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The Handbook of Leadership Development Evaluation (J-B CCL (Center for Creative Leadership)) Review"After hundreds of studies and many years of research, we still find ourselves playing with a few pebbles on the shore of this vast sea of subject matter." (p. xi) The authors do an admirable job of enticing readers into their game. This solid work presents the essentials, intricacies, and challenges of evaluating leadership development programs. Most readers will be outsiders to this specialized field, but the book is accessible and relevant to anyone who leads or works with leaders, as well as to its primary audience of evaluation practitioners.
The authors acknowledge that "Leadership means many things to many people" (p. xi) and suggest that evaluation is one way to ensure that leadership programs are really about leadership, as defined by program stakeholders. The 19 chapters that follow explore how evaluation can meet the needs of both traditional stakeholders, such as program participants and funding sources, and more distal beneficiaries in surrounding communities and in the evaluation profession.
The first of the book's three sections reviews strategies for designing leadership evaluations. The reader leaves this section with a firm grasp of the basic tools needed to evaluate leadership development programs. Section two explores evaluation in context. The authors examine evaluation of leadership development in an evaluation professional association, municipal nonprofits, health service organizations, for-profit manufacturing corporations, grant recipients of philanthropic foundations, school systems, adolescent leadership programs, and "distressed" neighborhoods. Each chapter follows a helpful strategy of profiling the leadership development program, summarizing the evaluation activities, and highlighting lessons learned.
The final section discusses how evaluations should be designed, conducted and reported to increase chances that results will be used. Readers are invited to visit the book's web site (www.leadershiplearning.org) to participate in an ongoing discussion of how to improve leadership evaluation.
Effective communication is a theme of this book on two levels. The chapters are well written, logically organized and make effective use of flowcharts and diagrams. The authors model a concern for effective communication that many of them also discuss explicitly. For example, Chapter 12 stresses communicating with participants and stakeholders in language they understand (p. 358). Chapter 17 begins with a story about a communication crisis that both illustrates and models effective storytelling and ends with advice about the delicate task of communicating negative evaluation findings.
An issue not well addressed is which leadership competencies are responsive to development in the first place. Are some key competencies more a product of innate abilities or early learning? Such abilities may be hard to change through any type of development. Evaluators should consider whether some programs may target the unchangeable. Some chapters tread close to this issue, recommending pretesting before a program begins (p. 148) and acknowledging that different competencies may be required by leaders in different disciplines (p. 194) or leadership roles (such as leading versus managing--p. 237). But there is no explicit consideration that leadership competencies may differ in their fundamental learnability. To the contrary, the programs evaluated in Chapter 8 all assume that "leadership can be learned" (p. 231) in a broad sense. Leadership development evaluation practice can benefit from a closer examination of this issue.
This is a good reference book. If you are an evaluator or design leadership training, consider adding it to your personal bookshelf--after a determined effort to get your employer to buy it for you first, of course. You might also pick up the authors' related volume: The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development.
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