Can an Evidence-Based Practice Approach Strengthen our Leadership Work?
If our leadership work is wildly successful, who will be better off and how will we know?
Most of us working in the leadership field are committed to having some bold and worthwhile impact in the lives of others. Based on a sampling of leadership programs in the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) directory, if just 3 leadership programs were wildly successful, we would see children entering school ready to learn, improved social and economic well-being of the Latino community, and a reduction of AIDS in a large metro area. These are high stakes. There is a lot riding on the success of leadership programs.
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LLC is currently working on a project for Annie E. Casey to explore the possible application of Evidence-Based Practice to the leadership development field. This work raises a number of important questions about how to strengthen our leadership work. First we grappled with the question, are we learning through our leadership work about how to achieve our desired results? To dig a little deeper, are we creating, testing and refining our hypotheses for our leadership work? Are you able to create an “if/then” (if you do ___ then ____ will result) formulation for your own leadership work? It is unclear how many leadership programs are able to answer these questions. But we believe that being able to answer those questions is extremely important because our potential for collaboration and impact will significantly increase if we can articulate what change we seek, and how that change will be affected or influenced by what we do in our programs or initiatives. We invite you to help us learn more about our leadership practice by completing a short survey. This will enable us to learn across our different efforts by testing our assumptions and comparing our findings.
We also found ourselves looking at the question of who will be better off as a result of our work. We often attempt to understand the impact and success of our leadership work by asking the participants themselves. For instance, if an Executive Director of a non-profit organization serving immigrant women who have been victims of domestic violence believes that he or she now has a renewed commitment and is a better organizational manager, we may assume that the lives of immigrant women and their children have been improved. To collect actual data about immigrant women’s use of services or children’s stability in school is often beyond the scope, budget or capacity of a leadership program. This can limit the results we are seeking to what can be measured. We need to address the real changes we hope to see in communities and in the lives of different populations.
If you are interested in evidence-based assessment and leadership development, join our discussion at Leadership for a New Era.
Image source: Horia Varlan, Flickr
