Designing Leadership Development Program Curriculum: A Narrative Research Study

A high priority is placed on developing leadership skills because of its importance to organizational performance and growth. Since 2010, significant investment has been put into leadership programs by companies globally with the goal of producing more effective leaders. Despite the expenditure into leadership development, most training efforts fail to meet learners’ needs because they do not include participant perspectives in the content decision-making process, using outdated leadership theories as a framework for content development, or failing to evaluate training efforts. These failures result in a mismatch between the challenges leaders face in their roles and the content of a leadership program. Therefore, to successfully design programs that meet learners’ needs, an understanding of an audience’s challenges is critical. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the challenges leaders face in a global technology company. In this study, the researcher specifically used narrative inquiry to understand the stories of past participants in a leadership development program. The researcher collected data by retrospective analyses of open-ended internal surveys gathered by the study organization during the last 12 months for the purposes of identifying challenges leaders face in their leadership roles and understanding perceptions of how well a leadership program prepared them to respond to these challenges. The researcher intends the findings to help the organization identify to what extent the content of their current leadership program addressed the challenges of the participants.