Up Close and Personal: Building Foundations for Leaders' Development Through the Personalization of Management Learning

Abstract

Courses that aim to foster reflection and personal development in the service of leaders' development are increasingly popular within MBA curricula and executive education portfolios. We explore the process through which these courses enrich their institutional context and enhance students' ongoing development and practice of leadership. Through an inductive, qualitative study of the Personal Development Elective, an offering within the leadership curriculum of an international MBA that gives students the option to work with a psychotherapist, we develop a model of how the interplay between the regressive and holding features of an intensive management program foster the personalization of management learning. The personalization process, we posit, allows management education to provide the foundations for leaders' development by transforming potentially regressive experiences into material for participants' personal learning, experimentation, and growth.