Expertise

Individual Leader Development: How individuals develop the intrapersonal and interpersonal capabilities needed to be effective in leadership roles — often referred to as "personal development." Central to effective leadership capabilities is the ability to understand one's strengths and development needs, and one of the long-held core competencies of this practice area is expertise in assessment and feedback methodologies. The focus of Individual Leader Development is on how to stimulate and support individual development for people in a wide variety of leadership roles, and how these people can do the same for others.

Global Leadership and Diversity: How to lead (and how to develop as a leader) when one is demographically different from the majority or "traditional" leader; also, how to lead across differences when the collective is made up of diverse demographic or cultural groups. A core assumption of this practice area's work is that leading in the context of difference is more difficult than leading when the other people are similar to you. Special attention, therefore, must be paid to context, developing additional competencies, and overcoming barriers. This work focuses on what it takes to lead in this context, and on how to develop the capabilities for such leadership.

Groups, Teams, and Organizations: Effective leadership in organizations today requires more than selecting and developing a critical mass of individuals possessing specified competencies. It also requires the development of leadership as a property of the whole system. From this view, effectiveness in leadership is a product of the nature of connections and relationships among the parts of the system rather than just the result of any one part (e.g., the individual leader) and is dependent on choosing leadership strategies that fit with the complexity of the challenges the system faces. This practice area will develop expertise, tools, and processes for helping groups and organizations:

• Understand their current leadership strategies, under what circumstances they use a particular strategy, and the strengths and limitations of these strategies;
• Develop more shared or collective leadership strategies and processes for facing complex challenges;
• Identify the aspects of their systems that need to change or develop to more effectively accomplish leadership.