The idea of Leadership Development
Organizations require of their employees that they take increasing responsibility for the design and success of their work field. If this central challenge on executives is taken seriously, then the development of executives themselves must be put thereafter in the center, and direct responsibility must be placed upon them for their own learning. The frequently found learning situation, in which executives consume seminars with charismatic advisers and lecturers, is totally different from what is essential in everyday leadership.
So our idea was therefore to create learning situations in which executives take responsibility for their own learning and take it into their own hands. Only in such a way they learn what is increasingly demanded of them: activity and responsibility. The idea of leadership development arose from this experience, and attempts to transform executives from consumers to producers of their own learning.
In leadership development, executives invent, plan and create their own learning. They make experiences with themselves exactly in what is their most important task in everyday work life: to take responsibility for themselves and joint responsibility for the group with which they learn.
With this essential experience all the other tasks are connected executives are confronted with in development-oriented organizations:
- To make decisions
- Enable ability to make decisions
- Assume business responsibility
- Empower teams for exceptional results
- To work in a team cooperatively and creatively
- To notice and work on conflicts
- To engage, advance and coach employees
- Make hard cuts and new growth possible
- Communicate clearly, understandably and in a connected manner.
In leadership development, executives are asked
- How they live leadership
- How they enter into relationships
- How they form their own educational path and help design the learning path of others
- How they notice and manage developing conflicts
- What energy they bring in and what makes them energized.
Leadership development offers to participating executives, learning arenas and spaces for gearing their learning gradually with that of their team and their organization. Leadership development aims in its idea and architecture toward a connection between individual learning, team learning and the learning of the organization.