Pedagogy of Practice: Toward Better Understanding of the Development of Leadership Skills

Despite massive global investment in leadership development, questions remain about the level of subsequent improvement in leaders’ on-the-job behaviors. We examine why programs often fail to produce demonstrable skill change, highlighting as a core reason the lack of an evidence-based, theory-driven “pedagogy of practice” that can be consistently employed to help prepare leaders to better perform what they learn. We review literature regarding who, what, where, when, how, and how much regarding skill-building practice under stressful conditions. We include literature across many fields and contexts—leadership development, psychology, education, learning, medicine, and sports—organizing our review and posing questions around the “right” level of difficulty, way to practice, people to develop, and amount of time needed. Specifically, we examine (a) the creation of desirable difficulty by attending to psychological safety and significant exposure to stress, (b) the need for effective practice designs focused on reproducible skills, (c) how learner readiness and enduring motivation can be identified and nurtured, and (d) how long particular leadership skills take to develop and how allotted time can be optimized. We propose greater research focus on the constituent parts of practice-focused leadership development to produce a foundation from which to construct broader, more applicable theorizing.