Home

Learning for Leadership: The “Engineering” and “Clinical” Approaches.

Gianpiero Petriglieri and Jack Denfeld Wood

Meaningful leadership development requires a deeper and more fundamental approach than is usually deployed in university classrooms and corporate training centers.  It needs to incorporate difficult emotions and unconscious forces, and provide a safe place for their investigation and integration.  Whilst the typical “engineering” approach has a valuable contribution to make in leadership development, it is limited by the heavy reliance placed on a rational and cognitive view.  In contrast, a “clinical” approach emphasizes working with the individual’s existing natural patterns of behaviour, with the aim of understanding and managing the multiple forces that motivate individual and collective behavior.  A real-life example from a leadership program highlights the substantially different approaches and the different results that can be produced depending on the method employed.

In: P. Strebel and T. Keys (Eds) 2005. Mastering Executive Education: How to Combine Content with Context and Emotion. London: Financial Times-Prentice Hall.