Managing and Leading Nonprofit Organizations

5Leadership Development in Action: The Generative Leadership Advantage

To this point we have explored several important ideas as we strive to advance a framework that will help you build your leadership practice. In earlier chapters we delved into the importance of pursuing leadership as a practice, the need to build a toolbox, and the importance of developing practice perspectives, as well as considering the type of leadership style you would like to pursue. From a lens that is more individually based, we moved into a consideration of what it takes to build a positive organizational culture—a culture that will help to ensure your nonprofit organization's capacity to realize its mission.

We turn now to another important consideration in advancing effective management and leadership practice that focuses on building strong leadership development capability at the individual, team, and organizational level. In this chapter we explore a leadership development frame that I call generative leadership (Dann, 2008). As you will read, generative leadership is a leadership development strategy that focuses on the co‐creation of leadership practice within and across the organization. It is distinctive from traditional leadership development strategies because it focuses on the capacity to engender leadership behavior at the individual employee, the team, and the organizational level through action.

Developing leadership practice using an action‐based approach moves away from the traditional ...