Specific nouns are of scant relevance in trying to evaluate leadership potential, which is what Cason, the widow of Elliott Jaques, the management theorist and the coiner of the phrase "mid-life crisis," has been trying to do for decades.
We used a pre- and post-test to evaluate leadership practices and 6 subscales related to culture change (systemwide culture change, resident choice, organization design, empowering supervision, job design, decision making, and permanent assignments).
Moreover, if you evaluate leadership development experiences by their entertainment value, what you get is entertainment.
The huge disconnect between how most companies evaluate leadership development efforts and the dimensions along which they are seeking improvement dooms these efforts.
Pfeffer: First, evaluate leadership development activities, including talks, programs, and so forth, using relevant criteria: improvements in employee engagement, trust in leaders, job satisfaction, turnover, the ability of leaders to keep their jobs and be effective in doing them, etc.
If we want to make workplaces and careers better, if we want to increase trust in leaders, then it seems pretty obvious to me that those should be the criteria we use to evaluate leadership training experiences not whether people came away feeling good.
