Executive Leadership Development Program and Providers

What is Executive Leadership Development?

Executive Leadership development is often conflated with management development; but it is just a sub-section of the management education sector albeit an important one. Unlike the functional areas of finance, operations, marketing and sales and so on, leadership is a much more subjective concept and still the focus of much energetic debate as to its precise meaning.

This continuing lack of clarity and definition makes the task of developing leaders more difficult as there are so many options and alternatives to select from in trying to identify appropriate leadership development solutions. Nevertheless in terms of senior manager education “leadership development” is the critical task.

In January 2010 the IEDP program database returned over 350 open enrolment programs that included the keyword “leadership” and just over half of those were categorised as pure leadership programs. So from the top 25 global business schools a range of over 170 pure leadership development programs exist covering such varied topics as:

• Basic Management at the Ross School, Michigan University
• Competitive Talent Management at Ashridge
• True Leadership: Leading with Meaning at Darden
• Cambridge Health Leadership at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge
• Leadership at the Peak at Center for Creative Leadership
• Leadership Best Practices at Harvard Business School
  

This snapshot of programs indicates that Executive Leadership programs can be focused in hugely varied ways and from many Executive leadership development providers. The Basic Management program above is “Designed for newly appointed managers or those in the early years of their management careers” while at the other end of the scale CCL’s Leadership at the Peak “focuses exclusively on the demands of senior-most leaders” and is CCL’s flagship program.

The Darden program looks at the key leadership need for managing change; while the Judge program is where “Judge Business School and the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust collaborate to present an exciting programme for senior health sector leaders.” – a much more focused sectoral program.

Program content

Increasingly, executive leadership programs are targeted more on individuals personal motivations and thinking. The programs designed for more senior executives will allow more time for the participants to think about their own behaviour and how it affects others. To do this effectively programs will often try and “remove” the participants from their daily routines either by giving them unusual experiences (asking them to conduct a chamber orchestra without any prior notice, for instance) or take them to locations where daily business seems far removed (like CCL’s campus in Colorado Springs, Colorado). Either approach is aimed at getting the participant to find some “space” where they can reflect more wide-rangingly and stop being concerned, for the moment, with daily business frustrations and problems and look to the future.

Other programs may seek to explain the workings of the mind, through Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), behavioural methodologies, emotional intelligence, and other psychology based research.

Leadership skills have been tied closely to leading teams and the interaction of “the leaders and the led” over the last two decades. This continues to be a significant theme. And in the last few years with organisations increasingly having global operations the issue of leading across different cultures has become important.

Identifying appropriate solutions

As with all program choices – the identification of appropriate solutions is a complex and challenging task for the talent management executive. The choice is bewildering and the differences between programs sometimes stark and sometimes nuanced. Some providers specialise in certain aspects of leadership research and delivery; others may have more hands-on application focused solutions.

As ever it is the purchasers’ responsibility when selecting executive education programs to fully understand not only their own specific needs and objectives but also exactly what the various providers can offer. Leadership programs, being more subjective than functional programs, make this challenge all the more complex.

IEDP has full details on over 1000 executive leadership development programs offered by the world's leading executive education providers on our unique searchable and FREE database. Search for your ideal leadership development solution  by keyword, subject/topic, location, dates, price or any combination of these to identify appropriate solutions for your organisation's needs.

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