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The purpose of this paper is to identify the specific practices senior leaders need to engage in to best support their organization’s leadership development initiatives. All organizations invest billions of dollars around the world in leadership development, but there is surprisingly little attention given to the important role that senior leaders play in supporting these efforts. This paper draws upon focus group research with those responsible for designing and implementing leadership development initiatives to identify the strategic role senior leaders play in formal leadership development efforts.

To explore this issue, we conducted structured focus groups with over 250 executives, HR leaders and talent managers from over 30 different global organizations. Participants were responsible for leadership development in their respective organizations, averaged 44 years of age, 18 years of work experience, and were 54 per cent men and 46 per cent women. These focus groups were being used to solicit the input of those responsible for leadership development to identify the specific things senior leaders need to do to best support these leadership development efforts. The participants were asked to answer the following question, “Based on your experience, what specific things do senior leaders in your organization need to do to best support your efforts at developing high performance and strong leadership talent?”

Focus groups identified a series of key senior leader behaviors that are necessary to support an organization’s leadership development efforts. These findings, included the importance of senior leadership commitment to the process, the identification of specific leadership behaviors necessary to support these initiatives, the requirement of clearly understanding the organizations leadership development process, providing appropriate financial, staffing and technology resources to support these efforts, creating a climate of continuous learning and role modeling appropriate behaviors, among other findings.

While the focus groups in this research and the subsequent qualitative and quantitative analysis of the findings were rigorous, the participants were not a randomly selected group and were by definition a convenience sample. At the same time, the implications of this research are significant on this important subject and provide a solid baseline for both practitioners and researchers alike to help explore, identify and build on best practices for senior leaders to support organizational leadership development initiatives.

Leadership is the key to success in any organization. To maintain that success, leadership development and continuous learning is imperative. This paper provides ten specific practices based on the focus group research that can help senior leaders create a more supportive environment for effective leadership development initiatives. The methodology used to identify these factors can be duplicated in other organizations to help them build an appropriate model for senior leader support for leadership development in their enterprise.

The social implications for improving any organizations’ leadership is significant. It is known that effective leaders foster innovation, improve teamwork, create a more positive workplace, drive continuous improvement in quality, reduce turnover and improve the financial performance of most enterprises. With this backdrop, organizations can and must do everything in their power to accelerate leadership development and to engage in activities that do so. This paper will help pinpoint leaders and leadership development researchers and experts in that direction.

This manuscript offers a unique perspective on the role of senior leaders from the perspective of those who design leadership development programming in their organizations. And given both the readership and focus of this journal, this is an important perspective which takes into account the operational demands of leadership development in the strategic role senior leaders play in supporting these efforts.

Senior Indigenous leadership positions across the Australian higher education sector has increased over the past decade. Despite this advancement, there is limited understanding in terms of how to best integrate Indigenous leadership into existing governance structures of Australian universities. In 2018 the Walan Mayiny: Indigenous Leadership in Higher Education project commenced, aimed at establishing a model of best practice for the inclusivity of Indigenous leadership in higher education governance structures. This article presents key findings from the project, namely, a model of senior Indigenous leadership within the Australian universities based on the perceptions of a group of Indigenous academics.

Through qualitative semi-structured interviews with Indigenous academic staff, the perceived value, characteristics and challenges of senior Indigenous leadership were examined. The varying opinions held by Indigenous academics in relation to the qualifications and experience required to fulfil a senior Indigenous leadership position were also highlighted. In doing so, a model of senior Indigenous leadership within the Australian higher education system is presented. The model of best practice presented in this article is underpinned by Indigenous Institutional Theory (Coates et al., 2022), a theoretical framework developed from the Walan Mayiny study.

The research findings highlight the diverse opinions of Indigenous academics in relation to the qualifications and experience required to fulfil a senior Indigenous leadership position. The six essential components are built upon the core characteristics, values and behaviours that senior Indigenous leaders need to have according to Indigenous academics, in order to advance Indigenous success within the academy.

Given Australian universities are being called upon to ensure that senior Indigenous leaders are in the best position possible to forge institutional change, senior Indigenous leaders within the academy may find the contextual Indigenous leadership model beneficial. The model allows one to uphold cultural integrity and fulfil the responsibilities and obligations of their higher education institution, while being able to serve their Indigenous colleagues and communities, leading to the advancement of Indigenous higher education outcomes. Importantly, the model can be adapted to suit all First Nations Peoples globally, who also find themselves working within the shackles of Western institutions.

While uncertainty during emergency response operations necessitates adaptive performance, emergency response organizations, such as the fire service, tend to constrain adaptive behaviors due to their highly formalized bureaucratic structures. Structural theories suggest that leaders can empower employees to bypass these constraints.

Using survey data from four US fire departments, this research tests whether mid-level supervisors can empower firefighters by increasing their ability to improvise during complex emergency response operations, and whether this enhances department adaptive performance. Moderated mediation is also performed to assess whether senior leaders must also be effective, empowering leaders in order to achieve heightened levels of empowerment and subsequent adaptive performance, as many senior leaders in the fire service are criticized for being overly bureaucratic, risk averse, and resistant to change.

The findings support compensatory effects and show how immediate supervisors are key to overcoming senior leader deficiencies and producing adaptive performance during conditions of high uncertainty and complexity.

The lack of response organizations’ success during complex incidents is often attributed to senior leaders who are risk averse, overly bureaucratic, and resistant to change (Wankhade and Patnaik, 2020). This study is the first to show how empowering leadership can help overcome these constraints to enhance adaptive performance under complex conditions in the fire service.

This paper examines the leadership of police officers in the top levels or ranks of an Australian police organization. The sample consisted of 480 senior police who recorded the frequency of leadership behaviors of the person they directly report to via the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. Multi‐regression was used to identify predictors of the leadership outcomes of leader effectiveness and extra effort. The study found that each rank of senior officers had unique sets of leadership behaviors that influence the perception of leader effectiveness and motivation to exert extra effort. The Stratified System Theory was used to explore why each rank had unique combinations of predictors. Finally, the paper discusses the multilevel issues of leadership and the importance of considering rank in relation to leadership at the senior levels of police organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore subjective life histories and leadership journeys of senior leaders, drawing upon elements of an authentic leadership framework (life trigger events, values and emotions). The paper surfaces partial life histories and the often unheard of individual experiences of becoming a leader, offering stories to others as a media for learning and extending authentic leadership theory.

The paper draws upon a qualitative empirical study engaging 22 UK senior leaders in semi‐structured interviews, involving a life‐history approach to generate subjective narratives of how individuals establish and sustain leadership.

The empirical data highlights that elements of authentic leadership theory resonate in practice. Senior leaders' life histories and in particular negative trigger events are significant to their approach as leaders. The values of honesty and integrity were important to the leaders, with some able to sustain their values uncompromisingly. The leaders openly expressed emotion and vulnerability when re‐telling their stories, but whether they do so as leaders in relationships with others, requires further research. Authentic leadership theory may be over simplified in terms of emotion and vulnerability in practice.

Elements of authentic leadership offer alternative understandings of experiences of leaders. The life history approach enables important insights into leaders' subjective realities and should be integral to leadership development approaches.

The paper offers empirical data from UK senior leaders, highlighting the unheard of strutting and fretting of leadership and contributing empirical research to authentic leadership theory.

This chapter aims to examine the ways coaching and mentoring are currently leveraged to deliver leadership development in higher education institutions. By exploring the variety of coaching and mentoring approaches and their deployment at different levels and across different institutions we are able to indicate opportunities for further enhancing leadership development in the sector through coaching and mentoring. The chapter examines peer-reviewed articles, sector reports and insights from key informants crafted into mini case studies. Mentoring emerges as a default approach to leadership development, in particular at early career stages and where inclusivity and diversity feature as part of leadership development programmes. Coaching is evident at the senior levels and offers a wider range of individual leader, senior team and organisational leadership development opportunities. Our cases highlight the range of responses and sophistication of coaching approaches and practices, from the highly embedded to other more piecemeal examples. The findings emphasise the importance of empirical research in this area to better understand and inform the sector of the wider benefits and opportunities of coaching and mentoring in supporting leadership development. Opportunities to support greater inclusivity and diversity in leadership should consider coaching approaches and practices too. This exploration of coaching and mentoring identifies why shifts towards coaching may be evident. It challenges those in the sector – researchers, people management and organisational developers, as well as senior leaders – to adopt more integrated and embedded coaching and mentoring initiatives to support the sector in addressing its current challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to share the successful experience of Lilly Research Laboratories (LRL) in engaging senior leaders in developing the next generation of leaders.

The paper describes the principles and approach used by LRL. It provides a straightforward description of the major leadership development programs with a more detailed description of a course on inspirational leadership. One of the co‐authors, a Vice President of Medical, describes his personal motivation for participating.

The commitment of a significant amount of time to their development by respected senior leaders is a powerful message and model to participants. The ability to interact in a deeply personal way with senior leaders is highly motivating to participants. The involvement of senior leaders in the design and development of programs gives them a strong interest in later participation. Being identified as an inspirational leader and having the opportunity to influence the next generation are personally rewarding to senior leaders.

LRL is one of too few organizations that have succeeded in gaining a high level of commitment from senior leaders to developing future leaders; their methodology may be valuable to other large and medium‐sized organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the nature of management and leadership is related to the management and development of teaching and R&D (research and development) in higher education institutions.

The nature of management and leadership is approached by consideration of transformational and transactional leadership styles. The emergence and influence of these two styles in management of teaching and R&D are examined using an electronic questionnaire for senior and middle level managers at Finnish polytechnics.

Both transactional and transformational environments were identified in polytechnics. Senior and middle level managers did not have the same management and development preferences and their perceptions of the operational and management practices differed. Differences found between the viewpoints of these managers diminished when middle managers perceive transformational environment. In a transactional environment teaching was preferred rather than R&D, the role of personnel and students was less important and the good management practices were less common. In a transformational environment, R&D and integrating teaching and R&D had better circumstances to develop further.

This study is not concerned with how various environmental and contextual factors affect management of teaching and R&D. Nor did this study shed light on the perspectives of teachers on institutional leadership and management.

Development of operations, management and leadership is crucial to integrate and be in transformational interaction involving actors from all levels of a higher education institution. In order to implement changes and improve current practices, managers and leaders should extend the ways they approach and perceive teaching and R&D, their own management and leadership and environment. Personnel training and delegation are both needed.

The paper reports on the findings of an electronic survey distributed to senior and middle managers working in polytechnics in Finland that explores their perceptions of teaching and R&D. This paper provides a topical picture of the operative management of teaching and R&D and its extensive meaning in higher education institutions. In addition, this paper identifies a need to examine practice in Finnish polytechnics in terms of the notion of transformational leadership.

This paper aims to examine the discursive constitution of leadership identities by senior women leaders working in the City of London. This study draws on postfeminism as a critical concept to explore this constitution, as it has produced the cultural conditions for the reconfiguration of masculine and feminine gender norms in leadership.

In a qualitative study, 13 women leaders in positions of power in the City of London were interviewed. Discourse analysis techniques were used to unpack the postfeminist shaping of leadership identities

At the heart of the leadership identities that senior women leaders construct is a gendered hybridity that is a multifaceted calibration of masculine and feminine attributes and behaviours. Postfeminist discourses of individualism, choice and self-improvement are entangled with discourses of authenticity, relatability and connectivity as particular leadership assets. The gendered hybridity of leadership identities unfolds the possibility for a fundamental makeover of leadership by opening-up space for a transformative change that accommodates women leaders.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the very few studies that foreground the leadership identities that women leaders construct within the confines of postfeminist gender regimes. It shows how these women invoke authenticity, unfolding possibilities for the transformational change of and political challenge to traditional gendered leadership in their organizations.

The purpose of this article is to consider junior officers' attitudes towards those in senior positions, and the implications that this has for current debates on improving police leadership.

An ethnographic study of policing underpins the article and theoretically the notion of police culture is used to consider the various ways in which frontline police officers are able to resist or circumvent reforms to which they do not subscribe.

The article finds that frontline officers place great value on being led by senior officers who have considerable direct experience of street level policework. Those officers who have rapidly climbed the promotion ladder, without “serving their time” on the streets, are regarded with some suspicion.

Further analysis of the attitudes of junior officers towards their senior colleagues would be useful, to build on this study to consider the extent to which the attitudes identified here apply to various roles completed by senior officers.

The current agenda of police reform emphasises the benefits to be had from employing leaders who are from outside the British police service. While the suspicion with which such individuals are likely to be greeted by frontline staff is not, in itself, reason to reject such proposals it does indicate that efforts need to be made to bridge the “credibility gap” that seems likely to surround them. The article identifies a number of situations in which junior police officers did not accept the legitimacy of requests made by those of senior rank. It is not argued that leaders and managers were necessarily betraying ignorance of the realities of police work or that they were misguided. However, it is argued that given the continuing high levels of discretion available to police officers in terms of how they interpret their role and operationalise their diverse duties it is important for proponents of police reform to understand the cultural factors that, in part, will determine the ways in which frontline officers will respond to change.

The article presents valuable and original insight into a neglected aspect of debates on police leadership; namely, the perspectives of those who are “followers”. Since British policing has continued to eschew officer‐level entry, the issues raised are vitally important to those seeking to transform police leadership by introducing those from outside the service to senior positions.