Leadership Development as a Mindset: Teaching the Process of Development

Abstract

In this essay we advocate for viewing leadership development as a particular form of behavior change and seek to emphasize some important ways in which a core set of meta-skills and basic social-cognitive capabilities – that underlie human learning across a diverse set of activities– might play an even more prominent role in what and how people learn about leadership. From this perspective the development of any specific leadership and interpersonal skills might be seen as a useful byproduct of the real objective: developing a set of meta-cognitive capabilities that will allow continuous development throughout one's career and one's life. In particular we report some of the ways in which we have attempted to track these processes as outcome measures against which to gauge the quality and effectiveness of the leadership development courses we offer.