For most of my clients, leadership development has risen to the top of the agenda over the past year or so. As strategies to build leadership capacity are considered, I often hear of dissatisfaction with the traditional model of leadership development (You know the model I’m talking about. It’s the one where you send your people to a one week executive leadership program. You give them a certificate. Then you tell them to get out there and lead).

Most of my clients are moving away from this single event model of leadership development, and moving towards a more multifaceted and multilayered model that emphasises continuous learning, action learning, mentorship, personal development, knowledge sharing, communities of practice and social networking.

For those of us in the learning consulting/design business, the challenge becomes how to take an organization’s strategic leadership plan and turn it into an on-the-ground leadership development program. In particular, how to do you get an organization’s leaders (often driven and fiercely individualistic people) to work as part of a team to mentor, share best practices and collaborate in an effort to build leadership capacity.

From a learning design perspective, here are a few things to build into the model:

1.Provide a challenge: People collaborate best when they have a meaningful task or project to work on. Identify a business problem to be solved or an innovative project to work on. Create authentic business tasks that cannot be completed without collaboration and opinion sharing.

2.Involve leaders in content creation: Identify key leaders and get them to set up leadership blogs. Consider setting up a leadership Wiki. Videotape leaders as they discuss leadership wisdom, and distribute these videos via iPod. Pair leaders with instructional designers to design learning sessions.

3.Promote self reflection: Provide access to self assessment tools (360°, Myers Briggs etc). Create learning tasks that promote individual reflection and thinking.

4.Make great resources available: Provide of menu of leadership content in a variety of delivery formats. Examples are leadership books and articles, e-learning courseware, webinars, lunch and learn, leadership lessons on iPod etc. Set up a one-stop internet/intranet destination for your people to access leadership resources.

5.Develop Communication channels: Begin to incorporate social networking tools into corporate communications channels. For example, have each of your teams set up a group on Facebook. The communication model should promote creative discussion and welcome input from all.

The assumption underlying the new model of leadership development is that leadership is something that can be learned, and that it is something everyone can get better at.

Let me know what is working in your organization.

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