Leadership identity development: Enhancing the impact of a middle management programme through identity work

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