Discussion and Implications
Our main themes in this report have been: Leadership development of individuals in programs is a matter of facilitating a shift to more encompassing and adaptive ways of knowing and experiencing a complex world; and development of this sort has myriad precedents and outcomes and tends to happen over long rather than short periods of time. In closing, we would like to emphasize a number of points related to these.
Leadership development is “whole life” in that it is vitally connected to family, personal, and community life, as well as work life—including the biographical aspects of each of these. Another way to say this: Leadership development is about the way a person broadly constructs, evolves, and enacts his or her values, relationships, memberships, and responsibilities.
Environments (such as organizations, families, and communities) may tend to promote stability within meaning systems more than evolution of meaning systems. This means that development of people without development of the holding environments may work against the development of both people and their contexts.
Leadership—meaning-making in communities of practice—is a set of processes that extend beyond the individual leader (although individual leaders are an important aspect of leadership processes). The purpose of working with individuals in programs is not to further concentrate leadership in those individuals. Rather, it is to build their abilities to foster and effectively participate in processes of leadership in their communities.
Leadership development is best considered over a span of years rather than (only) weeks and months. Short-term results from programs are possible and may be desirable, but the absence of obvious and dramatic short-term results does not necessarily indicate the absence of development. The pragmatics of outcome measurement have led to conceptions of development that emphasize the short term at the expense of understanding long-term development (see, for instance, Hellervik, Hazucha, & Schneider, 1992). Programs do best when they incorporate some form of long-term support and follow-up.
Development is largely a process of “getting outside the box” with respect to one’s worldviews—and then getting outside that box—with “the box” being each sequential stage of development.
It is not enough to train for particular leadership competencies (Vaill, 1991). Holding environments, and stages of meaning-making, must also be developed if the competencies are to “take” and “make sense.”
There are “inner” and “outer” approaches to assessing outcomes of development. The secret may lie in keeping our eye on both epistemologies and behaviors. If behaviors are manifested without an undergirding epistemology and suitable holding environment, they are very likely to be ephemeral. At the same time, it is new experience and experimentation with new behaviors—learning—that is a principal driver of epistemological evolution.
When we take these previous points together, it is clear that the process of leadership development is much larger than any single program or intervention. We therefore cannot speak of the outcomes of a particular program for an individual or for an organization without considering the larger context of systems, experiences, and circumstances. Leadership development of individuals in programs should therefore be coupled to systemic development of leadership processes in organizations.
There is a certain risk of pain, and even harm, to the individual and the organization, associated with development as described in this model (Kaplan & Palus, 1994). Evolving basic perspectives is unsettling at times, and it means moving from what is familiar into what is largely unknown. This risk may spill over into the family realm, as, for example, the individual takes new perspectives on the order of, “Who am I and what am I doing with my life?” Not everybody is ready for further disequilibration in the name of leadership development. Many people are already burdened with disequilibration on many fronts. Careful thought needs to be given to readiness: Who is ready for what kind of work?
There is a central developmental motion for a maturing leader that typically involves first developing a strong independent self-identity with which one can act with a high degree of confidence, authority, and autonomy. Further development involves the leader’s being able to examine his or her system of beliefs as a system among many systems, and to surrender some autonomy and authority by redefining identity in terms of one’s evolution as an individual in dialectical relationships in community—while at the same time not losing self-identity (Drath, 1990; Kegan, 1982).
The concept of “program” as traditionally defined is too limiting. Leadership development work needs to allow for individual tailoring (Boydell et al., 1991) and to be integrated into the routines of the organization.
Quite often the people in charge of organizations say they want to develop leadership within the organization (“How could that possibly be anything but good for the timely execution of our initiatives?”), but what they really mean is that they want people who are empowered to enact leadership that emanates from the top. Effective leadership development entails the creative risk that any sort of received wisdom will be questioned and even turned on its head. It invites some degree of apparent chaos, with staff choosing to go “under construction” rather than to obediently “cross the street.” Choose carefully before you choose leadership development for your organization.