Leadership development is the umbrella term given to a range of interventions meant to help people — often people in corporate managerial roles — develop the skills needed to effectively implement visionary strategies with a team of other professionals following them. In business literature, much attention is paid to accurately evaluating the success of this programming (Athanasopoulou and Dopson 2018), which can include taught programming, facilitated conversations, administering assessments, and executive coaching. In some views (Spoelstra, Butler, and Delaney 2021), efforts to evaluate leadership development are beside the point, as proponents of leadership development believe in its power regardless of the results of such assessments. In this talk, we consider what exactly such proponents believe in. To do so, we present and analyse a discussion between experienced leadership development facilitators on what constitutes good facilitation, with particular attention to their suggestion that a facilitator’s job is to let ‘magic’ happen in small-group leadership training exercises. We reflect on some of the shared convictions and experiences that underpin facilitators’ idea of ‘magic,’ and propose that leadership development assumes the possibility of individuals’ transformation. This phenomenon, when it occurs, reinforces the sense of ‘magic’ among facilitators.
Departmental Seminar Series Michaelmas Term 2024
3.15pm, Fridays of Weeks 1, 3-8.
In person in the Lecture Room, 64 Banbury Road.
Convened by Alpa Shah and Elisabeth Hsu
Week 2 is replaced by the Marett Lecture delivered by Professor Deborah James
