Leadership development: Insights from a careers perspective

This article reports on an exploratory empirical investigation into the resonance between two developmental processes to see if any insights into leadership development could be gained from using a careers lens. Career and leadership development both share contemporary shifts in emphasis: leadership from hero to distributed models, and career from objective to subjective explorations of progress and success. Twenty-two participants on a leadership development program used a career card sort which was then processed with a peer partner to support personal meaning making. A constructivist-orientated content analysis of the resultant peer dialogues revealed four themes: challenge, ownership, sponsorship and work-life balance, which showed different aspects of the nexus between leadership and career. This nexus is characterized by a resonance in the sense of echoing that suggests that a careers lens used by peer partners provides additional insights into leadership and leadership development