No matter how many employees your company has, it probably doesn’t have an abundance of leaders. At least, not yet. Such is the reason for providing leadership development opportunities to employees. Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business shares this opinion in their recent article titled ‘Four Strategies for Cultivating Strong Leaders Internally.’ Clinical Professor of Management and Associate Dean for Leadership Development at Kellogg, Bernard Banks, states that “It’s not like there’s this overwhelming abundance of great leadership talent, and every company gets who they need.” As a result, it’s imperative for the future of growth of companies to develop the leaders of tomorrow, today.

The article shares four key strategies on developing great leaders in-house. We won’t go until detail here as we recommend reading the article in full but one excerpt we wanted to highlight was the emphasis placed on ‘Immersive Leadership.’ The article points out that current corporate leadership training is archaic and outdated in that it typically puts employees through standard classroom training. This fails to teach leaders ‘how to think’ versus simply ‘what to think.’

What the article recommends, instead, is immersive leadership training similar to what you might see in the Army where ‘…people are dropped into an entirely new context, in which they are forced to respond in real time against a thinking adversary.’ Within this approach, incorporating ‘after-action reviews [can also] help determine what went well—and what could have been done differently.’

At CBST Adventures, we’re big proponents of immersive leadership as this concept is core to our Experiential Leadership Programs. Many of our leadership programs are founded in military training, including our Mission Special Ops engagement. If you’re interested in learning more about these Experiential Leadership programs or other engagements, feel free to reach out to us.