LEARNING FOR LEADERSHIP: THE “ENGINEERING” AND “CLINICAL” APPROACHES
Gianpiero Petriglieri and Jack Denfeld Wood

Meaningful leadership development requires a deeper and more fundamental approach than is usually deployed in university classrooms and corporate training centers. It needs to incorporate difficult emotions and unconscious forces, and provide a safe place for their investigation and integration. While the typical “engineering” approach has a valuable contribution to make in leadership development, it is limited by the heavy reliance placed on a rational and cognitive view. In contrast, a “clinical” approach emphasizes working with the individual’s existing natural patterns of behavior, with the aim of understanding and managing the multiple forces that motivate individual and collective behavior. A real-life example from a leadership program highlights the substantially different approaches and the different results that can be produced depending on the method employed.