« Academy o/ Management Executive. 2004, Vol, 18, No. 3
Leadership development
through experience
Morgan W. McCall, ]i.
Human beings never know more than part, as
"through a glass darkly;" and all knowledge
comes to us in pieces.
-Thomas Cahill
What follows is my interpretation of what we know
about developing leadership talent; that is, it is a
relative truth as seen through the lens of my re-
search and experience with the topic. I have set out
below what I believe to be true—true enough to act
on with confidence in most situations; what I be-
lieve to be contingent—things for which action de-
pends on the specific situation; and finally, what I
think we need to learn if we are to get better at
leadership development.
What is the lens of my particular truth? My col-
leagues and I have done mostly qualitative re-
search with managers and executives deemed
successful or having high potential in large corpo-
rations.' The underlying assumption has been that
what it takes to become a successful executive, to
the extent that it can be learned at all, is learned
mostly through experience. The goal of the re-
search has been to understand what experiences
matter in the development of executive talent,
what those experiences potentially teach, the pro-
cesses by which the lessons of experience are
learned (or not), and how experience can be used
more effectively in organizational settings to de-
velop leadership talent. Pursuit of this knowledge
has involved hundreds of managers and execu-
tives from all organizational levels, from many dif-
ferent types of organizations, and from the U.S. as
well as other countries. Many of the results have
been replicated in specific corporate settings^ and
in other cultures.^ A number of companies have put
the basic principles into practice.
As pleased as I am with our progress to date, it is
important to remember that this work is about the
development of corporate executives through ex-
perience. Other relevant populations and other ap-
proaches are based on different assumptions.
While I would like to think that what we have
learned can be widely generalized, there are other
truths.
What We Know
The primary source of learning to lead, to the ex-
tent that leadership can be learned, is experience.
The role played by training and other formal pro-
grams is relatively modest in comparison to other
kinds of experiences. The implication of this belief
is rather profound because it suggests that expe-
riences (mostly assignments) rather than programs
should form the core of executive development. Yet
until recently we have known relatively little about
how to effectively use experience for development,
including what experiences are developmental,
what people might learn from them, why some
people learn and others don't, who to give what
experiences to, and so forth.
The primary source of learning to lead, to
the extent that leadership can be
learned, is experience.
While experience is at the heart of development,
not all experiences are created equal. As Dennis
the Menace once observed, "The trouble with
learning is that it's always about stuff you don't
know." The vast majority of experiences reported
as developmental involve facing adversity, going
into the new or unknown, struggling with the un-
familiar. The broad categories of experiences that
seem to matter most are challenging assignments
(for example, start-ups, turnarounds, and substan-
tial increases in scope and scale of responsibility),
exposure to other people (usually either excep-
tional or terrible superiors—people don't seem to
learn much from mediocre bosses), hardships (for
example, making mistakes or getting fired), and
personal events (mostly significant non-work expe-
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128 Academy of Management Executive August
riences). While these kinds of experiences offer
different and somewhat predictable lessons, how
developmental they are and what they might teach
to specific individuals is, well, highly individual.
The implication is that different individuals will
benefit differentially from the same experience de-
pending on prior experience, what they already
know and don't know, and (as noted below)
whether their own styles and the context around
the experience promote learning.
People don't automatically learn from experi-
ence. They can come away with nothing, the wrong
lessons, or only some of what they might have
learned. Similar experiences repeated over time
carry with them reduced learning, which is why
careers spent doing similar kinds of things (e.g.,
multiple turnarounds) or within functional, techni-
cal, or product silos so often produce narrow exec-
utives. The challenge in using experience for de-
velopment lies in giving the right experiences to
the people who will learn the most from them (of-
ten described as "open to learning" or "learning
agile") and then providing the kind of support that
will help them learn what the experiences offer.
This is anything but easy. It requires developing
ways to identify what experiences are develop-
mental and where they are, ways to identify the
people with the ability to learn from those experi-
ences, mechanisms for getting the right people
into those experiences (and unblocking them when
necessary), ways to identify and specify desired
learning outcomes, and an understanding of the
kinds of interventions that promote the develop-
mental side of performance-driven assignments.
People don't automatically learn from
experience. They can come away with
nothing, the wrong lessons, or only some
of what they might have learned.
If experience is the focus of executive develop-
ment, then who gets what experience (usually a
job assignment) drives it. Ironically, the person
most likely to get a specific challenging assign-
ment is the person who has already demonstrated
the ability to do it (the ready-now candidate),
rather than the person who has not yet shown the
ability and could learn the most if given the oppor-
tunity. In my earlier work, I called the former the "A
list" and the latter the "B list" candidates and sug-
gested that effective succession planning would
create and consider both lists before filling a key
developmental job.^ Of course that implies identi-
fying the assignments that are key developmental
jobs as part of the succession planning process,
not just identifying who the talented people are.
Whatever the mechanism used to somehow match
talented people with the assignments they need,
there almost always will be a difficult decision to
make between maximizing short-term perfor-
mance by choosing the most qualified candidate
and longer-term development (and presumably
performance) by choosing the person with talent
who could learn the most. This dilemma is one
reason that a clear philosophy about developing
talent is a crucial aspect of senior leadership. De-
velopmental moves involve potential business
losses due to errors, costs, and inefficiencies asso-
ciated with the learning curve, and even possible
loss of talented people if they do not succeed in
meeting the performance objectives of the job.
Another reasonable certainty is that the devel-
opment of executive talent does not happen all at
once. In fact, the complexity of the knowledge,
skill, and ability required to perform most high-
level executive jobs effectively is such that we are
talking in terms of decades.^ A reasonable compar-
ison point is research on expertise that demon-
strates empirically that a minimum of ten years of
intensive investment is required to produce a mas-
ter chess player, and even longer for some other
disciplines that are substantially narrower in
scope than senior leadership positions.^ It there-
fore makes little sense to begin executive develop-
ment processes at very senior levels, as so many
companies do. Instead the process must start early
and pay special attention to crucial transition
points, such as those described by Linda Hill in her
seminal work on the move from individual contrib-
utor to manager and Ram Charan and his col-
leagues in their conceptual discussion of various
transition points in the "leadership pipeline."'
In summary, through one lens we seem to know
that experience is at the heart of development, that
experiences vary in their developmental potential
and in the lessons they can teach, that what is
actually learned from experience varies depend-
ing on what the individual brings to it as well as
the context for learning created around it, that a
process for getting talented people into the expe-
riences they need is crucial, and that acquiring
executive competence through experience requires
many years and a number of difficult transitions.
These points seem to be universally true (if such is
possible) in large corporations. They also suggest
some important contingencies in development,
some key places where it all depends. These in-
clude the business strategy itself, which deter-
mines what development is needed; what actions
might enhance learning from a particular experi-