What I’m learning about leadership development as I research for my dissertation

Learning log 1 Week 0

Leadership studies are crazy overwhelming!!! I’ve learned new words like eclectic and conflation just to describe what reading leadership studies is like.

Eclectic — Leadership understanding takes from a varied source of perspectives from a range of different disciplines. You can see leadership through the lens of a practising manager/executive, professional coach, philosopher, sociologist, anthropologist, or even a musician!!

This year, as I am undertaking my MSc in Business Psychology, I will be taking the opportunity to look at leadership through the lens of a psychologist. However, it has been vital to be aware of and respect the multiple voices surrounding leadership studies as (taking on a pluralist stance) to optimise the development of leadership development (lol…) it would be beneficial to appreciate the contributions from all perspectives.

3 Learnings this week:

1. When coaching an organisation, tools to assess the psychological context (MBTI, Belbin, or Debono hats) are important as a tool to initiate conversations. It’s less important to be critical of the effectiveness of the assessment tool.
2. R&D around Leadership development is pretty underdeveloped relative to other topics around leadership. There have been a lot of conversations aimed at understanding leadership as a phenomenon (still no consensus) and less so about how we can best develop leaders. Of course, this is not surprising as how can we know how to develop leadership when we don’t know what leadership is?
3. Learning theory is actually an important element in tackling leadership development and requires to be treated separately as a research topic for leadership development. What I mean by that is, learning theory (like leadership) is eclectic and to fully benefit from its contribution to leadership development, it should be understood from the range of perspectives and contexts it comes from.

I will continue to log my learnings on this topic as well as other topics in Business Psychology as I go through the course so further logs will include topics around cognitive biases, career theory, and change management.

Hope this was useful for you to read!