Abstract:
This white paper outlines how the process of leadership identity
development reinforces the management development programme
and the value it brings to the organisation and individual. “For
the most part, the learning doesn’t lead to better organizational
performance, because people soon revert to their old ways of doing
things” state Beer, Finnstrom, & Schrader (2016, p. 51). Leadership
development interventions appear to be something that is “nice to
have” when sufficient resources exist, but few organisational leaders
seem to know whether it has any true value with respect to return on
development investment.
Research indicates that the manager is more able to traverse the
challenges of the workplace with newfound leadership capacities
when underpinned by a coherent identity shift.1 Enhanced leader
identity equips managers to be nimbler when dealing with daily
pressures and organisational changes, which brings greater results.
This white paper offers a framework for designing a management
development programme underpinned by a leadership identity
development process. It highlights how to design the process,
facilitation and coaching to bolster leader development. In this case,
the Managing Managers for Results programme is used by way of
illustration. The programme evolved out of the Personal and Applied
Learning centre of the Gordon Institute of Business Science. The
Personal and Applied Learning department has deep capability in
coaching, self-discovery processes, applied learning and process
facilitation, which are processes used to embed leadership identity
development.
This information is useful to those involved with the development
and selection of managers within an organisation, including C-suite,
executive education and business schools, corporate learning and
development managers, human resources and talent managers, and
organisational effectiveness managers. The anticipated value-add of
this paper is to:
• provide a framework and core constructs for leader identity
development;
• describe the design processes that support leadership identity
development through coaching and facilitation, as differentiated
from pure lecturing;
• explain the rigour of the design of the career development
programme, Managing Managers for Results programme; and
• contribute to the literature around leadership identity
development
