Twenty-first Century Leadership Development

At Royal Roads University

Graham Dickson
Doug Hamilton

In the early 21st century, interest and investment in leadership and leadership
development has grown dramatically (Collins, 2001; Giber, Carter, & Goldsmith, 2000;
Harvard Business Review, 2002; Campbell, 2003). Numerous public service
organizations (Government of Canada, 2002; United Kingdom and Northern Ireland,
2003; BC Education Leadership Council 2005; BC Health Leadership Capacity Building
Initiative, 2006; Canadian Medical Association’s Leadership Project, 2006), and private
corporations (Giber, Carter, & Goldsmith, 2000) have invested significant dollars in
leadership development. Studies have shown that prolonged and significant commitment
to leadership development has indeed improved both the profitability and quality of work
life for employees (Collins, 2001).

Royal Roads University (RRU), through the School of Leadership Studies

(SoLS), is one of a handful of graduate educational institutions in North America and
Europe that has devoted significant resources and commitment to a very focused study of
leadership and leadership development. Leadership programs at Royal Roads University
have a unique learning design. This design is the product of significant research and
inquiry into the nature of modern leadership; best practices of leadership development;
and, of course, the nature and design of effective learning processes and environments.
This paper outlines some of what we have learned in each of these three domains, and
then describes some of the unique approaches RRU takes to leadership development.

Leadership in the 21st Century

When people use the word ‘leadership’ today, they are using a term that has both
historical and cultural significance, but also a term that has evolved in meaning as the
practice of leadership has evolved to reflect the changing demands on leaders.
Leadership is a term loosely used to describe a variety of different functions: individual
ability to influence others to move towards a goal; the exercise of power and control
within positional authority; or collective ability of all members of an organization to
work together to solve problems. The word leadership also is often used
interchangeably—albeit with some discomfort—with the words ‘administration’ and
‘management’—as if they were the same thing. They are not. Colin Powell described
leadership as the ability to accomplish what the science of management says is
impossible to do (Powell, 2006). Warren Bennis (2006) states that leaders are people
who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right; and John Kotter (1990)
argues that people are being overmanaged and underled in many organizations.

In essence, leadership is a unique quality that has strong connections to

administration and management; but is also exclusive to them. It is a quality that can be
found in anyone who exercises responsibility to rise to a challenge, and who uses his or

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her skills to engage others in solving that problem. Leaders need the skills of
management and administration to solve problems; but cannot solve them with those
skills alone. This difference also explains why leadership is gaining more attention in the
21st century than it did in the 20th—we are facing societal issues and concerns, due to the
pace of change, for which there are no tried and true solutions. For instance, the current
declining enrolment evident in K-12 education in British Columbia from 65,000 students
in Grade 12 to 45,000 in Kindergarten is not simply a demographic issue. Have we ever
had to lead an education system in which numbers are declining this significantly before?
Where is past best practice for doing this at a time when there are increasing demands
and expectations placed on our school system?

If leadership is indeed a unique quality, or function, it is important to identify the

characteristics that define it. Study after study (Rowe, 2005; House, Hanges, Javidan,
Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004; Collins, 2001; Kouzes and Posner, 1995) just to name a few,
identify such qualities as passion, resolve, humility, the ability to envision a future,
enabling and inspiring others, systems thinking, the ability to challenge existing practices,
and strategic thinking, as qualities of people who excel at leadership. However, these
qualities rarely are spelled out in leadership competency frameworks so they can be used
by people in organizations to improve leadership performance. Management and
administration ‘job description’ language creates conceptual confusion and tends to
crowd out leadership qualities (Grzeda, 2005). Others treat leadership as an indefinable
quality; as if it was best left alone. As one senior executive recently stated, “Leadership is
like fog—it is all around you, but you can’t get a handle on it”. In both cases, it is rare to
see an organization, or sector, truly take on the challenge of defining and committing to
developing the true nature of leadership.

At Royal Roads University, we have taken on that challenge. The School of

Leadership Studies is conducting research into cutting edge practices in leadership
around the globe, and designing programs to develop the qualities of leadership required
in the emerging 21st century world. From our perspective, it is the globe that is the
overarching context for the exercise of leadership with sub-contexts being regions,
nations, organizations, and individuals within them. This foundational viewpoint suggests
the need for a leadership philosophy and a set of competencies needed to practice in a
world characterized by flux, unpredictability, diversity, spiraling technical innovation,
and global communication. This approach to leadership is consonant with a wider
cultural shift from a mechanistic paradigm of the industrial age to a complex, integrative
systems paradigm informed by the complexity sciences, the rise of the global economy
and increasing diversity (Somerville & Mills, 1999).

Through the 1990’s, there has been increasing urgency in traditional circles of
leadership education to create change in six thematic areas: (1) strengthen the link
between theory and practice (Hodgkinson, 1996, 1983); (2) define standards of leadership
in organizational competency frameworks (Grzeda, 2005); (3) emphasize working
effectively with people of significant diversity of culture, language, wealth, and national
perspective (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004); (4) foster recognition of
the systemic nature of organizations and their national and multi-national environments

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(McCall & Hollenbeck, 2002; Morgan, 1986); (5) provide for the development of
self-knowledge and personal strength (Covey, 1989; Bloom, 1987); and (6) focus on the
development of the ability to learn continuously (Taylor et al, 2002; Senge, 1990). This
body of literature, as well as two significantly more recent publications on leadership
education (Mintzberg, 2005; Bennis and O’Toole, 2005), affirms RRU’s fundamental
approach to graduate leadership education.

The Educational Model for the School of Leadership Studies

As mentioned above, there is strong and growing support for many aspects of the
educational model that the School has established over the past nine years of the Master
of Arts in Leadership (MALEAD)1 degree at Royal Roads University, and in five years
experience designing and delivering certificates and executive short programs in
leadership education. It is a model supported, not only in the literature on leadership
education, but also in the development of similar graduate programs within the last 20
years on this continent and in Europe.2 It is also a model that has been continually
refreshed and updated through a program-wide commitment to imbedding the processes
of self-evaluation, action learning, and organizational learning into its program
improvement efforts.

The School’s Perspective on Leadership

Before describing these principles, however, there are a number of basic

assumptions about the nature of leadership in the 21st Century that inform our
educational model, the program design, and the relationships between the School and the
workplace. These are as follows:

Leadership is a common human challenge across diverse sectors.

Whatever a business, a government department, a hospital, a protective service, or

a school delivers as it ‘product’ and whatever the specialized technical expertise required
in delivering that ‘product’, leadership in all organizational contexts is the common
challenge of working effectively with and through people. The School’s educational
programs are designed for flexible access by working professionals—whether they are
health care professionals, educators, public service providers, owners and administrators
of business organizations or members of the not-for-profit and volunteer social services
sector—who, having achieved mastery in their respective professional technical domain,
find themselves in need of developing leadership skills to be successful in their chosen
field.

Leadership is a practice of engaging people toward a common purpose and enhancing

their capacity to contribute.

1
Formerly the Master of Arts in Leadership and Training degree (MALT)
2
For example, Masters in Organizational Management at Fielding Institute [US], M.A. in Management Learning and
Leadership at Lancaster University [UK], Master’s degree in Organization Development at American University [US],
and the Human Systems Intervention M.A. at Concordia University [Montreal]).

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The School’s orientation to leadership is beyond the traditional “John Wayne”

heroic model, in which an individual strikes out on his or her own to save others single-
handedly. Leadership is both the individual and collective practice of influence through
engagement rather than through command and control. This assumption aligns well with
Mintzberg’s (1994) perspective:

Leadership is not about making clever decisions and doing bigger deals, least of all
for personal gain. It is about energizing other people to make good decisions and
do better things. In other words, it is about helping to release positive energy that
exists naturally within people. Effective leadership inspires more than empowers; it
connects more than controls; it demonstrates more than decides. It does this by
engaging –itself above all and consequently others” (p. 143).3

Leadership involves generating leadership throughout an organization.

In a global environment of exponential and unpredictable change the knowledge

of yesterday is less relevant today (Helgesen, 1999). Most organizations face reduced
planning horizons, and the “shelf life” of relevant knowledge is shrinking. Consequently,
it takes more than the person ‘at the top’ to understand an organization’s mission and
operation and to be capable of good judgment and decisions. Further, the modern world is
characterized by a marked decline in compliance to positional authority (Helgesen,
1999), a trend that continues as successive generations of Canadians enter the workplace
as knowledge workers who expect their intelligence and capabilities to be fully utilized.

Leadership is a set of relationships within a dynamic system.

The foregoing principles of the School’s orientation to leadership suggests a

fundamental shift from a focus on leadership as a quality of one person—the heroic
leader who has the answers and solutions—to leadership as a quality of a human system.
It is about how people relate to one another in an organizational structure and culture that
maximizes the capabilities of its members to both contribute effectively and to learn and
adapt as the organization’s environment continuously changes. While leadership requires
individual competencies, these competencies are enacted and evolved in relationships
which, in turn, enable people to relate effectively and to enact their leadership
capabilities.

Leadership is situational: it requires wisdom that is evolved through practice and

reflection on that practice

3
Although this position was articulated most recently by Henry Mintzberg in 2004, this description of leadership was
also expressed by Greenleaf (1977), Dupree (1989), Kouzes and Posner (1995), Handy (1995) and many others long
before 2004 and could well be a synthesis of the competency framework that has been and continues to be the
foundation of the MALEAD program at RRU since its inception.

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Leadership is situational. What works in one situation at one time does not work
in another situation at another time. As a consequence, a leader constantly has to learn
and adapt what he/she has learned about leadership to new contexts. Knowledge and
skills is not enough. Knowledge and skills must be constantly adapted to different
contexts of action. This ability is called wisdom (Dalla Costa, 1995) and is a product of
learning from experience. This ability is evolved through continuous iterations of
practice and reflection; it is a seamless integration of a broad set of capabilities that
ultimately have to be clarified or defined. Learning leadership is a lifelong process; a
continual movement back and forth between philosophy, theory, and practice, always
seeking the wisdom as to how to act in a specific situation that requires leadership.4
Leadership education can catalyze and provide direction to this process in ways that
provide a quantum increase in effectiveness and value, and a high return on investment
for organizations or corporations that deem leadership education as vital to their success.

The School’s Approach to Leadership Education

In a context of accelerating change, there are no recipes, no set methodologies or

general solutions that can be relied upon in addressing practical and considerable 21st
century challenges (Quinn, 2004). Leadership education that speaks to this reality
enables people to shift their expectations from a static, predictable, top-down
organizational model to a dynamic, flexible, lateralized one. An educational model for
21st Century leadership needs to be rooted in this new and fundamentally different
perspective. The following educational principles, design constructs, and illustrative
practices are those to which the School is committed to preserving in future efforts to
create new educational programs and revising existing ones.

Holistic Design Principles

Holistic design refers to the larger concepts and ideas shaping the leadership
programs in the School of Leadership Studies, whether or not they are executive
programs, certificate programs, or the MA in Leadership. Three key principles are
described below.

A Blended Model of Learning.

RRU uses both face-to-face learning environments as well as on-line learning

environments. The purpose of the former is to create the concepts and conceptual
framework for leadership that will guide learning in the program; to practice the
demonstration of competency; to introduce the discipline of personal mastery (Senge,
1990); and to motivate learners to continue learning when they return to the workplace.
The purpose of the on-line learning environment is to allow the learner to make direct
connections between program content and its application in the workplace; to practice
personal mastery; to provide “just-in-time” instruction; and to maximize time on task for

4
The Greeks referred to this as practical wisdom. Hodgkinson (1996) calls it praxis, stating that “leadership
is philosophy in practice”.

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the learning of leadership. That is, to focus the learner during the working day on what
he or she sees pertinent to the exercise of good leadership while it is happening in situ—
in the laboratory of the real world. The blended model also provides more flexible access
to graduate studies than more traditional learning models. This is an extremely important
factor for many of the school’s learners who, as busy leaders themselves, would find it
difficult to commit two years out of the workplace to attend graduate school.

A Respect for Experience and a Marriage of Applied and Theoretical Learning

The basic instructional approach taken to define the overall program is based on
an appropriate mix of applied and theoretical learning. The basic assumption is that mid-
career professionals bring with them a wealth of experience and conceptual thinking
developed through practice. As such, the learners and their many experiences of
leadership represent a significant component of the learning design. This experience is
then married to the relevant theory and research that has emerged in the field of
leadership. The instructional interventions provided by faculty members simply build on
these two core elements to create an effective and communal learning environment. They
also provide the learners with the tools, techniques, and mindsets to construct
competency that builds on their own experience, strengths, and personality.

A Constructivist Learning Approach

Constructivist learning is an approach to learning that suggests that truth is

negotiated in social context, and created through shared meaning-making amongst
individuals (Stage, Muller, Kinzie, & Simmons, 1998; Bruffee, 1993). Lambert et al
(1998) describe constructivism as being at once a theory of knowing and of coming to
know. Leadership is construction: the construction of learning adaptive responses to
emergent circumstance on behalf of oneself and service to others, and that is
acknowledged as successful upon agreement between leader and follower.5 Adaptive
responses usually take the form of acquiring knowledge, skills, values and/or attitudes
that allow professionals to effectively deal with emerging leadership challenges.

At RRU, we call this collection of attributes of successful leadership

‘competencies’. Grzeda (2005, p. 531) defines competencies as “skills, knowledge,
attitudes, and underlying individual characteristics…[that]…vary as a function of the job
or role”. In our view, leadership is the deliberate, pro-active exercise of competence to
maximize socially acceptable and productive responses to emergent circumstances. A
constructivist perspective to leadership development acknowledges that each individual
that aspires to leadership—based on his or her strengths and weaknesses and
personality—will ‘construct’ leadership capability in a manner very different to another
individual in the same situation. The definition of successful leadership is created by
members of a human system who ‘construct’ a shared meaning about what successful
leadership is in that specific context.

5
Followership—the opposite of leadership—can be a non-deliberate, unconscious response to emergent circumstance;
yet if it results in an appropriate adaptation, it too is a form of learning.

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Design Constructs That Promote the Learning of Leadership

Within the holistic design framework outlined above, there is a number of

learning design constructs and approaches that are drawn from “best practice” literature
pertinent to leadership and management development, or that have been created to
operationalize the holistic design framework. They have been chosen because they
promote the development of leadership in that they create a supportive yet challenging
learning environment that demands of learners the very leadership qualities that are being
developed, and allow for the practice of those qualities. They are influenced by current
research in adult learning theory and leadership theory. The efficacy of the application of
these design constructs has been confirmed in recent studies by Hamilton and Greer
(2005), Fenwick (2002), and more than 10 learner-led research projects conducted over
the last nine years. These constructs are described below.

A competency focus that builds on a personal philosophy of leadership

Chris Hodgkinson (1983) once said, “leadership is philosophy in practice.” What

he meant was that each individual leader has a personal philosophy about life and people
that plays out in our day-to-day behaviours. In the RRU programs we interpret this to
mean that as we introduce each individual learner to the philosophy or theory of
leadership, and he/she integrates it into his/her own personal philosophy, it should
translate into sophisticated practice—which is described by the competencies of the
program.

Self-directed learning as a cornerstone of sustainable professional growth

The RRU leadership programs are based on the premise that leaders ‘construct
competency’ using the self-directed learning methods. This means that each individual
leader must build competency in a very deliberate way by building the blueprint of a
leadership competency framework on the foundation of his/her own values, beliefs,
personality, and existing skill-sets. Self-directed learning refers to a process of growth
and development that is under the control and direction of the learner, rather than the
instructor (Brookfield, 1986). In this model of learning, the instructor provides advice
and guidance and knowledge; but it is the learner’s responsibility to manage the learning
process. Peter Senge (1990) calls it ‘personal mastery’. There are two components to
self-direction. The first is self-awareness. The second is self-direction. We outline
techniques to provide the discipline of self-directed learning in the final section of this
paper.

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Building on strengths

Marcus Buckingham, working with The Gallup organization, has published two
recent books, First, Break All the Rules (1999) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001)
that argue that individuals are better able to expand their personal capacity in leadership
and management by building on their strengths rather than their weaknesses.
Buckingham argues that a person’s strengths can be stretched much further and
developed to a much greater extent than focusing on a person’s weaknesses, which have
more limited range of amelioration. It is also true that no one person can be good at
everything. Therefore, being really good at some things is probably better than expending
energy in areas that have limited return. To the extent possible, learners should be asked
to employ this approach when developing competency for the workplace.

Workplace focus and “tacit knowledge”

A fundamental principle of learning is that prior knowledge shapes and structures

one’s subsequent learning. Sometimes that knowledge is submerged, or unconscious.
Polanyi (1958) calls it tacit knowledge. Leadership is one discipline in which every
person has resources of tacit knowledge. The RRU leadership programs bring together
groups of learners with rich and varied leadership experiences. Thus, we encourage
instructors to draw out that tacit knowledge, through interactive learning strategies, and
then to help learners use it to understand and inform the theory and practice of leadership.

Furthermore, we intentionally design activities and assignments that encourage

learners to share this knowledge to support each others learning. Helping others learn is a
important leadership competency that is directly enhanced by another key attribute of our
leadership programs—the diverse, rich, and engaging learning community that is created
when professionals from various sectors, ages, and levels of experience learn together.

Action research/action learning

The workplace is an ideal learning environment for the practice of both action
learning and action research. At an individual development level, action learning is
operationalized as self-directed learning. At the organizational level, action research
techniques apply similar principles of experiential learning to creating change in the
broader organization (Stringer, 1996). This approach to learning suggests that people
learn best through taking informed action to create a desired change, reflecting on that
action (i.e., as to whether or not it achieved the desired result); and using the subsequent
learning to inform further action. For example, pertaining to individual development, at
the end of a RRU face-to-face session learners might be asked to decide on a specific
behaviour or intervention they would like to make in their workplace before the next
residency. In terms of organizational change, learners fulfil their thesis requirements by
completing an action research project designed to promote positive growth in a
sponsoring organization. They then go back to work, implement the change process, and

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write up their reflections about what they have learned about change and leadership ‘on
the job’.

Problem-Based Learning as a means of promoting relevant and authentic learning

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) emphasizes the importance of active and

collaborative engagement in defining, understanding, and posing solutions to real-world
issues that respect individual differences in learning approaches and builds on previously-
acquired experience. PBL has made significant inroads into medical, education, and
professional schools, as educators in universities and colleges seek ways to make their
curricula more integrative, problem-focused, and constructivist in orientation to enhance
the link to real-world performance requirements (Dunlap, 2005; Fenwick, 2002; Major &
Palmer, 2001; Barrows, 2000). In fact, PBL seems well-suited to RRU leadership
programs because our learners, as developing leaders, possess or desire substantive real-
life experience and are seeking ways to apply new skills and knowledge to directly
enhance workplace performance. As a core learning strategy, we have re-conceptualized
the definition of a “problem” used in more conventional PBL approaches. In our
applications of PBL, we focus on current, complex, and difficult-to-resolve
organizational issues—yet to be resolved--to reflect the kinds of authentic and
contextualized dilemma management processes encountered in the workplace and other
real-life situations. At Royal Roads University, we have trademarked these unique
projects as a Leadership ChallengeTM.

Application of these learning constructs in RRU Leadership programs

In all our leadership programs, our goal is to provide a seamless learning

experience that effectively blends the advantages of both face-to-face and online learning
environments. As the following descriptions demonstrate, the constructs described above
provide some robust guidelines for the designing of meaningful learning opportunities in
both these environments.

Components of face-to-face learning environments.

Enhancement of the self-awareness and self-management components of self-

directed learning is built into all residencies; through the use of self-awareness
instruments to provide information for self-reflection; and the introduction of Individual
Learning Plans and reflective journals as key tools for self-development. A 360
assessment instrument is usually employed, to provide learners with feedback on the
leadership competencies being developed. Feedback is derived from self assessments as
well as information from direct reports, peers, and one’s formal supervisor. Each learner
receives a report that informs his or her strategies for personal development. The learner
is then provided with tools and instruments to assist in the self-management of learning.6

6
The JED toolkit (Job-Embedded-Development) is a resource that has been developed by Royal Roads University and
Peter Norman (2003) to help learners undertake this responsibility.

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To ensure relevance to workplace settings, learning activities within the

leadership programs are designed to be integrative and focus on the simultaneous
attainment of multiple competencies. One significant example of this approach is the
Leadership ChallengeTM —a key component of the first residency of the MA program.
Based on our extended and enhanced PBL model, the Leadership ChallengeTM requires
learners to work in teams to address a significant and current leadership dilemma or issue
provided by an organizational sponsor from the private, public, or not-for-profit sector.
During a one-week cycle, learners—who are typically mid-career individuals that bring a
breadth and depth of organizational leadership experience—participate in skill-enhancing
workshops related to leadership, systems thinking, learning, organizations, and
communications. Therefore, the Leadership ChallengeTM activity becomes a learning
laboratory for participants to focus their knowledge building and skill enhancement on
addressing an important and real-life leadership issue. Recent research has confirmed
both the substantive benefits to learners (Fenwick, 2002) and the benefits to the
organizational sponsors (Hamilton & Greer, 2005) of the Leadership ChallengeTM.

Furthermore, in the MA degree programs learners are asked to complete an

integrated assignment. This is a paper in which they outlined to their immediate
supervisor what they learned in the residency, and how they might apply it in the context
of their work. Participants are encouraged to share the contents when back at work. A
formal process for assessing competencies and reporting on progress, using portfolios,
peer assessments, and self-assessments is used to ground this activity.

Components of online learning environments

In our RRU leadership programs, the online environment is used in a highly

complementary fashion to the residency. The seamlessness of this blended learning
design enables the online environment to serve as a bridge into and out of the residency
components of the program as well as means to deepen and broaden both the study and
application of leadership. Online course structures encourage continuation of the themes
of self-awareness and self-development, employing on-line discussions, on-line
resources, reflective journaling, team projects, and assignments drawn from the
workplace to contextualize leadership development. Furthermore, the longer and more
contiguous periods dedicated to online learning in our MA program enables learners to
focus on more extensive applied learning assignments such as the preparation,
production, and delivery of the culminating program activity—the applied thesis.

Suggested Instructional Practice

Formal research as well as ten years of self-evaluation and program delivery

experience has helped us identify a number of instructional practices that we believe
enhance the potential for individuals to learn leadership. These are described below.

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o Create personal relevance

Greenfield (1975) once wrote that “one cannot learn leadership without a
transcendental vision of one’s-self and one’s role in the universe” (p.106).
Instructors at RRU continually emphasize the power of a personal vision for
leadership in a global context, and the need for learners to act on this vision. This
gives all program activities direct personal relevance and a learning context.
Essentially, learners need the opportunity throughout the program to investigate
the personal relevance of every activity, concept, or expectation asked of them, in
order to realize their personal visions and to construct competency.

o Employ interactive exercises

Given the importance of tacit knowledge to the learning of leadership, instructors
are encouraged to employ instructional techniques that allow for a significant
amount of interactivity. Asking learners to recount stories from their past that
speak to ‘lessons learned’ about leadership is one way of encouraging
interactivity. Teamwork in which learners are asked to work together to
collaboratively explore or resolve an issue or problem is another strategy.

o Appeal to a variety of learning styles and use a variety of instructional approaches

Learners learn in a variety of different ways. Some are visual learners. Some are
tactile learners. Some enjoy the written word. Instructors use a variety of
approaches to engage all styles of learners in the learning process. Videos, story-
telling, the use of novels and plays, poster displays, role-play exercises, provision
of quiet time for self-reflection, simulation, debates, presentations, learning labs,
personal learning plans, learner-led workshops, written assignments, portfolios—
all of these approaches engage learners in different ways.

o Use the teachable moment

Instructors in RRU programs are encouraged to use the events and circumstances
that arise in the program as potential opportunities to teach leadership concepts.
For example, if conflict arises in an instructional setting, the instructor is asked to
determine whether or not learners would, as leaders in an organizational setting,
do anything about it. If they would, they are asked to make the appropriate
intervention, and then debrief either the individuals involved, or the community,
or the learning implicit in that event. To further reinforce this principle, we refer
to our faculty at RRU as learning facilitators, not teachers.7 For example, a
teacher may try to teach all a person needs to know about teamwork in advance of
the teamwork experience. It is much better to observe the teamwork experience,
and where appropriate, intervene with a lesson, as a coach or facilitator, to take
advantage of emergent learning opportunities.

7
For a discussion of the distinction between learning facilitator and teacher, see Brookfield (1986).

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o Envision the participants as a learning community

Learning communities are collections of individuals who come together to learn
from and with each other (Schmoker, 2004). In higher education, learning
communities have been used to provide an engaging, cross-curricular, and
integrative educational experience for learners (MacGregor, 1994). At Royal
Roads, we have organized cohorts of learners into learning communities to foster
an integrative learning experience, build collective wisdom, promote collaborative
inquiry, and provide a supportive learning environment. Furthermore, by
modeling collaborative problem-solving, we hope to encourage graduates of our
programs to build and sustain their own learning communities to foster continued
leadership growth. Etienne Wenger (1998) referred to these entities as
‘Communities of Practice’ designed to create, update, and retain shared
knowledge that is considered critical to ongoing advancement and growth.

o Treat the learning community like an organization in change

Current research suggests that learning communities are most effective when they
are purposeful and goal-directed (Goland, 2005). If the workshop or program, and
its participants, is perceived as being a group of emerging leaders dedicated to
organizational reform in their business, enterprise, or corporation, the program
can become a place whereby real and meaningful leadership interventions to
achieve the organization’s purpose can be decided upon and actioned. In this way
the learning program takes on a “real-life” purpose and enriches the relevance of
the learning.

o Employ strategies that provide mutual benefits for learners and organizational
sponsors
The design of our programs has recognized that real growth does not occur
through detached study of a discipline or subject matter. Real growth occurs when
learners are immersed in change processes themselves and experience the impact
of leadership in real organizational settings. We have learned that the best way to
achieve this is be inviting organizations into our extended learning community
through a variety of strategies, such as the use of cross-sector advisory boards to
determine and update leadership competency frameworks, sector-specific
customized programs, sponsorships of Leadership ChallengesTM, and learners’
theses, as well as consultative services provided in an outreach capacity. The
reciprocity inherent in this mutual engagement enables our leadership programs to
achieve both relevance and real impact in shaping the practice of effective 21st
Century leadership.

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Conclusion

Effective leadership is in great demand, as are effective leadership development

programs. The challenge of creating these programs as outlined in this article is two-fold.
First, to continually define and redefine leadership in the context of the vast knowledge
we have about the topic, and the relevance of that knowledge to the 21st Century. Second,
to develop programs that recognize the unique attributes of leadership as it affects the
learning process. Leadership is not a subject or discipline that can be taught as other
subjects and disciplines are taught. As Harold Geneen (2006) stated, “leadership cannot
really be taught; it can only be learned”. Programs in the School of Leadership Studies at
Royal Roads University attempt to address the needs of modern leadership; and rather
than teach it, provide the optimal environment in which it can be learned. It is our
fervent hope that in doing so, our School will make a unique contribution to the health
and welfare of education, society and business in the 21st Century.

Substantial sections of this article are based on a recent White Paper produced by the
School of Leadership Studies. The authors wish to gratefully acknowledge Marilyn
Taylor, Linda Coupal, Nancy Greer, Wendy Rowe, Monique Cikaliuk, Tony Williams
and Alison Meredith for their important contributions to the content of this article."

BC Educational Leadership Research May 2006

Dickson and Hamilton Page 14

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