Putting the Development Into Experiential Development

摘要

Although McCall's sure bets are helpfulfor moving leadership development beyonda competency-driven mixture of rote HRinterventions, simply relying on experiencealone to develop leaders is a costlygamble. We argue experiences, in andof themselves, do not promote effectiveleadership as much as the meaning thatindividuals infer from such events; meaningthat more directly shapes leaders' activeanalysis and future use of such priorexperiences. Although a step in the rightdirection, McCall's experiential approachfails to weigh the importance of reflectionon events and offers limited strategies toassist in the requisite facilitation of suchreflection in an organizational setting. Incontrast but not contradiction, we arguethat for an experiential approach to promoteeffective leadership, leaders must engage ina structured reflection process to facilitatetransfer of lessons learned into day-to-day leadership activities. Thus, the aimsof this commentary are to, describe whyextracting meaning from experiences is thekey to making experiential development,well, developmental. Following from this,we offer specific strategies, based on guidedreflection techniques, to accomplish thistask in organizational settings.