Ingress: Organisationer tycks inte bli mer rustade av att förlita sig enbart på traditionella kursupplägg. Företag som presterar starkt ekonomiskt prioriterar verksamhetsnära insatser där ledarskapet utvecklas i det dagliga arbetet, skriver beslutsfattare från näringsliv och akademi.

I projektet System för ledarskapsutveckling har forskare vid Jönköping University i partnerskap med ett tiotal svenska organisationer och genom en nationell telefonintervju med drygt 1 300 privata och offentliga verksamheter fördjupat kunskapen om hur ledarskapsutveckling organiseras, uppfattas och omsätts i praktiken. Resultatet i denna rapport bygger på ett varierat material i form av dokument, intervjuer och workshops.

Genom projektet har vi fördjupat vår förståelse av att ledarskapsutveckling kräver systematik och integration. Det handlar om att arbeta medvetet och långsiktigt med olika arbetssätt som är kopplade till organisationens syfte, samtidigt som vi reflekterar över de antaganden och idéer som påverkar utformningen. Ett ledarskapsutvecklingssystem omfattar de arbetssätt som främjar utveckling av ledarskap anpassat efter verksamhetens syfte, kontext och föränderliga behov.

I rapporten beskriver sju organisationer sin syn på ledarskap och hur de arbetar för att utveckla detsamma. Genom deras egna ord får vi en inblick i hur ett system för ledarskapsutveckling kan se ut i praktiken. Särskilt markeras att ledarskapsutveckling måste skräddarsys utifrån organisatoriska förutsättningar och individuella behov. De aktiviteter och metoder som används måste kontinuerligt testas, förstärkas eller fasas ut beroende på relevans. Hellre hålla fast vid en genomtänkt metod än att ständigt byta.

Den nationella kartläggningen ger en översikt av vilka aktiviteter som är mest använda och till vem de vänder sig. Fördjupande analyser visar att de organisationer som har starkast finansiella resultat värderar fem verksamhetsnära metoder främst; chefsmöten, gruppreflektioner, utvecklingssamtal, förbättringsarbete och tillfälliga uppdrag.

Slutligen presenterar vi en uppsättning framgångsprinciper, frågor och verktyg för att arbeta mer systematiskt med ledarskapsutveckling. Vår förhoppning är att de ska fungera som en kompass för ett mer nyfiket och reflekterande arbetssätt och öppnar vägen mot en hållbar och framgångsrik ledarskapsutveckling.

In the project System for Leadership Development, researchers at Jönköping University have, in partnership with about a dozen Swedish organizations, deepened their knowledge of how leadership development is organized, perceived and put into practice. This was, among other things, done through national telephone interviews with more than 1,300 private and public organizations. The results presented in this report are based on various empirical sources in the form of documents, interviews and workshops.

Through the project, we have deepened our understanding of the need for leadership development to be systematic and integrated. It is a matter of working deliberately and with a long-term perspective with different practices that are linked to the organization’s purpose, all the while reflecting on the assumptions and ideas that influence the design. A leadership development system encompasses the practices that promote the development of leadership, adapted to the purpose, context and changing needs of the organization.

In this handbook, seven organizations describe their views on leadership and how they work to develop it. Through their own words, we get an insight into what a system for leadership development can look like in practice. In particular, it is emphasized that leadership development must be tailored to organizational conditions and individual needs. The practices and methods that are used must continuously be tested, strengthened or phased out depending on relevance. It is better to stick to a well-thought-out practice than to constantly change.

The national survey provides an overview of the practices most used and which target groups they are aimed at. In-depth analyses show that the organizations with the strongest financial results primarily prioritize five practices close to daily operations: leadership forums, performance and developmental reviews, improvement work, group reflections and temporary assignments.

Finally, we present a set of success principles, questions, and tools for working more systematically with leadership development. Our hope is that they will serve as a compass for a more curious and reflective way of working and that they will open the way towards sustainable and successful leadership development.

Effective leadership development is crucial for high-performing organizations, but the questions of what methods, models, and theories to include in leadership development initiatives and how to best organize development interventions can leave professionals confused. We propose a systems approach that explains leadership development practices in an organizational context. A leadership development system encompasses all practices offered by an organization in which individuals engage with the purpose of enhancing leadership capacity to advance organizational objectives. To understand crucial components of the system as well as their defining features and how they interact, we propose a reflective theoretical framework for leadership development. Professionals can use the framework to assess their organization’s current leadership development system, identify areas for improvement, and systematically evolve the system to better support organizational objectives. We argue that that a systems approach transcends isolated leadership development programs, promoting a more holistic, context-sensitive, and strategically aligned method for building leadership capacity. Jag förslår att dessa inte anges i abstract utan bara i cover letter och i portalen där det skickas in. Är inte detta teoretiska bidrag underförstått ovan? This study offers three main contributions to the literature. First, our theoretical framework supports addressing leadership development as a system within organizations, moving beyond individual or group development in training programs. Second, we introduce six essential pedagogical questions to help professionals understand leadership development as a system. Third, our framework provides a road map for improving leadership development systems.

In the leadership development literature, there is a strong consensus for the value of taking a tailored approach to leadership development. Yet, the literature is surprisingly silent about what such tailoring actually involves. We review the leadership development literature through a didactical lens and develop a process model of didactic tailoring and leadership development. Our emerging conceptual model subsume the existent but oftentimes scattered research into the tailoring of leadership development programs into an overarching organizing framework. Our model helps identify the underlying processes involved in didactic tailoring of leadership development programs. It also articulate how these processes combine to predict leadership development. Finally, we outline a step-by-step guide informing how to conduct didactic tailoring. Our theoretical model provides valuable guidance for scholars and practitioners interested in designing, executing, evaluating, reporting, and reviewing leadership development programs.

The significance of leadership for organizational success is widely recognized; however, there are numerous perspectives on the best way to develop leadership. The aim of this study was to explore the factors that professionals collectively identify as crucial for enhancing leadership development in organizations. The research questions addressed are: What key principles guide well-informed decisions in organizing leadership development practices? What generic aspects are related to these principles?

Employing a participatory research approach, we collected and analyzed data in collaboration with professionals working with leadership development in 17 municipalities and 10 regions in Sweden. The data were gathered by recording collaborative work during workshops, analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and interpreted using paradox theory. Our main theoretical contribution consists of nine key principles that guide well-informed decisions in organizing leadership development practices. These principles are structured within key questions that go beyond perspectives on the best way to develop leadership, addressing inevitable paradoxical tensions. Additionally, we identify three generic aspects for managing these tensions and enhancing leadership development practices in organizations: systematic deliberation, integration and continuous improvement. Based on these findings, we present two practical tools to help professionals strengthen leadership development as a cohesive support system. Rather than seeking a single best curriculum or framework, professionals can be supported by aligning the responses to Why? What? How and when? Who? and What works?, always related to Where? and by continuously applying systematic deliberation, integrating leadership development with business strategies and HR activities and pursuing continuous improvement.

Leadership development (LD) plays a significant role in achieving high-quality performance and business results, but there is little research on how leadership development itself evolves as the organization develops. This study explores how a leadership development system evolved over 30 years, during a time when the organization became increasingly high performing. Through reflexive thematic analysis of organizational documents and interviews with top managers and practitioners, the study provides a rich longitudinal description of the evolvement. The results revealed three pervasive changes of the leadership development system: 1) from a system for business-specific learning to one for system-wide learning; 2) from a system for personal development to one for customer-oriented quality development; and 3) from a leadership development system consisting of leadership development programs to one that is integrated into regular meetings and uses simple rules. These changes supported the gradual transformation of the leadership development from being independent to becoming integrated in the wider system, supporting the business system. The findings offer a unique insight into how an organization transitioned from individual leader development towards promoting collective aspects of leadership development. The study provides two main theoretical contributions that support the perspective of viewing leadership development as integrated within organizational development. Firstly, we present a more multifaceted way of understanding leadership development, wherein managers and employees, customer outcomes, and business advancement are seen as mutually developing. Secondly, we introduce two new critical points that complement previous descriptions of an advanced leadership development system: It is system wide (not only business specific) and customer oriented (not only leader/participant oriented).

The focus of this workshop is to employ a more systematic approach to leadership development and design a maturity model that is supported by validated and practical applicable theories, methods and practices to fit the organization’s needs and resources.  

This paper explored social representations of leadership and leadership development shaping an organizations leadership development system (LDS). This study is based on the initial phase of a 4-year collaborative research project on LDSs, adopting an interactive research approach to co-produce knowledge through joint meetings and learning workshops (Ellström et al., 2020). The research project involves researchers from different disciplines, and five organizations operating in different business domains. The participating organizations vary in terms of size, strategies, markets, processes, products, and ways of organizing, but they all share a common interest in how to develop sustainable approaches to leadership development. An LDS encompasses all the metho ds and practices in an organization that contribute to developing and producing effective leaders (McCauley et al 2010). The importance of understanding the characteristics of the context the LDS is embedded in has been highlighted in a previous study (Avby et al., 2022), and serve as a point-of-reference in this study. However, less is known of what underlying assumptions an LDS is based upon. This study paid attention to the underlying values, ideas, and perspectives on leadership and leadership development that shape an organizations’ ways of thinking, communicating, and acting in the LDS. We suggest that the potential to develop a more deliberate practice of leadership development was enhanced by exploring and articulating the tacit knowledge and assumpt ions that an LDS rests upon.

Aim

The aim of this study was to explore how socially and contextually shaped assumptions on leadership and leadership development can be visualized and practically applied to develop the leadership in the organization. The question addressed was how the awareness of underlying assumptions can support the methods and practices applied, and in what way the disclosing of underlying ideas, values and practices may foster work -integrated learning?

Design and methods

From a social representation theory approach (Moscovici, 2001, Jovchelovitch, 2007, Markova, 2003, BergmoPrvulovic, 2015), underlying assumptions of leadership and leadership development were explored. In the collaborative project an initial mapping of the participating organizations’ LDSs has been co nducted, based on different sources of data. The results of this mapping have been presented through a metaphorical analysis (Avby et al., 2022), in which the participating organizations are described with certain metaphors of their LDS. This study paid specific attention to the organization entitled The Self-Managing Team, and added to the initial stage of mapping LDSs by exploring the underlying assumptions that underpins the expressions and formulations on leadership and leadership development found in the organization’s documents, websites, formulations in meetings and strategies. The exploration of social representations of LDSs was based upon the free association method (Abric, 1995), further developed, and used in studies exploring social representations of similar abstract and complex phenomena, such as career (Bergmo-Prvulovic, 2013: 2015). The method consists of questions, words and series of words given to the respondents who spontaneously write down their immediate associations towards a specific concept and complex phenomenon with a gradual deepening of questions related to specific words, series of words. In this study, a digital enquiry was created in Esmaker. The enquiry was designed to ask for respondents spontaneous, immediate thoughts on words, and series of words related to leadership and leadership development. The gradually deepening of questions, were designed by paying attention to the five dimensions of representations suggested by Jovchelovitch (2007), by exploring who are concerned, why and for what leadership is needed, what is the content 84 of leadership, when it works and doesn’t work, when and how it occurs as well who is responsible, whose engagement and what conditions are needed. This study was based on 19 respondents’ answers a ll member in the Self-Managing Team. They were selected by the organization, as identified having important roles and functions in the company’s LDS. A facilitator in the organization introduced an online enquiry with 12 questions, given one by one to the respondents, providing 1-2 minutes for each. The respondents wrote down their associations to each question, some background data, and questions about leadership identity. The analytical procedure was made according to qualitative content analysis method as the basic procedure of qualitatively exploring social representations (Bergmo-Prvulovic, 2013; 2015). Expressions were numbered with a certain code for each respondent related to each answered question, thereafter each textual units were condensed, meaning units were coded and grouped into constitutive elements that builds up preliminary and primary themes generating a web of social representations of LDS for the group of respondents.

Preliminary results

The results disclosed a web of underlying social representations shaping the LDS in The Self-Managing Team. The social representations shape a basic, contextually characterized system of values, ideas, and practices, on which the company at present form their LDS. Given the collaborative design of the project, the results were fed back to the organization to validate the analytical procedure, as well as to support the designing for work -integrated learning and further knowledge use in the organization. The results revealed the respondents’ assumptions on leadership, leadership development, and self-leadership. These assumptions are clearly anchored in the organization’s aim to build in self-management, as a collective way of working with leadership. However, the existing knowledge base encloses both commonalities and contradictions that needs to be further highlighted to create a sustainable LDS. Results showed both stable representations, that occur repeatedly throughout the material, and dynamic social rep resentations, that express a negotiating character between different views, or as being antinomies of thoughts. By identifying and raising awareness of ambiguities deriving from the results, a base of designing for reflective work-integrated learning was provided. A joint learning process to discuss how the results could be utilized as a tool for work-integrated learning was initiated. Some challenges were recognized, and the organization especially addressed the need to work with a second step of workplace reflection. A first learning cycle was initiated to be continuously developed by involving the employees in the process. In all, the contribution of the study explains the basis of leadership development practice, which unnoticed might create ambiguity in service delivery. The mapping of social representations of an LDS can be utilized as a tool for a more deliberate leadership development practice and highlight possibilities and challenges that need to be addressed for integrating methods and practices in everyday work.