Extraordinary Leadership: Addressing the Gaps in Senior Executive Development

Wisdom for Developing Extraordinary Leaders

"This book contains a rich collection of wisdom, experience, and insight for addressing the gaps in learning and development that the traditional models for training, talent development, and succession planning fail to address. As you address your own executive development needs or those of others, we hope you'll create your own recipe for pulling everything together. A rich stock of openness, vulnerability, and learning readiness forms the base for developing leadership capacity and can carry all of the ingredients that high-performing managers need to set the table for extraordinary leadership."—From the Introduction

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) is the world's largest institution devoted exclusively to leadership research and education. Since 1970, CCL has studied and trained hundreds of thousands of executives and worked with them to create practical models, tools, and publications for the development of effective leaders and leadership.

Extraordinary Leadership

While top-level leaders may be exceptionally gifted and successful, they often have gaps in their skills in such vital areas as interpersonal relationships, adapting to rapid change and complexity, partnering and sharing responsibility and accounta-bility, and inspiring and motivating others.

From the acclaimed Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) comes an essential resource that explores the subtle yet powerful gaps that separate successful top-level leaders from extraordinary ones. Extraordinary Leadership is filled with proven tools, frameworks, and processes that can guide good leaders to become truly exceptional.

Extraordinary Leadership contains a rich collection of wisdom, experience, and insight on a variety of topics relevant to senior leaders such as authenticity, credibility, emotional competence, social intelligence, developmental relationships, growth through connection, ability to learn, life-stage development, and overdone and fatal flaws. Throughout the book, a host of leadership experts such as Jay Conger, David Dotlich, Peter Cairo, Lisa Lahey, Morgan McCall, and Frances Hesselbein outline the four main lenses for examining leadership gaps—the gap within, the gap between, the gap in the system, and the gap at the institutional level—and providemultiple strategies for enhancing the leader's learning journey.

Extraordinary Leadership offers senior leaders a key to learning to lead with confidence and capability in our complex contemporary world.

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Kerry A. Bunker is founder and president of Mangrove Leadership Solutions, an executive development firm specializing in improving organizational leadership and performance through senior executive learning and coaching. Prior to forming his current organization, he was senior fellow and manager of the Awareness Program for Executive Excellence at CCL.

Douglas T. (Tim) Hall is the Morton H. and Charlotte Friedman Professor of Management at the Boston University School of Management, director of the Executive Development Roundtable, and faculty director of the M.B.A. program. He is a core faculty member of the Human Resources Policy Institute. He is a former H. Smith Richardson Jr. Visiting Fellow at CCL and a former member of CCL's board of governors.

Kathy E. Kram is professor of organizational behavior at the Boston University School of Management and Everett Lord Distinguished Faculty Scholar. She is a former member of CCL's board of governors.