Up Close and Personal: Building Foundations for Leaders' Development through the Personalization of Management Learning

This paper examines the process through which management students develop personal foundations (such as self-awareness, self-management, and a grounding life narrative) for the ongoing development and practice of leadership. The authors conducted an inductive, qualitative study of the Personal Development Elective, an innovative offering within the leadership curriculum of an international MBA, which gives participants the opportunity to work with a psychotherapist during the course. These findings suggest that the interplay between student’s work in the PDE and their overall MBA experience fosters a process of personalization of management learning. This process allows management education to provide the foundations for leaders’ development by transforming potentially regressive MBA experiences into rich material for participants’ personal learning, experimentation, and growth.