By Sarah Stawiski, Stephen Jeong, & Heather Champion
Center for Creative Leadership
Summary
Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) has been successfully developing leaders across the globe for more than 50 years, and formally evaluating the effectiveness of leadership programs for decades. There is abundant evidence that leadership development leads to positive impact. But how does CCL define impact, and what factors should we consider when assessing the results of a leadership development initiative? The purpose of our proposed framework is to introduce a structure for measuring and maximizing the impact of leadership development; this includes the type of impact that can be expected and measured as well as key factors that influence the extent to which a leadership development initiative is achieving the desired impact.
The comprehensive yet simple framework combines levels of impact (e.g., changes tied to individual, group, organization, and society) with three unique factors that contribute to the effectiveness of leadership development programs. These contributing factors include (a) leader characteristics (e.g., readiness, willingness, and other individual difference characteristics relevant to development), (b) leadership solution (e.g., content, design characteristics and delivery elements, cohesiveness and flow), and (c) context (e.g., internal organizational factors, such as culture, support, leadership or other organizational changes as well as external factors such as, shifts in the industry and market place, significant economic and social issues or changes).
Citation
Stawiski, S., Jeong, S., & Champion, H. (2020). Leadership development impact (LDI) framework. Center for Creative Leadership. https://doi.org/10.35613/ccl.2020.2040
