Rethinking leadership learning in postgraduate public management programmes

Leadership forms a key component of the curriculum of most Master of Public Administration and other public management programmes, usually doing so on the basis of assumptions that leadership is (a) both a subject and a responsibility that all such students might expect to embrace in the course of their careers; and (b) in some respects at least, it is distinctive and different in public service settings than in the commercial world from which the models and conceptualisations tend to be mostly drawn. This article, however, also starts from the proposition that leadership is best learned not by being “taught” in a traditional classroom context, but by exploration of and reflection on practical experiences and through developing the ability to “internalise” the behavioural processes involved, both positive and negative. What is needed, we therefore argue, is an approach that offers students opportunities to learn not only through the imparting of theoretical perspectives on the subject but also by impacting upon their self-awareness as a result of a focus on experience of leadership in practice. In the article we describe and reflect upon an experimental initiative of this nature; one that coupled an Action Learning (AL) approach with a more structured educational framework to help practitioner students identify and explore their Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) and to develop notions of the nature of leadership that they might aspire personally to practice.