orporate leadership development programs (Ready & Conger, 2003). If organizations did not believe that they were receiving an appropriate return on this investment, they would not be committing these levels of resources. However, it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of leadership training since leadership itself is believed to be a "soft" skill. Nonetheless, there are some leadership techniques that have gained particular popularity in recent years, and ways to gauge their effectiveness is the extent to which they are practiced in organizations that have implemented them.
CORPORATE LEADERSHIP TRAINING TECHNIQUES
Leadership training takes many different forms, and is similar in many areas to other types of workplace training. Training can take place in a classroom-like setting with an instructor lecturing on various techniques and applying the ideas to the specific workplace. Or, leadership training can take place in the relative isolation of the Internet, with students completing reading assignments and interacting with other students and the instructor via e-mail or even live remote communication. Some organizations encourage their managers to read the same leadership books and follow the particular vision of a single leadership "guru," while other organizations bring those same gurus in for in-house seminars. Unlike other types of workplace training, however, leadership has also been influenced by outdoor training similar to a type of training used to build a better understanding of teams.
When outdoor training is used to enhance team effectiveness, the trainees are typically from the same organization and often from the same team. When outdoor training is used for leadership training, the trainees may not be from the same organization, or even from the same industry. The idea is that by removing managers and executives from the everyday world and placing them in an outdoor setting with challenges that few of...