Leadership development: past, present, and future.

This article reviews notable trends in the leadership development field. In the past two decades, such trends included the proliferation of new leadership development methods and a growing recognition of the importance of a leader's emotional resonance with others. A growing recognition that leadership development involves more than just developing individual leaders has now led to a greater focus on the context in which leadership is developed, thoughtful consideration about how to best use leadership competencies, and work/life balance issues. Future trends include exciting potential advances in globalization, technology, return on investment (ROI), and new ways of thinking about the nature of leadership and leadership development.

The Past

Looking back at the state of leadership and leadership development over the past 20 years, we were surprised to discover more than a decade passed before HRP first contained an article with the word "leadership" in its title. At the risk of making too much out of mere titles, we note with interest the contrast between that early period and the fact that leadership development is now one of HRP's five key knowledge areas. The last two decades have witnessed something of an explosion of interest in leadership development in organizations. Some of the most noteworthy issues and trends in the field of leadership development in the past 20 years fall under these two general headings:

1. The proliferation of leadership development methods;

2. The importance of a leader's emotional resonance with and impact on others.

Proliferation of Leadership Development Methods

One clear trend over the past 20 years has been the increasing use and recognition of the potency of a variety of developmental experiences. Classroom-type leadership training--for long the primary formal development mode--is now complemented (or even supplanted) by activities as diverse as high ropes courses or reflective journaling.

Classroom training should not be the only part of a leadership development initiative, and may be the least critical. While training may even be a necessary element of leadership development, developmental experiences are likely to have the greatest impact when they can be linked to or embedded in a person's ongoing work and when they are an integrated set of experiences. Activities like coaching, mentoring, action learning, and 360-degree feedback are increasingly key elements of leadership development initiatives.

Developmental relationships primarily take two forms: coaching and mentoring. Coaching involves practical, goal-focused forms of one-on-one learning and, ideally, behavioral change (Hall, et al., 1999). It can be a short-term intervention intended to develop specific leadership skills or a more extensive process involving a series of meetings over time. The most effective coaching allows for collaboration to assess and understand the developmental task to challenge current constraints while exploring new possibilities, and to ensure accountability and support for reaching goals and sustaining development (Ting & Hart, 2004). Mentoring is typically defined as a committed, long-term relationship in which a senior person supports the personal and professional development of a junior person. It may be a formal program or a much more informal process. Recognizing the value of mentoring, organizations are increasingly looking at ways to formalize these types of relationships as part of their leadership development efforts.

Action learning is a set of organization development practices in which important real-time organizational problems arc tackled. Three kinds of objectives are sought: delivering measurable organizational results, communicating learnings specific to a particular context, and developing more general leadership skills and capabilities (Palus & Horth, 2003). Effective action learning may range from tacit, unfacilitated learning at work to focused and high-impact learning projects to transformations of people and organizations (Marsick, 2002).

Challenging job assignments are a potent form of leadership development and provide many of the developmental opportunities in organizations today. The level of organizational involvement in making job assignments part of their leadership development process runs the gamut from simply providing people with information about developmental opportunities in their current job to a systematic program of job rotation. Using job assignments for developmental purposes provides benefits that go beyond getting the job done and may even result in competitive advantages for the organization (Ohlott, 2004).

One developmental method has been so pervasive that it deserves somewhat greater attention here: the use of 360-degree feedback to assess leader competencies. Chappelow (2004) recently noted that perhaps the most remarkable trend in the field of leader development over the past 20 years has been the popularity and growth of 360-degree feedback. Others called it one of the most notable management innovations of the past decade (Atwater & Waldman, 1998; London & Beatty, 1993). To help those organizations disappointed with 360-degree feedback results, here is some of what we have learned over the years about how to implement them effectively (Chappelow, 2004):

1. An assessment activity is not necessarily developmental. Three-hundred-sixty-degree feedback should not be a stand-alone event. In addition to assessment there need to be development planning and follow-up activities.

2. Boss support is critical for the process itself, as well as for buy-in for the recipient's specific developmental goals stemming from the feedback.

3. The 360-degree feedback process works best if it starts with executives at the top of an organization and cascades downward throughout the organization.

4. Shoddy administration of a 360-degree feedback process can be fatal.

5. The timing of the process accounts for other organizational realities that could dilute or confound its impact.

Another kind of leadership development method gaining popularity during the past 20 years has involved teams (Ginnett, 1990). The prevalence and importance of teams in organizations today, and the unique challenges of leading teams, make it easy to forget that teams were not always so pervasive a part of our organizational lives. One way to convey the magnitude of that shift is to share an anecdote involving one of our colleagues. During his doctoral work in organizational behavior at Yale about 20 years ago, our colleague Robert Ginnett would tell others about his special interest in the leadership of teams. Routinely, he says, they would assume he must be an athletic coach; who else, they'd say, would be interested in teams?

Importance of a Leader's Emotional Resonance with and Impact on Others

Twenty years ago, our understanding of leadership in organizations was dominated by the classic two-factor approach focusing on task and relationship behaviors. That general approach can be characterized as transactional in nature, as distinguished from a qualitatively different approach often described as transformational.

Transactional leadership is characterized by mutually beneficial exchanges between parties to optimize mutual benefit including the accomplishment of necessary organizational tasks. The exchange-model nature of transactional leadership tends to produce predictable and somewhat short-lived outcomes. Transformational leadership touched followers' deeper values and sense of higher purpose, and led to higher levels of for lower commitment and effort and more enduring change. Transformational leaders provide compelling visions of a better future and inspire trust through seemingly unshakeable self-confidence and conviction.

Conger (1999) reviewed 15 years' research in the related fields of charismatic and transformational leadership, and observed that scholarly interest in these areas may be traceable to changes in the global competitive business environment at that time such as competitive pressures to reinvent themselves and challenges to employee commitment. Prior to that time, leadership researchers generally had not distinguished between the roles of leading and managing: A person in any position of authority was largely assumed to hold a leadership role. It was a novel idea that leadership and management might represent different kinds of roles and behaviors. Hunt (1999) was even more blunt about the state of scholarly research in the field of leadership in the 1980s. He described it as a gloom-and-doom period characterized by boring work, inconsequential questions, and static answers. Research in the areas of transformational and charismatic leadership both energized scholars and interested organizational practitioners.