Developmental readiness: Accelerating leader development.

Abstract

The development of leaders is a stated goal of most organizations, yet a validated framework and theory for leader development does not yet fully exist, nor is there a method for determining who is developmentally ready to engage in leader development. The authors of this article provide a framework for examining how one can accelerate leader development. They propose that leader developers first focus on assessing and then building the developmental readiness of individual leaders, as well as the developmental readiness of the organization as prerequisite steps for accelerating positive leader development. They identify and discuss 5 specific constructs comprising their initial modeling of developmental readiness (i.e., learning goal orientation, developmental efficacy, self-concept clarity, self-complexity, and metacognitive ability), as well as suggest methods for assessing and developing these 5 components.