Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 3 (2010), 3–19.Copyright © 2010 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. 1754-9426/09

FOCAL ARTICLE

Recasting Leadership Development

MORGAN W. MCCALL, JR.University of Southern California

AbstractTo the extent that leadership is learned, it is learned through experience. This article begins with sevenconclusions about the role of experience in leadership development, ponders the reasons that what is knownis so rarely applied, suggests some ways to put experience at the center of leadership development efforts, andconcludes with a series of recommendations for practice and for future research.

It turns out that using experience effec-tively to develop leadership talent1 is alot more complicated and difficult than itappears to be. But Einstein’s advice wasto ‘‘make things as simple as possible, butnot simpler,’’ and he was no slouch whenit came to taking on difficult phenomena.Experience—not genetics, not training pro-grams, not business school—is the primarysource of learning to lead, and although ourunderstanding of this kind of experienceis far from complete, it is absolutely theplace to start. This article begins with seven

Correspondence concerning this article should beaddressed to Morgan W. McCall.E-mail: morgan.mccall@marshall.usc.edu

Address: Marshall School of Business, University ofSouthern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0808

This paper evolved from an invited address,‘‘Lessons of My Experience: Three Decades ofExploring Leadership Development,’’ to the Societyfor Industrial and Organizational Psychology in Aprilof 2009 as recipient of the 2008 DistinguishedProfessional Contributions Award. Thanks to mycolleague, George Hollenbeck, and to an anonymousreviewer, both of whom made helpful comments onan earlier draft.1. The focus of this article is on developing people

with the potential to become effective executiveleaders in an organizational setting. Althoughthere are many definitions of leadership, most ofthe research upon which this article rests wasdone on managers and executives, and the termsleadership talent and executive talent will be usedinterchangeably.

reasonably sure bets about the role of expe-rience in leadership development, pondersthe reasons that what is known is so rarelyapplied, suggests some things that can bedone to put experience at the center ofdevelopment, and concludes with recom-mendations for practice and for research.

Seven Sure Bets

It may be true as has oft been said thatthere is nothing sure in this world but deathand taxes, but there are some things wehave learned over the last decades aboutexperience that come close to sure bets, orat least odds-on favorites. Here are seven ofthem.

1. To the extent it is learned, leadershipis learned from experience. For mostaudiences this is an easily acceptedstatement, one so obvious that noadditional proof is necessary. It iscomforting, however, that there issome evidence to support it. Researchon twins done over the years at theUniversity of Minnesota has lookedat all manner of personality andother traits, consistently finding that30%–50% of the variance can beattributed to heredity. When Arvey

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and his colleagues used the twinstudy paradigm with the criterion‘‘leadership role occupancy,’’ theyfound 30% explained by hereditybut the vast majority (the remaining70%) the result of experience (Arvey,Rotundo, Johnson, Zhang, & McGue,2006; Arvey, Zhang, Krueger, &Avolio, 2007).

2. Certain experiences matter morethan others. Study after study acrossorganizations (e.g., Douglas, 2003;McCall & Hollenbeck, 2002a; McCall,Lombardo, & Morrison, 1988), withincorporations (e.g., Valerio, 1990;Yost, Mannion-Plunkett, McKenna, &Homer, 2001; Yost & Plunkett, 2005),and in other countries (e.g., RecruitCo., Ltd., 2001) report that success-ful managers describe similar experi-ences that shaped their development.These experiences can be classifiedroughly as early work experiences,short-term assignments, major lineassignments, other people (almostalways very good and very bad bossesor superiors), hardships of variouskinds, and some miscellaneous eventslike training programs. There is reallyno need to do more research on thistopic unless a particular companyneeds to say the findings are uniquelytheirs.

Somewhat less certain is the result-ing folklore that there is a ‘‘70-20-10rule’’ [I have not found an originalpublished source, though the percent-ages clearly come from data reportedin McCall et al. (1988) and Lind-sey, Homes, and McCall (1987)] that‘‘experience’’ should consist of 70%challenging assignments, 20% otherpeople (in the original data these‘‘other people’’ almost always wereeither excellent or terrible bosses andsenior executives who, more oftenthan not, were neither good coachesnor mentors), and 10% programs.Although the rule of thumb makesa positive contribution by increas-ing the emphasis on on-the-job

experience, it also misleads by sug-gesting that coaching, mentoring, andprograms are effective when used asstand-alone interventions. In fact thebest use of all three is in support of on-the-job development, most especiallyin real time as job experiences unfold.

3. These experiences are powerfulbecause of the challenges theypresent. From the original study for-ward (see especially Lindsey et al.,1987), the elements that make anexperience powerful, as well as thespecific elements that make spe-cific experiences powerful, have beenidentified (see McCauley, Ruderman,Ohlot, & Morrow, 1994, for thedefinitive empirical study). Essen-tially whatever makes an experiencechallenging—the unexpected, highstakes, complexity, pressure, novelty,and so on—is what makes it a poten-tially powerful learning experience.

4. Different types of experiences teachdifferent lessons. It is hedging a bit,but a reasonable probability state-ment can be made about whatlessons each type of experience offers(see, e.g., the appendices in McCalland Hollenbeck [2002a] and Lindseyet al. [1987]). More to the practicalpoint, if one can identify the chal-lenges that make a given experiencepowerful, then it follows logically thatwhat one might learn is how to han-dle those challenges. In a start-up,for example, there is a lot of excite-ment about doing something new,but one of the challenges is thatno one knows exactly how to goabout it. The leadership challenge,and therefore what must be learned, ishow to take advantage of that energyand move forward when there is noroadmap to follow. In a turnaround,the challenges include diagnosing ata deep level what is broken and,that done, restructuring the organiza-tion, so the required learning includesunderstanding what drives the busi-ness and how to design (or, more

Recasting leadership development 5

accurately, redesign) the organizationto achieve it.There is no magic to discovering whatis in an experience—that is essen-tially a logical exercise. The difficultycomes in determining whether or nota specific person will actually learnwhat the experience offers.

5. Jobs and assignments can be mademore developmental. Because theelements that make experiences pow-erful are known, experiences canbe developmentally enhanced byadding those elements to them. Highcaliber learning experiences requirecomplementing challenge by provid-ing feedback on learning progress(DeRue & Wellman, 2009) and some-times by adding coaching. Again,nothing exotic here—just straightfor-ward application of what is known.Assignments can be enhanced with-out forcing a person to change jobs,and timelier and better feedback andcoaching can increase the probabil-ity that a person will focus and learn.This is so straightforward one has towonder why it isn’t done all the time.

6. People can get many of the experi-ences they need in spite of the obsta-cles. Although many relevant experi-ences obviously occur early in life oroff the job, still others, such as screwups and personal crises, cannot be (orat least should not be) manipulateddirectly. But when it comes to bossesand assignments, whoever decideswho gets what job controls devel-opmental opportunities. Whether animmediate boss or some successionplanning process makes the call,getting people into the experiencesthey need is a matter of knowingwho needs what experiences, hav-ing the experiences available, andbeing willing to put developmen-tal moves ahead of other priorities.Ultimately matching developmentalneeds to developmental opportunitiesis a matter of intentionality.

7. Learning takes place over time andis dynamic, with all manner of twistsand turns. Unlike the linear accumu-lation of knowledge and ability onemight hope for, the path to masteryis filled with serendipity, accidents,dead ends, and do-overs. As oneexecutive put it after making the samemistake a second time, ‘‘Damn it, Ijust did it again. But at least I’m awareof it this time!’’ Instead of adding com-petencies block by block or buildingincrementally on existing strengths, assome would suggest, growth occurs infits and starts, sometimes incremen-tally, sometimes radically. Develop-ment at various career stages mayrequire giving up strengths, addingnew strengths, correcting flaws, orotherwise reweaving the tapestry ofstrengths and weaknesses as timeand circumstances demand. Indeedit is well documented that failureto develop new strengths or to dealwith weaknesses can result in derail-ment (Finkelstein, 2003; McCall &Hollenbeck, 2002b; McCall & Lom-bardo, 1983).

Timing appears to be quite impor-tant to learning, both in terms of pro-viding meaningful help during impor-tant career transitions (see, e.g., Hill’s[1992] research on first-time man-agers; Charan, Drotter, and Noel’s[2001] ‘‘critical career passages’’;and Gabarro’s [1987] stages of ‘‘tak-ing charge’’), and in the juxtapositionof experience with an individual’sreadiness to learn. As an example ofthe latter, one newly promoted execu-tive told the author that ‘‘there is a lotof politics at headquarters and I don’thave time for that.’’ Despite the factthat an essential part of his new jobwas influencing those very executivesat headquarters, and that learning todo that was the essential challenge inhis promotion from a largely technicalmanagerial role, he was not yet readyto acknowledge the value in acquir-ing that ability. Apparently learning

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from experience is less likely whenpeople are not yet ready to embracethe lessons that are offered.

Despite Sure Bets, the Money Is onOther Horses

There may be more than these seven surebets, and some may not be quite as sureas we would like them to be, but theleadership development field has come along way from a singular emphasis ontraining and educational programs as ‘‘theway’’ to develop executive talent to a bet-ter understanding and acceptance of thecentral role of experience. But the theoret-ical elegance of the competency approachand its utility in integrating human resource(HR) systems still trumps the inherent messi-ness of experience-based development, atleast among most HR practitioners. Eitherthere are too many pieces still missingto implement a truly experience-centereddevelopment approach, or the lack of con-trol over assignments and who gets them, orboth, lead many in HR and talent manage-ment to seek the seemingly safer and betterknown haven of integrated competencies,360-feedback, performance management,training interventions, and HR processes.This is not without justification, as thereare still some really tough nuts to crackbefore experience-based development willwin skeptical hearts and minds (Hollen-beck, McCall, & Silzer, 2006).

Although it may not be so clear toHR professionals, it is intuitively obviousto most executives that leadership, to thedegree it is learned at all, is learned onthe job (i.e., from experience); therefore, itshould be easy to get them to buy in to anexperience-based development approach.From their perspective, leadership is devel-oped by simply doing what comes naturallyto them, i.e., giving leaders challenges.Consider the following recipe for devel-oping managerial talent from automotiveguru Carlos Ghosn, CEO of both Nissanand Renault:

You prepare them by sending them tothe most difficult places. . . . Tomorrow’sleaders get their training by dealing withtoday’s challenges. You have to take theones with the most potential and sendthem where the action is. . . . Leadersare formed in the fires of experience.It’s up to the head of the companyto prepare a new generation and tosend them to hot spots as part oftheir training. . . . (H)e must choose . . .

the future managers and directors . . .

not because they’re someone’s protegebut because they’ve faced difficult tasksand accomplished them (Ghosn & Ries,2005, pp. 152–153).

The common wisdom is that reachingexecutive ranks requires ‘‘earning yourstripes.’’ Doing what comes naturally,executives identify potential (‘‘I know itwhen I see it’’) and throw those with it intothe fires to test their mettle. An exampleof that is Mark Hurd, who replaced CarlyFiorina as CEO of Hewlett Packard (HP) andis credited with resurrecting HP, who wasidentified early on and received much of hisleadership development during his tenure atNCR.

‘‘Our theory on people was that yougive them responsibility,’’ says GilbertWilliamson, a CEO of NCR during Hurd’srise. ‘‘To my knowledge, every time wethrew Mark out the window he landed onhis feet. So we moved him up a floor, andhe landed on his feet again’’ (Lashinsky,2009, p. 96).

Although the idea of developing leader-ship talent through experience is an easysell to line executives, it is surprising howfew organizations actually do it effectively.This is true despite a research trail that gen-erated enough knowledge for organizationsto use experience more systematically if notentirely programmatically. Much of what isneeded has been around for some time now,and the tools exist to handle selection, feed-back, support, and other processes essentialto learning from experience. But in spite of

Recasting leadership development 7

increased knowledge and acceptance, theHR community has been slow to embracethe idea that on-the-job experience shouldbe the driving force in development and notjust one option among equals that includetraining, mentoring, rotational programs,coaching, and development programs ofvarious types.

In short, there is no reason thatexperience-based development can’t bedone effectively, or at least more effec-tively. Why isn’t it? The heresy I proposeis that the culprit lies in executives’ drivefor results coupled with a paradoxical lackof understanding about development andin HR professionals’ parochial perspectivecoupled with a misplaced need to exertdirect influence over what they see as theleadership development process.

How We Shot Ourselves in the Foot

As these things go, our understanding ofwhat it takes to build an experience-basedleadership development process is quiteadvanced. There are, to be sure, some areasthat need more attention, most especially abetter understanding of potential and howto assess it at various stages of a career and aclearer picture of what can be done to insurethat the desired learning from an experienceactually occurs. But the ‘‘knowing-doinggap’’ (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2000) in this case isnot the result of these gaps in knowledge,large as they may be. More than enough isknown to do a pretty good job of puttingexperience to work. So what, then, keeps itfrom happening more often and with moresophistication? The answer to that questionlies deeply embedded in the assumptions,beliefs, and practices that influence manyline executives and many HR professionals.

First, and perhaps most daunting, areassumptions about what people can learn(or, stated perhaps more accurately, aboutwhat they can’t learn). Sometimes explicitbut more often not, the belief that leadershipis something you either have or you don’tundermines efforts to use experience fordevelopment. It is clearly an advantagethat executives are willing to throw people

into fires or out of windows (translated:give them challenges) because that providesopportunities to develop. But it can be adecided disadvantage if those executivesare doing it to see whether those throwninto fires emerge unscathed or those tossedfrom windows ‘‘land on their feet.’’ In thatcase experience is less about developmentthan about testing, and because of that thereis little investment in helping people learnfrom the experience. So, although manythings can be done to increase learning,the assumption is that the truly talentedwill figure it out without any help. In thepractical world, this argument cannot bedisproved because there is no mechanismfor discovering if those who did not ‘‘landon their feet’’ might have developed if onlythey had had some help.

Changing executives’ beliefs about thenature of leadership is tough and not madeany easier by those who argue that peopledon’t change and therefore should beplayed only to their strengths (for a detailedanalysis of the flaws in this argument seeKaiser, 2009).

The second obstacle is no less dam-aging for all of its obviousness. Resultsare achieved short term; development isa longer-term proposition. It can be diffi-cult to get some executives to think longterm about the strategic needs of the busi-ness, much less about long-term individualdevelopment. When it comes to impor-tant and challenging assignments—the veryones with the most developmental poten-tial—the pressure to choose the provencandidate over the one who might learnthe most is often overwhelming, especiallyin tough times. Keeping people doing whatthey already know how to do, and dowell, gets results even at the risk—evenlikelihood—that doing so will derail thosetalented people at some point in the future.

Like the belief that you have it or youdon’t, there is no easy cure for a short-termperspective. A maniacal focus on resultscripples efforts to move people into newthings, to track growth over a career, and tohold managers accountable for developingtheir people.

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Short-term thinking is bolstered by (orperhaps causes) the third factor, a misplacedunderstanding of the true cost of develop-ment. The bottom line in leadership devel-opment is elusive at best, and attempts tomeasure it tend to emphasize visible and tosome degree quantifiable HR expenditureson training programs, coaching, consultingfees, tuition reimbursement, and the like,not to mention the expense of the HR staffitself—all things for which costs can becalculated. Unfortunately, return on thosecosts is much harder to determine becauseat best they have indirect effects on the bot-tom line. HR programs have indirect effectsto the extent that they operate to improvethe effectiveness of the actual source ofdevelopment—experience—which in turnpartially influences the quality of leader-ship, which in turn is only one factordetermining organizational performance.Looked at in isolation and with unrealisticexpectations, HR programs make excellentand easy targets for cost cutting.

The actual cost of development is inthe opportunity costs associated with thelearning curve as people take on newthings, plus whatever is invested in helpingthem learn from those experiences. Thereturn on that investment is the long-termimpact of higher quality leadership talenton organizational performance—itself adifficult thing to assess.

The fourth issue is connected to the firstthree. What priority should developmenthave among all the priorities of thebusiness? If it is construed as somethingseparate from the strategic business needsof the organization, even if in support ofthem, it competes with other things thatneed to be done. It is a legitimate questionjust where in the priority list developingleadership talent should be, and it is nosurprise that it ends up somewhere downthe list. If talent can be bought, how mucheffort should go into internal development?How long is long term, and what do you doif the time horizon for developing talent islonger than the time horizon for the businessstrategy? The answers to such questions arenot obvious.

Even if senior management places anadequate priority on development andputs resources into it, turning it overto HR to implement can be a mistake.Many HR professionals don’t have sufficientunderstanding of the strategy, jobs, andpeople to use experience effectively. Lackof knowledge, coupled with the ambiguityinherent in using experience to drivedevelopment, can increase the appeal ofcompetency models that boil leadershipdown to a list of attributes that can bedeveloped using an integrated set of knowntools and methodologies, from training toperformance management. It is a comfortingillusion.

As I have argued elsewhere (Hollen-beck & McCall, 2003; Hollenbeck et al.,2006; McCall & Hollenbeck, 2007), expe-rience makes a much better foundation fordevelopment than do competency models.What organizations are looking for is com-petence not a list of attributes. Successfulleaders have different styles (Herb Kelleher,Jack Welch, and Anne Mulcahy were allsuccessful leaders, but they achieved thatsuccess with their own unique styles), andequifinality rules (there are equally effectivebut different ways to achieve the same out-come). A single set of competencies appliedto all leaders can create a common lan-guage for talking about leadership and evenan integrated system of HR policies andpractices. But to the extent that there is noone ‘‘best’’ way to lead and that experiencedrives development, this approach focusesdevelopment effort in the wrong place.

Even common HR applications thatappear to take advantage of experience,such as job rotation and action-learningprojects, often fail to make full use ofthe accumulated knowledge about howexperience teaches. Job rotation certainlycan broaden one’s perspective, but unlessthe assignments are chosen carefully tobuild an individual’s ability, it can be avery inefficient and incomplete approachto development. In an action learningmodel, where teams in a training programtackle organizational problems, the teamssometimes focus so intently on solving the

Recasting leadership development 9

problem that learning takes a backseat.Even worse, in some cases, the problemsthat are the heart of action learning maynot be important to senior management,or the recommendations may not be takenseriously at senior levels. In such cases,the project may be seen as ‘‘make work’’and can even backfire, generating cynicismrather than development.

Betting on a Different Horse

It is one thing to acknowledge an imperfectworld but quite another to engage itknowing full well that there is no perfectsolution. What follows are some imperfectstrategies for putting business needs anddevelopmental experiences at the center ofdevelopment.

Go With the Flow Rather Than Fight It

Article after article talks about the necessityof top management support and howdifficult it is to ‘‘sell’’ them on the valueof various HR endeavors. Why spend somuch time and energy trying to convince‘‘senior management’’ to buy in, support,and fund various initiatives when, as notedearlier, there is little need to sell thevalue of challenging assignments? Whynot start there instead of trying to changetheir minds? The catch is that althoughexecutives like the idea of challengingtheir top talent, at the same time manyof them make some nasty assumptionsthat get in the way of actually usingchallenging experiences to develop thattalent. The apparent paradox flows fromdeeply rooted beliefs that leadership, orexecutive talent, or whatever you want tocall it, is a natural gift and very difficult if notimpossible to develop. Thus the advantageof executive receptivity to experience-baseddevelopment is in some ways negated bytheir skepticism about development. Thereis just enough truth in their point of view toreinforce it—as noted earlier, a significantamount of the variance in leadership roleoccupancy is explained by heredity (Arveyet al., 2006, 2007). Further, the belief held

by many executives that people have ‘‘it’’or they don’t is not eroded no matter whathappens when talented people are throwninto tough assignments. If they figure it outand do well, it proves what the executivesuspected all along, that they have the rightstuff. If they don’t, then failure simply provesthat they didn’t have it after all.

The temptation is to fight this self-fulfilling and counter productive perspec-tive. Measurement tools are created to offsetsubjective judgments about talent and per-formance, and ‘‘hard’’ data are collected to‘‘prove’’ that investments in various devel-opment activities pay off. Then these data-based tools and conclusions are built intoexecutive processes like succession plan-ning with the belief that rationality willprevail and the decisions will be moreobjective.

The futility of this approach is apparentin the example of one representative seniorexecutive team the author observed asit went through the succession-planningprocess. The HR staff had worked for weeksputting together comprehensive dossiers onthe people who would be considered in thesession. Available data included systematicperformance reviews, work history data,360-degree feedback summaries—a ratherimpressive collection of relatively hard data.But as the session unfolded, virtually noreference was made by any executive tothe data in the folders in front of them. Itwas not that the data were inaccurate orirrelevant; rather, it was already obvious tothese executives that the people they werediscussing were impressive or they wouldnot even be in the pool for discussion. Datasupporting the obvious were not all thatuseful, so the conversation turned to otherthings (see Table 1).

It is easy to be critical of the discus-sion—after all, these kinds of commentssound purely subjective. But these execu-tives were extremely bright, and there wasclearly energy in the discussion of thesepeople, so instead of criticizing what washappening, would it be possible to use it?What if these were the right conversationsor, if not right, the conversations that were

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Table 1. The Language of ExecutiveAssessment

• She’s a fine engineer, but there are contractson her life in Divisions A and B.

• He has trouble working with others. We don’thave time for that.

• He’s a big bag of warts, but he’s really smart.• It’s a tough job dealing with GE, but she’s

done it very well.• He has really gone out of his comfort zone.• He was Y’s product marketing guy and did

very well.• She builds a team beyond belief.• He understands the story.• She is relentless getting cost out and will

deliver what she promises.• She is a better strategic thinker than Y is.• That takes him out if he limits himself to

Scotland.• She’s ready for something more.• If we move him do we risk making the

dominoes fall?

going to take place regardless of whateverobjective data or processes someone foistupon them? Could slight deflections chan-nel that energy to achieve better outcomes?

Looking more deeply for the mean-ing beneath the short-hand phrases andsometimes glib comments, these execu-tives were in fact talking about the samethings research had discovered; only theywere putting it all in their own lingo andframing it with their particular lenses (seeTable 2). Many of their observations wereabout derailment and how the weaknessesof some people had, to this point, been over-shadowed by their strengths and accom-plishments but were no longer acceptable.Other observations took into account thekinds of challenges these people hadfaced and what facing those challengeshad revealed about their capabilities. Stillother assessments focused on particularchallenges that the business faced andhow a certain candidate’s prior experi-ence demonstrated an ability to ‘‘see thebig picture.’’ And other evaluations focusedon contextual issues, specifically whethera candidate was willing to move to getneeded experience or if there was an

Table 2. Making Sense of the Language ofExecutive Assessment

Derailment‘‘Flaws’’ that have been tolerated may no

longer be tolerated.• She’s a fine engineer, but there are

contracts on her life in Divisions A and B.• He has trouble working with others. We

don’t have time for that.• He’s a big bag of warts, but he’s really

smart.Challenging assignments

An emphasis is on relevant and revealingexperience.

• It’s a tough job dealing with GE, but she’sdone it very well.

• He has really gone out of his comfortzone.

• He was Y’s product marketing guy.• She builds a team beyond belief.

What makes a person valuableThey favor people who understand what

needs to be done—who ‘‘get it’’.• He understands the story.• She is relentless getting cost out and will

deliver on her promises.• She is a better strategic thinker than Y is.

AvailabilityPeople are considered only if it is practical to

move them.• That takes him out if he limits himself to

Scotland.• She’s ready for something more.• If we move him do we risk making the

dominoes fall?

adequate replacement if a candidate wereto leave the current job.

In other words, these senior executiveswere talking about derailment, challengingassignments, what experiences make a per-son valuable to the company, and availabil-ity or willingness to take on new and chal-lenging assignments—all things that havesurfaced in decades of research on howexecutives develop. To be sure, there was aheavy dose of Darwin in the room—muchmore ‘‘get the best people into the job’’than ‘‘get the right jobs to the best peo-ple’’—but close enough. Why not go with itbut create two succession-planning events,one geared toward selecting the best person

Recasting leadership development 11

for each key job (the traditional replacementplanning use of the process) and anotherone to select experiences needed to fur-ther develop high potential people? Neitherrequires changing the nature or philosophyof the executives, and they avoid surfacingthe nature/nurture issue. The first session iswhat they are used to doing. The secondsimply asks them to identify the key chal-lenges facing the business and to identifythe experiences their best talent should getto prepare them for those challenges. Theselection decisions are made for a businessreason.

Embed Development Seamlessly in theBusiness Strategy

Linking key challenges facing the businessto experiences that talented people shouldhave, as suggested above, is not as easyas it sounds. It is not enough to make adhoc decisions around particular individu-als. There must be a way to identify whatexperiences are important given the strate-gic needs of the business. In other words, tobe a priority, development must be embed-ded in and integral to business success. Thiscan be accomplished in several ways.

One way to identify experiences thatwould prepare leaders to carry out the busi-ness strategy was developed with the seniorteam of a major international corporation(McCall, 1998). The CEO and his directreports identified three strategic initiativesthey agreed were key to the future of thebusiness. In three groups, one for each ofthose initiatives, they listed the leadershipchallenges that each strategy would present,then identified where talented junior man-agers could learn to handle those chal-lenges. Not surprisingly they came up withcompany-specific versions of the experi-ences identified by research on importantdevelopmental experiences (McCall et al.,1988)—certain special projects, workingfor certain model bosses, and various chal-lenging assignments. These specific devel-opmental opportunities, identified by thesenior executives as crucial preparationfor the strategic challenges, now could be

allocated to individuals in the high potentialpool.

A similar endeavor with the senior teamof another company took a slightly differ-ent tack. This company was organized intobusiness units that produced quite differentproducts for different markets, as well asinto the usual corporate staff functions suchas finance, business development, and HR.The business strategy called for leaders withcross-business and cross-functional per-spective, but it wasn’t obvious how muchexperience, for how long, or in how manyof the businesses and functions, was actu-ally needed. Nor were they clear on exactlywhat should be learned from such movesother than ‘‘broader perspective.’’ To helpthem answer those key questions, the seniorleaders of each business and function cre-ated two charts. The first was a list of things amanager would have to master (be good at)to be successful in that business or function.The second chart was about things even asuccessful person would not be exposed toor would not have to master in the businessor function, as well as anything negativethat might be learned while working there.

Because most of the executives hadworked in more than one of the businessesor functions, this proved to be a relativelyeasy task. Not only could they identify spe-cific aspects that must be mastered, but eventhe ‘‘negative learning’’ came out readily.These lists of ‘‘what needs to be mastered’’for each business and function were usedto identify what could be learned from anassignment there, and in conjunction withthe lists of ‘‘what could not be learned’’ itbecame the business rationale for makingcross-boundary moves to develop talent.

Another large corporation struggled withsilo mentality created by careers spent in asingle line of business or function. Insteadof working across boundaries to solvestrategic problems, the businesses fought orundermined what they saw as ‘‘bureaucraticprocesses’’ foisted upon them by stafffunctions; and staff units felt hamstrungby ‘‘uncooperative and parochial’’ linemanagers. Neither side respected the other,much less would consider a cross-boundary

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move to gain a broader perspective orworking together to solve problems.

The senior executives in each of theline units and staff functions were asked toconsider what experiences they could givepeople from the ‘‘other side’’ that wouldallow them to understand the issues fromtheir perspective. One of the line units,for example, needed financial data in acertain form but was unable to convincethe finance organization to give it tothem in that way. They came up withsome short-term project assignments thata finance person could participate in thatwould help him or her understand whythe data needed to be a certain way. Thefinance organization, doing the same kindof exercise, came up with some temporaryassignments in which a line person couldget a sense for what was involved in makingchanges in data reporting. The subsequentexchanges allowed both parties to benefitand eventually led to strategic solutions tothe problems at hand. And, because theindividuals returned to their home bases,the resulting level of understanding andcross-boundary relationships led to bettercooperation as new challenges developed.

In short, when it comes to using experi-ence to develop people, line executives arean easy sell. They readily accept the philos-ophy of learning in the trenches, and theirown experience can be framed in ways tolink the business strategy to needed expe-riences, to find those experiences in theorganization, and to identify what might belearned from them.

Use Ongoing Business Initiatives—Not HRProcesses—for Development

If senior executives readily accept thevalue of challenging experiences and,with some guidance, can identify wherethose experiences are, what they canteach, and who might benefit from them,then HR programs and processes arenot necessary for development to occur.In fact, perhaps the less HR languageused and fewer HR-initiated processes,the less chance that attention will be

diverted from where it should be—onexperience. Maybe in an experience-centricdevelopment world there is no need toimpose a different language (e.g., HRspeak ‘‘competencies,’’ which Steve Kerr[2009], former vice president of LeadershipDevelopment and chief learning officer atGE under Jack Welch, described as ‘‘HRplaying with its food’’) or to overdesign aprocess by imposing formidable forms andprocedures. Perhaps instead attention couldbe focused on taking advantage of ongoingbusiness initiatives by making deflectionsthat enhance their developmental power.

As an example of such an opportunityconsider the task forces created by CarlosGhosn to save Nissan. The major problemsthat were threatening the very existenceof the company had been identified,and, not surprisingly, they required cross-functional solutions (Ghosn & Ries, 2005).So Ghosn created several cross-functionalteams (CFTs) to tackle the major problems:

Each CFT was to consist of about 10members with different functional expe-rience and a proven track record drawnfrom the ranks of middle managers. . . .Each CFT was headed by a pilot, typ-ically a middle to upper-middle man-ager who possessed two importantattributes: extensive front-line experi-ence and strong personal credibility.To impart authority and stature, Ghosnassigned two leaders from the executivecommittee representing different func-tional areas to each CFT. . . . Their rolewas to act as team sponsors and facilitatethe team’s work, particularly by remov-ing organizational barriers (Yoshino &Egawa, 2003, p. 2).

Needless to say, participating on one ofthose task forces was a very challengingassignment that included intense timepressure and presenting recommendationsdirectly to a very demanding Carlos Ghosn.It is clear that the people on these taskforces had to learn in depth about theproblem they were tackling and aboutfunctional areas other than their own, come

Recasting leadership development 13

to understand and work with people fromother functions and levels, and create arecommendation backed up with facts andfigures! Even though development was notwhat prompted Ghosn to structure theexperiences the way he did or to pickthe people he chose, everyone involvedwas being developed. What an opportunity,with just a little tweaking—for example, byinfluencing who was chosen to participateor providing feedback along the way—toturn this into an even more powerfullearning event, with the learning outcomesnot left to chance!

Lou Gerstner in his diving catch rescueof IBM chose a similar strategy for solvingthe major strategic challenges facing thebusiness (Gerstner, 2002). Once againcross-functional task forces tackled seriousstrategic challenges to the business, andthose chosen to serve on them not only weretested but had a unique opportunity to learn.

Such opportunities are all around asorganizations go about confronting strate-gic challenges, especially now as the globaleconomic meltdown has everyone scram-bling to survive and thrive. If only someoneis there to tweak it by identifying the spe-cial developmental opportunities createdby the key challenges facing the organi-zation, influencing how those challengesare attacked, keeping development needs inmind when selecting who will be involved,and providing an opportunity for reflectionduring and after the event. There is a roleto be played in developing people throughexperience that neither the immediate bossnor the HR generalist is able to play verywell.

Create a New Role to Assist Line Executives

Clearly there is a need for another playerin the development game who brings adifferent perspective and plays a differentrole—a ‘‘wise counselor’’ of sorts. Thissomeone needs to understand the peopleand their developmental needs, the on-line developmental opportunities in theorganization and what they might teach,and the strategy of the business as it dictates

both. This someone then is the knowledgeresource who is able to take advantage ofopportunities as they appear in the flowof things and to influence who gets whatexperience. To exert this influence withline management, where such decisionsare actually made, this someone must becredible as well as knowledgeable.

The role closest to this is titled ‘‘busi-ness partner’’ in some organizations, a titleless relevant than the responsibility as anadvisor to senior managers on people mat-ters (including development) as they occurin the day-to-day operation of the busi-ness. These people report directly to theline managers they support, with a possi-ble dotted line into HR (rather than theother way around). They frequently have alimited HR background but are thoroughlygrounded in the business and its strategy,and gain their credibility with line manage-ment through their practical knowledge andmaturity. Their role is to help their chargesrecognize people with potential and takeadvantage of developmental opportunitiesthat appear. They keep track of high poten-tial people over time and to some extentacross bosses, and do what they can tohelp people learn from their experience.The very informality of the nudging andtweaking process is what makes it work.

Focus Attention on Learning FromExperience, Not Just Having It

You don’t have to spend too much timearound managers and executives to noticethat reflection is not their strength. Eversince Mintzberg (1973) brought togetherthe diary and observational studies ofmanagerial work, it’s been clear that thenorm is many activities engaged in at afast pace. Managers ‘‘just sort of dasharound a lot.’’ If this was true 30 yearsago, before Blackberries®, lean processes,virtual teams, and working across globaltime zones, then it is even more so today.Although it may be good news if all thatactivity means more is getting done, theimplications for development are not sopositive.

14 M.W. McCall

One victim of the peripatetic manageriallife style is systematic development. Even ifexecutives believe in the role of experiencein development, they are not necessarilydedicated to consistent application or tobuilding systems and processes to supportit. In other words, their proclivity is to dealwith talent (at least high-level talent) onecase at a time, as circumstances requireand context dictates. And, although theimmediate boss, for a variety of reasons, hasthe most direct influence on a subordinate’sdevelopment, immediate bosses rarely havethe time nor the inclination to makedeveloping others a top priority. Even whenit is a priority, they are probably not verygood at it. As a result, talented people mayhave a career-long personnel file, but inreality have started over with each newboss. There is no cumulative record of whatthey have learned or consistency in howthey have developed over time.

Given these and other forces workingagainst a full commitment to development,there is no substitute for educating devel-oping leaders on how to take responsibilityfor their own development. This of courseis not a new idea, but it’s not obvious topeople how to create a meaningful planbased on experience, and even when theprinciples are understood it is not easy toactually create and carry out such a plan(McCall, 2009).

The ideal personal development planwould describe what the person needs tolearn how to do (based on the businessstrategy or his or her personal goals); iden-tify the experiences that could offer thoselessons; find a way to get the needed expe-riences; and create the necessary feedback,support, and incentives to actually learn thelessons sought. But short of all that, there isa simpler way to get more learning out ofwhatever assignment one has.

As part of a research project on howpeople learn from experience, I contacteda small number of newly promoted execu-tives biweekly and asked two simple ques-tions: ‘‘What have you done since we lasttalked?’’ and ‘‘What, if anything, have you

learned from it?’’ At first it was a chal-lenge for them even to remember what theyhad done in the previous 2 weeks, giventhe relentless pace and performance pres-sure of the executive job. But fairly quickly,in anticipation of the next contact, theystarted paying more attention. By simplybeing aware of what they were doing andwhat they were learning from doing it, theirexperience became richer. As one of themsaid at the end of the study, ‘‘I never knewthat asking dumb questions could make sobig a difference.’’ Some of them even beganasking the same dumb questions of theirhigh potential subordinates, and as a resultcreated a learning environment in their unit.

Much of development is a matter ofattention. If people can learn to keeplearning in mind, more of it can happen.

Shift the Focus to Mastery

Paying attention to learning begs the ques-tion of what needs to be learned. I haveused the term ‘‘leadership’’ rather loosely inthis discussion of development, as if whatis known about it might inform a develop-ment agenda. Yet, despite some progress,the concept of leadership even today seemsjust as fragmented and unconvincing aswhen Warren Bennis wrote his classic sum-mary of the leadership field in 1959 (Bennis,1959). The ubiquitous competency modelswith their finite lists of general attributes faresomewhat better but still fall short in funda-mental ways. Not only are they limited inbreadth and usually quite general, but theyimply a single set of attributes to somethingthat obviously can be accomplished by peo-ple with many different attributes. And,the more-is-better perspective ignores thecomplex relationships among strengths andweaknesses and the dynamics of derailmentthat, among other things, include strengthsbecoming weaknesses.

Is there an option? Our interviews andsurveys of successful executives producedhundreds of descriptions of the experiencesthat had shaped them and literally thou-sands of the lessons they said they hadlearned from those experiences. Reducing

Recasting leadership development 15

both to empirically justifiable and usefulcategories was a harrowing task, and ofthe two resulting frameworks it was theexperiences that received the preponder-ance of attention. But it is the framework forunderstanding the lessons of those experi-ences, however, that has the most potentialfor helping people think through their owndevelopment.

The thousands of lessons were first sortedinto 32 categories, which in turn weredivided into five large chunks that reflectedwhat leaders must be able to do: Set direc-tion and build an organization capableof achieving it; align through influence ordirect authority the various parties neededto achieve the strategic goals; develop thetemperament to cope with the ambiguity,pressures, frustrations, and excitement ofthe job; set, live, and enforce the valuesthat define the organization; and continu-ally grow their own and others ability (seeTable 3).

These represent the basic demands ofthe leadership role. These demands canbe met in remarkably different ways, butall leaders face them. Leadership is aboutcreating a context in which other peoplewill bring their talents to bear on thestrategic issues of the organization, andthat context is created by how effectively

leaders meet these demands. Looking atleadership development as acquiring theexpertise to meet these demands avoidsthe monotheistic search for a single style,personality, or set of abilities common toall leaders, the vain search for a ‘‘one bestway,’’ that has led repeatedly to dead-ends.Instead it focuses us on the variety of waysthat ‘‘mastery’’ in meeting the demands ofthe job can be acquired.

More importantly the lessons of experi-ence by definition confirm that leadershipcan be learned. No doubt some peo-ple have natural abilities that help themmeet some of these demands, but otherswith different natural gifts were able tolearn how to do those things, and theylearned it through experience. This is con-sistent with the extensive research on theacquisition of expertise in other fields ofendeavor (Ericcson, 1996; Ericcson, Char-ness, Feltovich, & Hoffman, 2006), that hasrecently appeared in the popular literature(Colvin, 2008). Among other commonali-ties (see McCall & Hollenbeck, 2008, for adetailed explanation), acquiring leadershipexpertise requires mastery of a large domainof knowledge, skills, and abilities (masteryof the demands); occurs over a lifetime ofeffort; requires years of intentional effort andpractice; involves certain kinds of teachers

Table 3. The Five Demands of Leadership

Leadership: Creating a context in which other people can reach their full potential in serving theorganization’s mission. Context is created by the ways a person in a leadership role addressesthe five demands described below.

1. Setting and communicating direction: Establishing and communicating the purpose, vision,mission, point of view for your part of the organization, and creating an architecture such thatstructure, processes, rewards, and human resource practices are consistent with that directionand each other.

2. Aligning critical constituencies: Through the use of authority, persuasion, negotiation, or othermeans, making sure that the people and groups necessary to achieving the mission understand itand are aligned with it, and that those who are obstacles to it are dealt with.

3. Developing an executive temperament: Developing the ability and confidence necessary to copeeffectively with the pressures, ambiguity, complexity, and frustrations of a leadership role.

4. Setting and living values: Through actions as well as words, conveying and reinforcing what theorganization, and you as a leader and person, believe in and stand for.

5. Growth of self and others: Taking the necessary actions to insure that one’s self and one’s peoplecontinue to learn, grow, and change.

16 M.W. McCall

at crucial inflection points; and demands‘‘playing on edge’’ (recognizing what thenext step toward mastery is and movingtoward it rather than staying with whatyou already know). Further, just as researchon expertise has emphasized the impor-tance of desire and discipline to becomingworld class, research on potential (Spreitzer,McCall, & Mahoney, 1997) documentedsimilar qualities in international managersand executives rated by their bosses to behighest in potential.

Support the Pursuit of Mastery

One reason few organizations fully exploitwhat is known about using experience isthat, inevitably, responsibility for it devolvesto the HR function but HR does not rise tothe opportunity. Instead of bringing pow-erful tools and processes to bear in sup-port of experience, they all too often arenot integrated at all, are used piecemeal,or are integrated around some other lessuseful principle. We have the tools to sup-port learning from experience but not theperspective to use them for that purpose.After all, to use experience effectively theremust be ways to (a) identify people withpotential; (b) identify the important devel-opmental assignments, other people, andso forth; (c) get the people who need theminto the experiences they need; (d) helpthem learn from the experiences they have;and (e) track individual growth and devel-opment over time. Clearly there are HRpractices and methodologies that could sup-port each of these necessary components.Take, as examples, the following:

• Selection methods, such as thegroup assessment of executive abil-ity described by Sorcher and Brant(2002), could be used equally well toassess potential, learning from experi-ence, and development over time—byadding or focusing questions aroundthose issues.

• Performance management, in additionto the annual or semiannual appraisalof job performance, could include

accountability for and measurementof specific growth objectives, andprovide a platform for recording cumu-lative developmental progress.

• 360-feedback tools could be used toaddress observable growth and devel-opment, or lack thereof.

• Coaching could be used not onlyto help individuals learn more fromtheir experiences but also to help theirbosses do a better job of creating devel-opment opportunities and the context(including accountability) to enhancelearning from those opportunities.

• Succession planning could be used tomarry people and experiences, buildin accountability, and provide specificfeedback to individuals on what theyare expected to develop.

• Training and development programscould be timed to support peoplegoing through difficult transitions, bedesigned to help people learn to bet-ter manage and learn from their ownexperiences, provide space and pro-cesses for reflection on and integrationof experience, or simulate experiencesthat are too rare or costly to providereal time.

In addition to these traditional toolsand practices, new ones developed specif-ically to support learning from experienceare beginning to appear. Yost and Plun-kett (2009), for example, have developed anumber of simple, online tools that man-agers can use for self-assessment, identi-fying potentially useful experiences, andmaking more of the assignments they findthemselves in.

In sum, there is much we know how todo that could be brought to the table ofexperience.

Conclusion

This article began with seven ‘‘sure bets’’about experience and leadership develop-ment, considered why that knowledge often

Recasting leadership development 17

is not applied, and suggested some practi-cal ways to put experience at the center ofdevelopment. Where does this leave us?

Some very dedicated people with verygood minds have taken a swing at this,but despite all the years of research, bestpractices, handbooks of this and that, tech-nological advances in data storage andhandling, new concepts and measurementtechniques, the difficulties remain. Ironi-cally, could it be that selection is ultimatelythe key to development? If leaders areselected and promoted who (a) understandthat leadership is critical to the business,(b) accept that talented people can learn tolead, (c) believe that they learn it throughexperience, and (d) have a longer-term per-spective, then the odds are good that theywill model development and hold oth-ers accountable for it. If we then candevelop ‘‘wise counselors’’—people whounderstand the strategic issues, know whatand where the challenging experiences are,know who has potential and their strengthsand weaknesses, and understand how expe-rience works—to help executives tweakon-the-job experience for developmentalreasons (and maybe even provide timelysupport to help people learn from theirexperiences), then maybe we will havepushed the envelope as far as it will goas long as fallible human beings have tolead imperfect systems.

With the ‘‘right people on the bus,’’the crucial issue for practice is rethinkingdevelopment with strategic challenges andon-the-job experience as the driving issues.From there it is possible to redesign andreconfigure tools and processes to supportand strengthen the development of talent.

From a research perspective, the focusshould shift from the recent emphasison ways to measure the impact of HRprograms to better understanding howto use experience more effectively. Butenough is known about experiences andwhat and why they teach. More is neededin three crucial areas:

(1) A key issue in developing talentthrough experience is deciding to

whom to give the experiences. Someresearch (e.g., Spreitzer et al., 1997)has attempted to address that issuein the context of development, butour understanding of potential isrudimentary at best (see a recentreview by Silzer & Church, 2009).It is possible that there are many or atleast multiple forms of potential thatare equally likely to blossom, thatpotential changes over time and afterexperience, and that there is muchto learn from the existing researchon how experts become experts thatapplies to the leadership arena.

(2) Work on the transition from indi-vidual contributor to manager (Hill,1992), on passages (Dotlich, Noel, &Walker, 2004), crucibles (Bennis &Thomas, 2002), expatriate assign-ments (McCall & Hollenbeck, 2002a,2002b), and the leadership pipeline(Charan et al., 2001) all suggest thatfor leadership, as is true for thelarger concepts of careers and lifestages, transitions are crucial. Butmuch remains to be learned aboutwhich ones are most central to lead-ership development and what canbe done to help talented people getthrough them successfully.

(3) It is clear that learning from experi-ence is not automatic, that not every-one learns from experience, that peo-ple may learn different things fromthe same kind of experience, and thatprior experience affects what can belearned from current experience. Butit is not as clear what the obstaclesare to learning from different kindsof experiences, or on the flip side,what might enhance it. Until more isknown about these aspects of learn-ing from experience, efforts to inter-vene effectively to enhance learningwill continue to be hit or miss. Andbecause so much of learning fromexperience depends on the learner’sinsight, useful research might explorewhat reflection looks like in a man-agerial world and how to stimulate it.

18 M.W. McCall

Although life and leadership develop-ment may never be totally predictable, thecost of leadership failure is too high toaccept less than our best efforts. It is time tofocus on the most promising and potentiallypowerful developer of leaders, experience,and to do what we can to use it in the mosteffective ways possible to shape the kindsof leaders needed for the future.

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