Professionalizing Leadership

Over the last 40 years, the leadership industry has grown exponentially. Yet leadership education, training, and development still fall far short. Moreover, leaders are demeaned, degraded, and derided as they never were before. Why?

The problem is leadership has stayed stuck. It has remained an occupation instead of becoming a profession. Unlike medicine and law, leadership has no core curriculum considered essential. It has no widely agreed on metric, or criteria for qualification. And it has no professional association to oversee the conduct of its members or assure minimum standards. Professionalizing Leadership looks to a past in which learning to lead was the most important of eruditions. It looks to a present in which learning to lead is as effortless as ubiquitous. And it looks to a future in which learning to be a leader might look different altogether - it might resemble the far more rigorous process of learning to be a doctor or a lawyer. As it stands now, the military is the only major American institution that gets it right. It assumes leadership is a profession that requires those who practice it to be taught in accordance with high professional standards. Barbara Kellerman draws on the military experience specifically to develop a template for learning how to lead generally.

Leadership in the first quarter of the present century is different from what it was even in the last quarter of the past century - which is why leadership taught casually and carelessly should no longer suffice. Professionalizing Leadership addresses precisely the problem of how to prepare leaders in accordance with professional norms. It provides the template necessary for transforming leadership from dubious occupation to respectable profession.

Barbara Kellerman is the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. She received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in political science) degrees from Yale University. She is author and editor of many books and articles on leadership and followership, and speaks to audiences all over the world. In 2015, 2016, and 2017 she was ranked by Global Gurus as # 13 among World's Top 30 Management Professionals, and in 2016 she was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association.