experiences can enhance a person's ability to learn, and individuals with high ability to learn seek out and may benefit more from a variety of developmental experiences. This dynamic is examined in much greater detail in Chapter Seven.

Finally, part (b) indicates that any leader development process is embedded in a particular organizational context: the organization's business strategy, its culture, and the various systems and processes within the organization. This context shapes the leader development process-how it is focused, how well-integrated and systemic it is, and who is responsible for it.

Elements of an Effective Developmental Experience

Through CCL's research and educational programs, we have begun to gain a better understanding of the elements that are key drivers of leader development (assessment, challenge, and support). When we look at any type of developmental experience, from training programs to job assignments, we find that they are most effective when all three elements are present.

These elements serve dual purposes in the development process. First, they motivate people to focus their attention and efforts on learning, growth, and change. Second, they provide the raw material for learning: the information, observations, and reactions that lead to a more complex and sometimes quite different understanding of the world. To enhance the development of leaders, we need to help them find, create, and shape a wide range of learning experiences, each of which provides assessment, challenge, and support. Table I.1 summarizes the motivational role played by each element, as well as the kind of learning resource each provides. In the next three sections of this chapter, we look at each of these elements in more depth.

Assessment

The best developmental experiences are rich in assessment data. Assessment data can come from oneself or from other people. The sources are almost limitless: peers in the workplace, bosses, employees, spouses, children, parents, friends, customers, counselors, and organizational consultants. The processes for collecting and interpreting the data can be either formal or informal, with many shades of variation in between.

Formal assessment from others includes such processes as performance appraisals, customer evaluations, 360-degree feedback, organizational surveys that measure employee satisfaction with managers, and evaluations and recommendations from consultants. Informal assessment data from others are available more regularly through less structured processes: asking a colleague for feedback, observing others' reactions to one's ideas or actions, being repeatedly sought out to help with certain kinds of problems, or receiving unsolicited feedback from a boss. Self-assessment can also occur through formal and structured means, as with psychological inventories or journaling, or through informal and often in-the-moment processes, such as monitoring of internal states, reflecting on decision processes, or analyzing mistakes.

Assessment is important because it gives people an understanding of where they are now: their current strengths, the level of their current performance or leader effectiveness, and what are seen as their primary development needs. So one important function of assessment data is that they provide a benchmark for future development. Another is that they stimulate people to evaluate themselves: What am I doing well? Where do I need to improve? How do others see me? In what ways do my behaviors affect others? How am I doing relative to my goals? What's important to me? Still another is that assessment data provide information that helps people answer these questions. In the context of their everyday work, people may not be aware of the degree to which their usual behaviors or actions are effective. In the face of a new challenge, they may not know what to continue doing and what to change. Even if they realize that what they are doing is ineffective, people may believe that the answer is merely to work harder; it may not occur to them to try a new strategy. But when an experience provides feedback on how one is doing and how one might improve or provides other means for critical self-reflection, the result can be an unfreezing of one's current understanding of oneself to facilitate movement toward a broader and more complex understanding.

Assessment information also points out the gaps between a person's current capacities and performance and some desired or ideal state. The desired level might be based on what the job requires, what someone's career goals demand, what other people expect, or what people expect of themselves. This gap is one of the keys to why developmental experiences motivate learning, growth, and change. If the area is something that is important to them and if they believe in the accuracy of the assessment data, people work to close the gap by improving their current capacities. If the assessment data indicate that there is no gap-that in fact someone is quite effective in a particular area-then the outcome of the assessment can be increased self-confidence. As a result, the person may seek out more opportunities to use and refine the strength.

Good assessment data also help people clarify what they need to learn, improve, or change. Having data not only motivates a person to close the gaps but also provides clues as to how those gaps might be closed. For example, if a leader learns that part of the reason for low morale in his work group is his pattern of not delegating important work to others (which, he comes to understand, is grounded in perfectionism), then improving morale involves learning how to let go of work, including how to be more in touch with his perfectionist tendencies so that they can be better managed. If a person's frustration at work is diagnosed as being partially caused by low tolerance for ambiguity, she can focus on ways to increase her tolerance or to shape situations so that they are less ambiguous.

Continues...

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