Purpose of the ILC

• Be a learning space where leadership development practitioners can openly share their international experience (stories, approaches, processes, programs and tools) as well their questions.
• Be of benefit to the members of the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) whose activity is focused on the United States.

Rationale

• Leadership development in other countries and across countries (particularly developing countries) must take into account cultural differences to be effective
• LLC is primarily based in the United States and members who operate abroad may find themselves somewhat isolated from other practitioners who deal with similar challenges
• Leadership is becoming more global (or “glocal”) and an exploration of the international leadership development field can benefit any country’s effort
• There is a lot to learn from non-western cultures about collective forms of leadership as well as the role of women in leadership.
• The field of leadership development would benefit greatly from a discourse that comes from other countries as well as the U.S.

Some Questions we hold

1. What effective leadership development programs exist “out there”?
2. What leading-edge experiments or programs do we know about? What are their underlying assumptions?
3. Are there emerging forms of “androgynous” leadership?
4. Do effective leadership development efforts share some common conditions or activities? Are there universal patterns that are transferable from one country or region to another?Should we focus more on processes or practices rather than models?
5. What are the underlying assumptions for each of them?
6. Does evaluation present special challenges in the international context?
7. How do leadership development programs deal with the funding challenge?
8. What is our definition of leadership? Should we replace leadership by another term such as stewardship?

Possible Forms of the ILC/Next Steps

1. Create, use and maintain an ILC wiki with the help of LLC staff
2. Post our stories, approaches, tools, questions on the wiki
3. Engage in dialogues on issues of common interest
4. Take advantage of conferences to hold learning meetings in person (e.g. ILA Conference in Vancouver on November 1-4, CS IX in April 2008).