Learning Leadership Through Experience

Learning Leadership through Experience, Education, and applying A-O-R

Introduction

What are leader made of? Can leaders be created by education and experience? This is a very interesting topic indeed. Many people believe that leaders cannot be created; they believe leaders are born and they go into a self-defeatist mind frame that makes them believe they are not capable of becoming great leaders. That should not be the case; leaders can be created by willing people who wish to learn how to become one. There is one model that shows just how one might be able to learn to become a leader by analyzing behaviors and actions by perceiving them in different manners. This model is the action-observation-reflection (A-O-R) model. This model in turn uses the spiral of experience which illustrates the steps in the A-O-R model and how they work. One important aspect of all of this is that perception is required in all steps of this model. This is just one of the many ways in which leaders can learn to become better at leading, but it is not the entirely representative of how leaders learn to lead and come to be. Becoming a leader requires that a person train for it; it requires the person obtain experience through practice and education.

Leadership through Experience

Experience plays a very important role in leadership. There could not be many great leaders if they did not go through some type of experience or play some sort of role that led them to where they are. This is important for business executives as well; they could not get to where they are by just being given a position of authority without prior knowledge in some area. The underlying assumption has been that what it takes to become a successful executive, to the extent that it can be learned at all, is learned mostly through experience (Morgan W. McCall, Jr. 1993-2005). As Morgan McCall mentioned in Leadership Development through Experience, he believes that not all experiences are equal they do not all teach you lessons in leadership. In his article, Morgan McCall believes that not all people learn well from experience says this,” It requires developing ways to identify what experiences are developmental and where they are, ways to identify the people with the ability to learn from those experiences, mechanisms for getting the right people into those experiences…” McCall also believes that good, qualified, and talented individuals should be spotted and put through challenging assignments in order to develop their leading capabilities. While I would disagree with many of the points that McCall is trying to make in his paper, he does have some basic idea in that talented individuals capable of becoming good leaders should be spotted. These individuals should be put into assignments that test their capabilities and develop them to become good leaders.

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