Leveraging Leadership Development to Pre-Empt Leader Derailments

This article examines the role of leadership development interventions in pre-empting leader derailments. The research literature suggests that derailments are not only commonplace but associated with a range of significant costs, from financial, to mental health, to morale, to employee turnover, to missed opportunities. Given these costly consequences, this article seeks to answer the question: "Can leadership development-especially at early managerial-career stages and during transitions-play a significant role in mitigating leader derailments?" Research suggests that the majority of leadership failures occur-or are more visible-at senior organizational levels. This begs the question of whether development interventions earlier in a leader's career might have pre-empted their later failure. What if the field of leadership development were to adopt a 'preventative medicine' model in which pre-empting derailments was the focus rather than 'fixing' leaders as they are derailing? Moreover, there appears to be an overreliance on coaching as the intervention of choice. What if the field were to leverage a broader range of development interventions beyond coaching to ensure a greater probability of minimizing derailments? Five interventions will be discussed which have the potential to pre-empt leadership failures, when deployed in unison.