Chapter 3: Developing Leadership as Well as Leaders

New narratives of leadership are forming along with new ways of conceptualizing what leadership is and how it is created. These ways of looking at leadership can profoundly affect the way one might approach leadership development and research in leadership development. This chapter explores leadership as recognizable patterns of interaction between a group of people as a distinctly different perspective from viewing leadership as the qualities, behaviors, attitudes, skills, or personality of a single individual. We propose that this additional conceptualization of leadership expands the repertoire of how leadership capacity can be fostered, grown, or developed. Leadership development is a $14B+ industry (Kaiser & Curphy, 2013) that has traditionally focused on developing individual leaders. Yet despite this effort, a recent Harvard Business School (2016) survey suggests that the focus on quality, relevance, and outcomes in most leadership development programs still leave a lot to be desired (p. 6). If investments made in skills-based or competency-based leadership development are not resulting in additional leadership capabilities, how then can we step back and examine what might be missing? What previously unnoticed features of leadership might we bring to prominence? If our conceptualization of leadership fundamentally falls short of explaining much of the phenomena we call leadership, then what does leadership development become?