A group coaching approach to authentic leadership development
The Portfolio presented here is concerned with the subject of Authentic Leadership Development. This subject has become the focus of much attention in the last 10 years by both researchers and practitioners in the leadership and leadership development field. Over the decades there has been a variety of leadership themes and concepts that have garnered similar attention, for example, Transformational & Transactional Leadership, Situational Leadership, Servant Leadership, Contingent Leadership, Ethical Leadership…and now Authentic Leadership. It has probably come to the fore as a result of high profile examples of poor leadership on a global scale. Even before the financial crisis of 2008 there were the examples of Enron and Worldcom and since 2008 there have been the examples of Arthur Andersen and Lehman Brothers (http://www.accounting-degree.org/scandals) and more recently Toshiba, Volkswagen and even FIFA (http://fortune.com/2015/12/27/biggest-corporate-scandals-2015). Although over this last decade there has been this considerable interest in the idea of Authentic Leadership, both as a construct and an effective form of leadership practice, what has been notably lacking, particularly in the academic field, are ideas of how to actually develop authentic leaders. Both anecdotal evidence from the practitioners and empirical evidence from the researchers all point towards Authentic Leadership achieving desirable organisational and business benefits. Yet there is almost a complete absence of any research demonstrating how Authentic Leadership is actually developed. This is the sole purpose of this piece of research, to investigate one particular approach to Authentic Leadership Development (ALD) to see if it works and if so, to try and understand how it works.
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