Leaders learn how to lead from experience. Formaltraining can help, but it’s no substitute for learning on, and off, the job. While that insight makes intuitive sense, a wealth of management writing confirms it. Pioneering scholarship by Warren Bennis, Edgar Schein, Chris Argyris, Donald Schon and Morgan McCall has helped make possible a sophisticated understanding of experience-based leadership development.
Some organizations have taken this idea to heart. For example, Toyota, Boeing, General Electric and MIT (through its Leaders for Manufacturing program) have put programs into place specifically to take advantage of experiential learning. But they, and a few others, are the exceptions.
Most companies stay within a narrow comfort zone. They certainly encourage aspiring and emerging leaders to “get experience,” to take on “stretch” assignments and to take risks. But they provide precious little guidance on how to learn from experience — how to mine it for insight about leading and adapting to change over the course of one’s life. Organizations generally don’t look outside their industry, or business itself, for new approaches. Instead, a banking model of learning predominates, that is, a semi-industrial process in which cost per unit is the key performance measure and knowledge is something deposited in aspiring leaders’ heads for later use.
That’s unfortunate, because organizations are missing the opportunity to develop leaders by integrating their life and work experiences, especially those... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
Subscribe today to read this article.
Buy this article. Purchase one or more copies of this article in PDF form.
Subscribe today to read the most recent articles and the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
Become a premium subscriber today to read this article and the entire archive of MIT SMR articles.
Sign in if you have registered already for the website
Do you subscribe the MIT Sloan Management Review in print? Enter the email address and password you used when ordering. Don't remember? Lookup your subscription account information
- Register for free access to recent articles and the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
- Subscribe and read articles from the past three years online.
- Premium subscription give you access to the entire archive of articles.
