A Cooperative Inquiry to Develop Leadership Capabilities

In the past ten years there has been considerable debate on thesubject of leadership and management development (Finegold, 1994;Friga, Bettis and Sullivan, 2003). Two of the key debates in themanagement education literature have been firstly the place ofBusiness Schools in developing leaders and managers (Cornuel, 2005;Marrington and Rowe, 2004; Grey, 2004; Pfeffer and Fong, 2003;Wankel and Fillipini, 2002; Leavitt, 2000) and secondly the continuedrelevance of the MBA as a pre-eminent source of managementeducation (Mintzberg, 2004a; 2004b; Conolly, 2003; Mintzberg andGosling, 2002; Mintzberg and Lampel, 2001). In 2001 following inputfrom two cross industry focus groups RMIT University established agraduate certificate post-graduate award program in organisationalleadership as a response to the growing questioning of practices inmanagement development and as a response an industry identifiedneed to develop an applied leadership practice program at postgraduate level suited to experienced practicing managers. A process ofco-operative inquiry (Heron, 1996; Heron and Reason, 2001) was usedas both a research approach under critical theory driven actionresearch and as an aid to participants co-researching their insights intoleader-manager practice and implementing improvements into thatpractice. This paper explores the methodology adopted, approaches toaction research undertaken and also conclusions drawn from theproject, many of which now inform practices in the RMIT MBAExecutive program.