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CHAPTER SIX

Emerging Issues, Trends, and Future Directions

In the introduction of this book we mentioned that leadership, leadership development, and evaluation are all evolving. Throughout we have shared our current thoughts and practices on evaluating leadership development. We want to end the book by sharing emerging issues and trends that have a direct impact on how we develop leadership and how we conduct evaluations.

Our definition and understanding of leadership is regularly evolving. A growing body of work is focusing on leadership as a networked process (Meehan & Reinelt, 2014). Understanding networks and incorporating the development of networks into leadership development has a clear impact on how we evaluate outcomes. For example, outcomes of leadership-development efforts may increasingly include improving individuals’ abilities to understand and leverage the existing network as well as building networks within teams, across parts of an organization, and between organizations. We included information on using network analysis in Chapter Three because this analysis is more frequently used as a method for assessing changes in organizational networks as a result of leadership development that aims to improve collaboration, the exchange of innovative ideas, and the leadership capacity within organizations. More work is needed to understand the links between specific development initiatives, changes in network structure and composition, and outcomes associated with stronger networks.

We are also seeing more of a shift from individual skill-building (or competency development) to what is called vertical development: helping individuals develop more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking (Petrie, 2014). This focus on changing mindsets is considered critical to leading in a complex, interconnected, and rapidly changing world. The concept of vertical development of individuals has also been applied to describe organizational-leadership cultures (McCauley, Palus, Drath, Hughes, McGuire, O’Connor, & Van Velsor, 2008; McGuire & Rhodes, 2009). Understanding the impact of this type of development presents clear challenges for identifying measurable outcomes and effective evaluation. How do we efficiently assess various stages of vertical development in individuals and organizations, as well as the impact that this type of development has on leadership outcomes? Some measures do exist to assess individuals and teams, but they have not yet been used widely in evaluation of leadership development.

CCL has a long history of acknowledging the importance of experience-driven development; the book by McCauley, Derue, Yostt, and Taylor (2013) describes how to foster on-the-job development. There are more and more virtual-learning opportunities, personalized leadership coaching, and development experiences that do not occur at work or in a training room; these might include learning about leadership while driving a race car or working with horses. Learning and development can occur in short bursts of development over different time frames and at the discretion of the learner. This self-paced, tailored, and self-directed learning can be powerful, and it creates new opportunities to collect evaluation data as part of the learning process and challenges since the initiative is not consistent across people or time.

There is increasing recognition of the importance of being culturally responsive in leadership development and in evaluation, and there are more guidance and tools for doing that well, though there is more work to be done. At a minimum, global leadership-development initiatives require you to consider collecting data in different languages and employing techniques to understand potential differences in how people respond and rate their experiences and what they need to best apply what they learn. At a deeper level, it ramps up the need to attend to assumptions, understand norms and expectations, and explore the possible interpretations and consequences of processes and actions. For example, what may seem like an insignificant finding in one context could be deeply threatening in another.

There are new tools and sources for data collection such as social media, phone apps, pulse surveys, and self-monitoring technologies that provide opportunities to capture real-time feedback and possibly more accurate measures of things like the frequency of certain behaviors or responses to certain people or situations. Data systems are increasingly used by organizations to connect their performance with industry benchmarks and to provide tools for analyzing organizational data with other data sources. Big Data and human-capital analytics are leading us all to think more in terms of data-collection systems and standardizing data collection, which could lead to more rigorous and empirical benchmarks for leadership-development evaluation, if we are thoughtful about how we approach it.

Evaluation is often a complex endeavor, and it may become more complex as a result of these and other developing trends. It is impossible for any single book to provide all the information that may be needed for a particular situation. Our goal has been to provide an overview of the evaluative process with examples of techniques, strategies, and guidelines that you can use to ensure that your evaluation is meaningful, useful, and credible. In addition, following our guidance, you can make sure your evaluation is not an isolated process. By linking your evaluation to the design and results of development initiatives and to broader goals, you can help build systems and processes that augment the individual and group impact of leadership development.