Leadership Development: Of Fires and Forges

Abstract

Don’t be under any illusion; developing people is big business. It’s tricky to get an exact size of the market in terms of Dollars, Pounds and Yuan, but it manages to sustain tens of thousands of human resource professionals, industrial/occupational psychologists, various forms of coaches, whole consultancies and entire business schools — some of them sprawling minicities. Confronted with that plethora of choice, it’s easy to take the path of least resistance: choosing the well-known brands, buying development interventions through a single supplier that can deliver in terms of scale and scope; opting for sheep dip solutions that ignore the subtle nuances of individual learning needs; the list goes on. In the next few pages we’ve opted to discuss a few key areas of people and leadership development that we think are useful, but which should be used with eyes wide open and a hand firmly on the purse strings. Wherever possible, we have tended to focus on those areas that we believe may be particularly useful for the development of network leadership.

Minds are not vessels to be filled, but fires to be fuelled.

(Plutarch, source unknown)