Leadership Development – Then and Now
By Albert A. Vicere

An enhanced ability to learn from experiences _ both their own and those of colleagues, customers and competitors _ is central to the development of leaders.

Although far from a revolutionary notion, the growing emphasis on learning as an element of corporate competitiveness has provided the impetus for revolutionary changes in how organizations are managing and utilizing leadership development initiatives.

Leadership development today is in a state of transition from development for the sake of development, to development for the purpose of crafting organizational effectiveness and competitiveness. As such, benchmark leadership development processes are presenting new answers to age-old questions.

Who? Traditionally, leadership development efforts were reserved for an elite few individuals who had been identified as having high potential for advancement within the organization. This process helped companies create a small pool of executives from which senior managers could be drawn. In contrast, leadership development today is increasingly all-inclusive, involving managers at all levels – not just high potentials – in the process of continuous learning and team development. Through these processes, organizations are kept vital, flexible and open to opportunities in the competitive environment.

What? In the past, the leadership development process for most organizations consisted of a series of "checkmarks" in a manager's file indicating that he or she had completed a predetermined rite of passage into the next level of management. Today, leadership development is managed as a process of continuous learning through which managers at all levels of the organization are involved in ongoing experiences, including training, education, experiential assignments, team building and coaching/mentoring. These processes are designed to facilitate not only individual development, but also the implementation of corporate strategies through the cultivation of the managerial talents and organizational values essential to long-term competitive effectiveness.

Where? The main venue for traditional leadership development used to be the classroom where individual managers were exposed to ideas, concepts and hopefully learning. Today, the venues for leadership development encompass not only the classroom, but also the workplace and even the world. The action learning model of leadership development, in which managers learn by doing, is moving to the forefront of leadership development, as companies attempt to promote learning and personal growth through guided processes of real-world problem solving. And involving leaders as teachers – requiring them to develop their own teachable perspectives –  is making real inroads into leadership development design processes.

When? For executives in most companies, traditional development opportunities were few and far between. Attending an external executive education program, for example, was often a once-in-a-lifetime event. For benchmark organizations, leadership development has become an ongoing process that fosters the ability to continuously learn, innovate and improve.

How? Formerly, leadership development was viewed as a series of relatively discrete programs, including classroom activities, rotational assignments and perhaps some form of performance feedback. Individual managers frequently were left to their own devices to figure out how to apply what they had learned to their work. In today's benchmark organizations, leadership development is an ongoing process designed not only to enhance personal performance but also to enable work processes, develop behaviors, cultivate culture, give practice and provide feedback. This applied, systemic view of leadership development enables an organization to build a hard-to-replicate form of human resource-based competitive advantage.

Why? Traditionally, leadership development activities were managed as rites of passage – "stripes" earned perhaps for achievement, but often simply for long-term organizational membership. The new learning-oriented perspective takes advantage of the real value of leadership development by utilizing it as a force for building organizational capability – the ability to maintain both flexibility and focus in a complex, changing environment.

This type of organizational capability cannot be developed through management edicts, analytical techniques or quick-fix programs. Rather, it requires a new perspective on leadership and organizational development, which realizes the contribution of continuous learning to an organization's competitive advantage.

Albert A. Vicere, one of the country's top leadership coaches, is a professor of strategic leadership at Penn State's Smeal College of Business and president of Vicere Associates, Inc. Visit www.vicere.com.