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Fundamentals for a world-class
leadership program
Jack Denfeld Wood and Gianpiero Petriglieri
Summary
Meaningful leadership development needs to incorporate emotional and
often unconscious aspects of human behavior. This chapter describes a
leadership program designed to provide opportunities to learn, in-depth
and through personal experience, about the exercise of authority,
leadership behavior and team dynamics at individual, interpersonal, group,
intergroup and organizational levels. Such a program is not for everyone,
and it requires a deep commitment to personal and professional development on the part of individual participants, faculty and sponsoring
organization.
There is a significant difference between leadership ‘training’ programs,
whose assumptions derive from an ‘engineering’ approach, and leadership
‘development’ programs, whose assumptions derive from a ‘clinical’ one.1
The clinical approach invites faculty and participants of a leadership
program to collaborate in the creation of a hospitable environment for
meaningful and long-lasting learning about the deeper determinants of
leadership – an environment suffused by a culture of curiosity and openness
rather than one of judgment. In this chapter, we shall focus on the six
fundamental elements of a world-class leadership program. They are:
1 A ‘potentially’ committed group of participants.
2 A solid psychological foundation.
3 A coherent educational framework built upon this foundation.
4 An engaging and interactive experiential program design.
5 A program staff of serious behavioral professionals.
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6 A collaborative partnership with the client organization.
Let us examine them one by one.
The participants
The vast majority of participants attending executive education programs
are sponsored by their employer. They range in age from their late 20s to
their late 50s and have a history of significant achievement in their
corporate careers. Professionally, they have been exposed to the challenge of
managing and being managed by others. Often, when they arrive, they are
facing a moment of personal or professional change – a coming promotion,
a change in employer, a change in their family situation, or a mid-life
transition.
Corporations typically send participants to leadership programs for one of
three reasons: (a) the individual managers have heard the program
reputation is good and want to come; (b) they have been identified as ‘star
performers’; or (c) they are perceived as ‘needing help.’ The first are being
sent as a reward, the second are being sent to be groomed for greater responsibilities, and the third are being sent to get ‘fixed.’
The reason one is being sent obviously has a profound influence on a participant’s initial attitude towards the program. The final go-ahead is usually
made by their bosses in collaboration with the HR department, on the basis
(at least officially) of performance reviews, someone else’s informal
suggestion, or results from a formal assessment center. Those with the most
direct experience of a participant’s leadership skills – their subordinates – are
rarely consulted. For these reasons, a sizable percentage of each class
approaches leadership development with some degree of skepticism. We
find that in a typical program – between 24 and 90 individuals – participants
will learn best if the class is as diverse as possible, both in terms of sociodemographic variables and in terms of attitude towards the program. A
balanced mixture of the enthusiastic and the skeptical provides everyone
concerned with a richer learning opportunity, because it accurately mirrors
the reality of today’s organizational life. This flatly contradicts the
commonly held assumption that the more homogeneous, open and enthusiastic the class is, the more it will collectively learn.
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The psychological foundation
The general assumptions and features of the clinical psychological approach
have been presented in an earlier chapter.2 Our educational methods draw
on an eclectic set of perspectives, including depth psychology, transactional
analysis, group relations theories, and some methods originated at the NTL
and Tavistock Institutes. Together, these perspectives provide a psychological foundation that aims at facilitating the natural flow of human development and integration – and allows the program to embrace intense
personal emotion as well as to reveal unconscious processes at work. Unlike
adherents of the engineering approach, we do not rely predominantly on a
cognitive, rational perspective to ‘train’ managers in ‘defensive routines’
that suppress unpleasant thoughts and feelings; we believe these techniques
inhibit personal and professional development.
The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott found that the best and
healthiest human development occurs when we have the possibility to
explore and make sense of our experiences within a ‘holding environment’
– a physical as well as an emotional space – both stimulating and safe
enough, where help is available to make sense of, and deal with, the
confusion of one’s emerging feelings, and where one can extrapolate one’s
experiences and feelings to similar situations. A holding environment is a
space where it is possible to be curious about, and ‘play’ with, delicate
material, without judging or being judged, and without getting
overwhelmed or overreacting.3 The educational framework we provide helps
create such a holding environment.
Educational framework: Idiom, symbol and
myth
Managers who come to our programs have been working in a ‘performance
based’ social system, probably since kindergarten, and are usually looking
for concrete deliverables. Few participants have much familiarity with the
concept of the unconscious; many have never voluntarily signed up for a
psychologically-oriented seminar; and some can find ‘good’ reasons to
avoid the exploration of unconscious influences in their and others’
behavior in favor of a more conventional face-saving and socially acceptable
pedagogical approach. Therefore, the principal challenges that faculty face
in the early part of a ‘clinical’ leadership development program are:
■
Inviting the unconscious into the room in a non-threatening way.
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■
Legitimating, demystifying and depathologizing its manifestations.
■
Establishing its relevance to the clients’ personal and professional
situations.
■
Gaining authorization to work with unconscious dynamics in the here
and now.
Psychologically speaking, we try to create the conditions where there is a
chance for one’s ‘ego resistance’ to the unconscious to soften, and where
unconscious forces can be ‘enticed’ to make themselves heard, seen and felt
in a more or less non-threatening way. Four elements that facilitate the effort
to make room for emotions and the unconscious in a leadership program are:
(a) confidentiality, (b) the use of clear, concise, colloquial language, (c) the
importance of symbolic imagery and (d) the integrating function of myth.
Confidentiality
Participants must feel reasonably safe to explore relatively unfamiliar and
uncomfortable material, to experiment, and to permit themselves to be
clumsy. To do so, both participants and faculty work together to create room
that allows this experimentation to take place. Confidentiality is essential.
We ensure a clear and explicit confidentiality contract among staff and
participants as soon as the program begins. We are not running an
assessment centre – we are offering a developmental opportunity. Nothing
regarding a manager’s behavior is shared with the company that sent them,
or with our own organization.
Language and idiom
The language we use has to be comprehensible. ‘Psychobabble’ and ‘bizspeak’ simply do not work. The language we use needs to be familiar and
relevant to the participants – we have found that plain, colloquial English
and familiar idiomatic expressions usually work best.
Symbolic imagery
Symbolic images serve as a pathway to recognize unconscious material and
hence play a pivotal role throughout the program. When coupled with plain
language, images can guide participants from the familiar into the
unfamiliar with economy and effectiveness. Symbolic imagery is the
language of the unconscious – of dreams and of fantasy – and we encourage
participants to play with the images we at first provide. Later in the
program, we invite them to explore the images they create themselves.
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Let us give an example. For several years a
picture of the Matterhorn mountain has been
used in all IMD MBA promotional brochures.
The graphic depicts a long, ascending yellow
line from left to right that reaches above the
Matterhorn, where the word ‘leader’ appears
to hang in mid-air – on top! The yellow line
then takes a short plunge down to the right.
The alpine image suggests a particular view of
leadership, and we ask participants what the
metaphor might mean. They answer that a
leader climbs the corporate ladder, the path is
straight, there are pauses along the way,
one makes such an ascent with a team, the
team can climb only as fast as the slowest
individual, it takes tremendous energy and
focus to get there, only one person, the leader,
is visible at the top, it is hard to breathe, there is a precipitous fall, and the
line disappears in the mist. Their interpretation almost serves as a warning.
There are countless images that could evoke leadership development. As a
contrast with the mountain, we use an
iceberg. When asked for the meaning
of the metaphor, managers say that an
iceberg is a lonely, broken-off fragment
of a larger mass; it floats upon the
primal, salt-water ocean; the smaller,
visible part is supported by the larger,
invisible one; and the part that sunk
the Titanic was underwater and out of
sight. The implications for leading
groups and organizations is clear, and
implies that it is helpful to develop
one’s capacity to identify and navigate
the covert and emotional aspects of
individual and collective behavior so as
not to be inadvertently sunk.
Living myths
If the conventional metaphor for managerial success is a linear rise to a
mountain summit or hierarchy, ours is a circular one – a journey of ‘descent,
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encounter and ascent’ from the safe and familiar to the uncomfortable and
unfamiliar and back home again. There is nothing ‘new’ about this ‘hero’s
journey’ – it is timeless – first explicated by psychoanalysts Otto Rank and
Carl Jung at the turn of the twentieth century and then popularized by
Joseph Campbell in his 1949 classic on the mythology of heroic leadership,
The Hero with a Thousand Faces. One finds this same journey as a basic theme
in myths, fairy tales and stories from every century and every civilization.
Campbell describes the journey as follows:
The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification
of the formula represented in the rites of passage: Separation-initiation-return:
Which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures forth
from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: Fabulous
forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: The hero comes back
from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow
man.4
Even the structure of our leadership development programs follows the
pattern of the hero’s journey. For the participants, the pattern is captured in
their departure from home, encounter with the challenges of the program,
and return to their families and work. Participants are gently brought into a
psychological space where they have the opportunity to cross the boundary
between management and leadership – from the rational world of
management spreadsheets, annual reports and concrete tools, to the
emotional world of leadership mythology, imagery, charisma and inspiration.
Program design
In a program designed to follow the movement of the hero’s journey –
preparation, departure, fulfillment and return – four distinct phases occur in
a typical two-week period:
1 Pre-program preparation.
2 An initial orientation with the unconscious domain.
3 Outdoor exercises for leadership experimentation.
4 Integration of the experiences to prepare for the return home.
The pathway leads participants to a threshold between the conscious and
rational and the unconscious and emotional and encourages them to
descend across that threshold and explore that domain with the faculty and
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Preparation
Integration
Orientation
Consciousness
Unconscious
Experimentation
other participants, and then to ascend and integrate the experiences in the
final portion of the program.5
1 Preparation
The coherence of such a leadership program depends in large part on meticulous preparation that includes assembling the program staff; preliminary
staff work on role assignments and session design; negotiation with our own
school; preparing the client organization for sending their participants (to
be explained below), and preparing the individual participants for the
program.
For the participants, preparation consists of reading several psychologicallyoriented articles and leadership cases, filling out an application including
personal background information for a ‘participant handbook’ comprising
one-page résumés, and writing a ‘Personal and Professional Identity
Statement’ (PPIS) – a confidential 10–15 page in-depth autobiography that
invites participants to engage with the theme of their own development in
a more personal and meaningful way. For many, the PPIS is the first serious
personal reflection in their lives. The discrepancy between their application
résumé and the PPIS highlights the fundamental difference between the
mask we show others – our persona – and who we really are behind that mask
– our self.
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2 Orientation
Study groups
As soon as they arrive, participants are put into a study group of five to eight
participants, chosen for maximum diversity by nationality, sex, company,
industry, function, managerial experience and so on. This intimate group is
the primary ‘learning unit’ and remains intact for most sessions; attached to
it is one principal faculty consultant.
Contracting
One aim of the first part of the program is to establish a ‘psychological
contract’ among faculty and participants, individually and collectively. 6
Faculty and participants articulate their expectations and concerns, and are
encouraged to identify what they wish to get out of the program. For
meaningful development to occur, individuals must take personal responsibility to shape and discover their own learning. While the faculty provides a
framework and a learning opportunity, participants determine what they
learn, how much they learn, and the pace at which they learn.7 We have
found it helpful if the faculty and participants work with a sense of freedom,
curiosity, willingness to take the initiative, courage to explore, and willingness to
be surprised. Those who take the opportunity seriously, bringing themselves
fully into the program and allowing themselves to explore and be surprised,
are rewarded with a deeper experience of personal and professional development and a deeper understanding of the unconscious dimensions of
leadership – how it really works.
Session content
The orientation phase is an introduction for the participants – to the staff,
the program material, and the behavioral way of thinking about leadership.
In this phase, we attempt to weave metaphor, colloquial language, symbolic
imagery and living myth together with more traditional case studies,
lectures and behavioral simulations. We use audiovisual media extensively,
for example integrating short clips from Hollywood movies into brief
lectures to illustrate various learning points, and we videotape the small
study group at work. Taken together, these sessions entice participants to
explore behavior, give them a preliminary conceptual framework and
simple language to do so, and bring them to the fully experiential portion
of the program.
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3 Experimentation
While experimentation runs throughout the program, the heart of the
experience is the outdoor exercises portion. The primary task here is to learn
about the exercise of authority, leadership behavior and team dynamics at
various ‘levels of analysis’ – individual, interpersonal, group, inter-group
and organizational – using our own experiences in the indoor and outdoor
activities.
Outdoor exercises
Groups go through a tightly choreographed series of problem-solving
outdoor activities and competitions. It is neither survival school nor
‘Outward Bound.’ Each exercise is followed by an hour or so debriefing,
where the group reflects on its behavior with the aid of their consultant,
using a formal debriefing guide designed to systematically explore the
covert structure and dynamics of the group.8
Participant group retreat and review
Following these outdoor activities, an extensive retreat and video review
allow participants to take stock of – and primary responsibility for – their
learning without a faculty consultant present. They take time to review the
videos and informally discuss how their group works together, exploring
key insights on their own.
Classroom presentations
To conclude the experimentation phase, each group presents their experiences to the rest of the class. This offers a multi-faceted learning opportunity. Groups have a chance to articulate their learning thus far and share
it with the other groups, ask other groups questions, and experience the
residual competitive and less comfortable ‘large group’ dynamics of a
classroom context. Following the presentations, the groups debrief with
their faculty consultant regarding the presentations and the events that
took place in the larger class.
4 Integration
The final phase of the program focuses primarily on making sense of the
participants’ experiences. This is accomplished through theoretical frameworks that allow an integration of logic and emotion, thinking and feeling,
the rational and irrational, and the conscious and unconscious. We have
found that exposure to excessive theoretical materials too early in the
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learning cycle ‘contaminates’ the participants’ spontaneous experience with
alien cognitive structures, and interferes with their intuitive understanding
of what is happening.
Structured group feedback exercise
The activity that marks the beginning of this portion of the program is an
extensive feedback exercise. Based on their experience with one another,
small study group participants prepare and share interpersonal feedback.
This exercise is highly appreciated by participants as a way to capitalize on
their shared experiences, giving them a tangible collection of others’
perspectives on their behavior and preparing them for subsequent sessions
as they approach re-entry to their family, friends and jobs.
Understanding and managing individual differences
These sessions explore some of the systemic differences that have been
operating covertly and affecting the structure and dynamics of the small
study groups, such as culture, ideology, personality and differences in career
orientations. Faculty offers theoretical frameworks to enable participants to
consolidate and integrate their recent experience.
We normally position more complex theoretical material, such as personality inventories like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), after the
outdoor activities rather than before them. To encourage lasting insight and
development, we believe it is essential that participants first make personal
sense of their experience, within their own framework and vocabulary,
and only then bring in perspectives derived from standard, more technical
frameworks. The same reasoning applies for 360° feedback questionnaires.
360° feedback
If we include 360° feedback in the program – with results from a questionnaire completed prior to the program by the participant and his or her
supervisor, peers and subordinates – it is best distributed after the outdoor
activities are complete. If distributed earlier, survey results tend to hold back
participants’ mental freedom in the experimentation phase – they naturally
focus on the evaluations from their workplace and worry about how to
respond to them rather than concentrate on their present learning
experience. However, when introduced just prior to the individual coaching
at the end of the program, 360° feedback from the workplace can be
compared and contrasted with their peer-group feedback, and so is more
readily assimilated.
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Art atelier and individual coaching
The last day aims to assist participants as they cross back over the threshold
into their familiar everyday domain, while honoring their intuitive and
emotional experiences from the program. We split the day between a halfday art atelier and a one-on-one coaching session. The combination of these
two learning opportunities allows participants to articulate and integrate
their experiences from the program – both verbally and artistically – while
acknowledging the emotional (less rational) aspects of the experience.
Previously, on the second day of the program, we had provided a ‘warm-up’
for this session, where participants had a chance to approach the symbolic
language of the emotional level through ‘play’ with finger paints and
modeling clay. The objective of this work is to allow participants to get in
touch with a dormant part of their creative selves, probably untouched since
childhood, and to help them recognize and appreciate non-verbal means of
expression as meaningful sources of information. In the final day’s art
atelier, participants create a painting that expresses their thoughts and
feelings in symbol and metaphor – perhaps those that are still difficult to
articulate in words – from the program experience.
When not engaged in the symbolic work of the art atelier, participants are
preparing for, then involved in, individual sessions with their faculty
consultant. The individual coaching sessions aim at maximizing the transfer
of their new insights to the ‘home situation.’ The faculty consultant takes
the role of ‘individual coach,’ enabling the participants to integrate their
learning and ‘make the link’ back to their home and job – thinking through
and discussing how they will apply their insights in their personal and
professional lives.
Clinical leadership development is not surrogate psychotherapy, although
both operate in the same psychological domain and ask similar questions –
What am I feeling? What is happening now? Why? What lessons can I
draw? Both involve a certain degree of probing and exploring individual
and group tensions. It frequently happens, however, that participants find
their experiences to be therapeutic in a general sense, and that the program
has changed the way they think about themselves and how they lead their
lives. This is entirely within the scope of an educational design for
leadership development.
Closing dinner
The program ends with a ‘reception’ and ‘exposition’ of participant
paintings from the art atelier, followed by a formal closing dinner. We
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encourage senior management from the client organization to attend both
the opening and closing of the program, in an effort to serve as a symbolic
bridge, respectively ‘handing the participants over’ and then ‘receiving
them back.’ We have found that holding the closing dinner as a celebration
on the last night of the program is much preferable to a luncheon where
participants and faculty are preoccupied and distracted with packing, hotel
checkout and travel arrangements to return home.
The program staff
Roles
Each faculty member consults to one group throughout the program, but
they participate in the management of the program as a whole, sharing a
larger responsibility than maximizing their own group’s learning. In such a
complex program, faculty members take a number of different roles –
classroom instructor, consultant to one small group throughout the
program, individual coach, and occasionally consultant to various subsystems. The experience of individual faculty members can be markedly
different in each of those roles, as is the participants’ perception of them.
This is a learning opportunity in and of itself.
Clinical background
It is extremely important that all members of the program staff have the
interest and background to work together with the clinical approach, that
is, in an authentic and collaborative way – sensitive to covert psychological
processes, comfortable with difficult emotional material, and without
excessive reliance on prescribed procedure and technique. Our program
staff is drawn from a broad range of academic backgrounds, and usually
have advanced degrees in the social sciences, clinical psychology or
medicine. Regardless of their official academic degree, however, each staff
member has had extensive psychological training in individual, group and
organizational dynamics. In addition, because past qualifications and
experience are not enough, each staff member must be committed to
regularly update their personal and professional training and development.
Staff meetings
Frequent, intense and lengthy staff meetings are a central part of the staff’s
clinical responsibilities. One basic tenet of the clinical approach is not to ask
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participants to do anything that faculty members are unwilling to do
themselves – we need to practice the same authenticity, investment,
commitment, risk taking and willingness to explore and reflect upon one’s
behavior and feelings that we demand from participants. During the staff
meetings we discuss what is happening in the participants’ groups and the
larger ‘system,’ as well as within the faculty group itself. Such meetings are
neither intended to train inexperienced consultants, nor to provide them
with therapy, nor to entertain psychology-lovers; instead, they are one of
our principal means of guaranteeing the integrity of the learning
environment.
The importance of staff meetings is dictated by the perpetual novelty of
behavioral work, and encourages an understanding of the uniqueness of
each situation and each person in the program. The work is exhilarating as
well as stressful, and the staff meetings serve several functions: a ‘reality
check’ to individual faculty from trusted colleagues, an opportunity to
release stress, and a way to maintain psychological availability for the participants. In our view, staff groups that avoid frequent and thorough clinical
meetings during an experiential leadership program are either incompetent
or unprofessional. Even if individual staff members are extraordinarily
qualified and experienced, without clinical staff meetings the psychological
integrity of the learning process and the program suffer tremendously.
Collaboration of participants and staff
An open and reciprocal collaboration between staff and participants is
fundamental for the learning to be optimal. The staff needs to be
dependable, without providing either unnecessary reassurance or excessive
stress; the former would deter participants from reflecting on their own
experience, and the latter would hinder their ability to learn. If the material
is provocative enough to challenge them and stretches their boundaries,
most participants will engage deeply in the task of learning. However, if the
faculty push too little or too much, or if the provocation is out of tune with
their deeper needs, participants tend to shut down and give up. Faculty
members need to get close enough emotionally to feel with the class
members, but remain apart enough to be able to reflect on those feelings
and access what might be at work under the surface. Any closer and they risk
losing the autonomy of their distinct perspective; any more distant and they
risk hiding behind an empty role of ‘guru’ and jeopardizing their emotional
connection with the participants. Ultimately, the staff needs to care
deeply about the participants without falling into the trap of ‘taking care’ of
them.
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Collaborative partnership with the client
organization
In this chapter, we have described the educational framework and program
design of a serious leadership development program. However, high-quality
leadership development requires more than a professional faculty and a
class of committed participants working together. It requires time, space,
and the alignment and active engagement of the client organization, the
provider of leadership development, the individual managers who will
participate, and the program faculty. When any of these four major stakeholders is not on board, trouble is in sight.
Program
Participants fill out detailed evaluation forms at the end of the program.
They evaluate every session as well as each faculty member’s work as small
group consultants on a five-point scale – unacceptable to excellent. In
addition to the quantitative assessment, participants have the opportunity
to write comments and observations. The unedited tabulated results are
distributed to all program faculty, the school’s president, and the client
organization’s training or HR representative.
We use the ratings to develop the individual faculty, the staff as a team, and
the program as a whole. The numbers and comments are a fairly accurate
measure of how well the faculty has managed to make the work relevant to
the clients. Participants’ ratings are a reliable measure of their feelings about
the program. They are not, however, a measure of how much participants
have really learned during the program. Nor are they an accurate evaluation
of the depth and quality of the behavioral work. It is possible for faculty
members to get ‘excellent’ ratings by colluding with a participant’s or a
group’s desire to be told what to do, to have simple answers, and thus to
‘avoid’ the difficulties inherent in gaining insight into themselves. By the
same token, faculty might earn a ‘fair’ or ‘good’ rating and yet have done a
superb job in bringing a participant or a group out of their comfort zone,
into the space where the emotional fundamentals of leadership can be
uncovered and explored, and where serious behavioral learning can occur.
Client objectives
It is essential that the client organization be committed to serious leadership
development and that they are also aware of its implications. This kind of
program is not simply ‘fun and games.’ Companies that do not wish their
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managers to be challenged to examine their real behavior, or companies
that do not wish to develop self-aware, independent leaders who are both
able and willing to take emotional risks in the service of leading, should
probably consider other kinds of programs, perhaps those using exclusively
classroom lectures, traditional cases, role plays and motivational speakers.
We believe that the economic temptation to sell as many clinical leadership
programs as possible is a mistake. These programs are not for everyone and
this must be clearly and honestly communicated. Should client organizations buy a program for which they are unable or unwilling to provide a
supportive context for participants upon their return to the workplace, both
it and IMD will be poorly served in the long run.
Professionally delivered ‘clinical’ leadership development, at its best, can
foster meaningful and long-lasting behavioral learning – nothing less and
nothing more. It is important that individual participants and their
sponsoring companies are well aware of what they are bargaining for. This
kind of leadership program works best when individual participants have a
concrete need and genuine desire to deepen their understanding of
leadership and team dynamics, and when their companies reward the
pursuit of such learning in two ways: by encouraging managers to develop
their self-awareness and leadership skills, and by offering them opportunities to apply those skills at work.
Key take-aways
■
Learning about the fundamental determinants of leadership occurs best
within a stimulating, yet safe, ‘holding environment’ where help is
available to make sense of one’s experiences and feelings.
■
Participants’ learning is enriched if the study groups are as diverse as
possible, both in terms of socio-demographic variables and in terms of
attitude towards the program.
■
A successful framework for leadership development parallels the
mythological ‘hero’s journey’: preparation, departure, experimentation,
return and reintegration.
■
Outdoor exercises, if tightly choreographed and well debriefed, provide
a rich source of experimentation to reflect on how leadership works.
■
A combination of structured feedback, experiential group work,
questionnaires, artistic expression and individual coaching provides an
effective vehicle for integrating personal learning about leadership.
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■
Competent staff members participate in the management of the
program, are present in several roles, and require the same commitment
to learning demanded of participants.
■
Long and frequent ‘clinical staff meetings’ are fundamental to maintain
the integrity of the learning environment.
■
Client organizations need to be well aware of what this kind of
leadership program can – and cannot – deliver.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
See this book, Chapter 11.
They include descriptive and pragmatic use of theories; integration of rational and
emotional capacities; familiarity with a range of feelings and behaviors and the
development of an attitude of ‘reflective spontaneity’; including the unconscious as
part of the dialog; participant responsibility for their learning, etc. For a more
detailed explanation, see this book, Chapter 11, ‘Learning for leadership: The “engineering” and “clinical” approaches.’
Winnicott, D.W. (1990) The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment:
Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London: Karnac.
Campbell, J. (1994) The hero with a thousand faces. London: Fontana Press. Original
work published 1949, p. 30.
See Appendix to this chapter for a detailed block schedule of a two-week leadership
development program.
Schein, E.H. (1970) The psychological contract. In: Organizational Psychology. 2nd ed.
Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, pp. 77–79.
Miller, E.J. (1989) The ‘Leicester’ model: experiential study of group and organizational
processes. Occasional Paper No. 10. London: The Tavistock Institute.
See this book, Chapter 18.
379
Appendix 26.1
Contracting
session
Introductory
exercise
Project
Inter-group
relations:
Sample leadership program
The value
of
symbolic
expression
Teamwork
and synergy
General
manager
role play
Diagnostic
interview
Group
relations:
Leadership
and
management
Organizational
dynamics
in action
Outdoor
activities
Outdoor
activities
Outdoor
activities
Organizational
dynamics
in action
Personal
retreat
and
reflection
Team
video
review
Day 7
Experimentation
Day 6
Individual
feedback
exercise
Team
presentations
Day 8
Personality
Managing
differences:
Structure
and dynamics
of groups
Managing
differences:
Day 9
Film and
discussion
Results
and
preparation
for coaching
360°
feedback
Career
orientation
Managing
differences:
Day 10
Integration
Closing
dinner
Individual
coaching
and
art
atelier
Individual
coaching
and
art
atelier
Day 11
9:01 am
Interpersonal
relations:
Introduction
to
transactional
analysis
Leadership:
Taking the
irrational
seriously
Day 5
29/7/05
Program
introduction
and
guest
speaker
Day 4
Day 3
Orientation
Day 2
380
Day 1
MEXE_C26.QXD
Page 380
Learning scripts for programs