Leadership Development

If it is true that "everything rises and falls on leadership," it also follows that everything rises and falls on leadership development. Put another way, the most effective way to mitigate leadership risk is simple: prepare leaders better, and they'll make better decisions.

Developing leaders requires a comprehensive approach, encompassing:

• Leader development - development of individual human capital
• Group-Leadership development - development of social or interpersonal skills
• Life Experiences and Intuition development - compilation of life experiences and patterns which may be drawn upon in future observations and decision making
• Environment - the context or situation in which learning takes place, experience is gained, or decisions are made
• Neurology - the neurological basis for all cognition and brain function underlying development and decision making
• Assessment - testing techniques required to assess leadership competence and quantify progress

Synthesis

The elements listed above are not mutually exclusive. Rather, leadership development is a consequence of a synthesis of all these components. For example, neurological functions are not separate from either leader or group leadership development, they are leader and group development. Similarly, the environment plays a continuous role across all elements, and intuition is gained based on a combination of interaction with the environment and neurological function.

Multi-discipline

According to Warren Bennis, "although we do not yet know what a theory of leadership would look like, we do know it will be interdisciplinary, a collaboration among cognitive scientists, social psychologists, sociologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, biologists, ethicists, political scientists, historians, sociobiologists, and others." (Introduction to American Psychologist Special Issue on Leadership, Jan 2007, page 4). If, as Bennis states, leadership theory requires collaboration across all these fields, then leadership development must require at least all of these as well.

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