Putting the Development Into Experiential Development

Although McCall’s sure bets are helpful for moving leadership development beyond a competency-driven mixture of rote HR interventions, simply relying on experience alone to develop leaders is a costly gamble. We argue experiences, in and of themselves, do not promote effective leadership as much as the meaning that individuals infer from such events; meaning that more directly shapes leaders’ active analysis and future use of such prior experiences. Although a step in the right direction, McCall’s experiential approach fails to weigh the importance of reflection on events and offers limited strategies to assist in the requisite facilitation of such reflection in an organizational setting. In contrast but not contradiction, we argue that for an experiential approach to promote effective leadership, leaders must engage in a structured reflection process to facilitate transfer of lessons learned into day-today leadership activities. Thus, the aims of this commentary are to, describe why extracting meaning from experiences is the key to making experiential development,