Chapter 15

Learning on the Job

Ellen Van Velsor

In This Chapter

• What people learn from job experiences.
• How they learn from these work-related events.
• Why learning from experience can be difficult.
• What can be done to enhance the potential for learning on the job.

 

When people consider how learning and development take place, they tend to think of formal training and to look to these kinds of classroom or e-based opportunities as benefits and as necessities. But when we ask people to describe the most important learning experiences of their careers, these kinds of experiences typically do not take center stage. The learning that sticks with people for 10, 20, or even 30 years tends to come from events that happen naturally on the job, experiences such as challenging assignments, business crises, mistakes, and personal failures, and having an exceptional boss or having to deal with a very bad boss.

Some of these events happen almost by chance, others are intentionally designed by a boss or mentor for the manager’s development, and some are self-initiated. Yet people not only remember these events as if they happened yesterday, but they can discuss at length what they learned, how or why they believe they learned from those events, and how that learning has affected the leader they have grown to be. However, much of this learning is almost accidental, in that it is often unplanned and unsupported. The assignments and relationships people remember were most often not planned for intentional learning. And few of the experiences recounted by managers were intentionally supported or made part of a systematic development approach so that learning could be maximized.

Of course, many organizations use job rotation to develop skills—for example, moving a new fast-track human resources (HR) recruit through compensation, recruitment, assessment, and training assignments to develop the skills and perspectives needed in an HR generalist or HR manager. But the emphasis of job rotation is often about learning the business of the function, picking up a variety of technical skills (in this example, understanding compensation systems, recruitment processes and skills, onboarding, and training), and gaining a broad view of the function’s role in the organization. Though that is certainly important, particularly at an entry level, many organizations do not use and integrate learning from the broad variety of challenging experiences (assignments, relationships, and setbacks) that take place on the job to intentionally enhance the leadership capabilities of people from the start of their careers onward.

This chapter focuses on how to understand and enhance learning from these job experiences. It takes an in-depth look at what people learn from job experiences, how they learn from these work-related events, why learning from experience is hard, and what can be done to enhance the potential for learning on the job. How managers describe various kinds of potent work-based experiences and what they learn from them is the subject to which we now turn.

What People Learn from Job Experiences

Over the course of 30 years, significant research has been done, by the Center for Creative Leadership and by others, to better understand how people learn, grow, and change over the course of their careers. Through a series of studies—beginning in the United States and now including interviews with senior managers in China and India, public- and private-sector leaders in Singapore, and male and female senior executives who attend the Center for Creative Leadership’s Leadership at the Peak program from all sectors of the economy—it has become clear that job experiences can both deepen and broaden an individual’s overall learning and development. Certain experiences are key to workplace learning. Here, I discuss three types of non-classroom-based learning experiences: work assignments, developmental relationships, and work-related mistakes and setbacks. These are among the most frequently cited events that lead to workplace learning.

Work Assignments

When we think about learning on the job, work assignments probably first come to mind as sources of opportunity, and in fact research bears that out. We often think of assignment-based learning as “development in place,” because learning from the challenges encountered in one’s day-to-day work often does not require a major job shift or moving to a new organization to learn (McCauley 2006). Instead, one can learn from challenges that arise in the context of a current job, when the context for the work changes in some way or because new elements are added to the job. Among the assignments most frequently described as developmental across many studies (McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison 1988; Morrison, White, and Van Velsor 1992; Douglas 2006; Yip and Wilson 2010) are the following:

• an increase in scope of responsibilities
• an assignment in which the individual is responsible for creating change
• a significant project or cross-functional team
• an international assignment.

Although some of these assignments signify a job change, others are experiences that can come in the context of one’s current role. We also know that there is a great similarity across cultures in the kinds of job assignments that people see as developmental, but there are also some differences (Yip and Wilson 2010). For example, one of the most frequently reported learning experiences in a recent study conducted in China was an event called “organizational reform,” usually referencing a powerful learning experience Chinese managers had been working in an organization under transformation from a state-run entity to a private-sector firm (Zhang, Chandrasekar, and Wei 2009).

People tend to learn a variety of lessons from events like these. Table 15-1 illustrates some of the many lessons people report learning from the events listed above. Tables 15-2 and 15-3 provide useful tools for (1) assessing the developmental quality of a job or job enlargement and (2) facilitating learning from a developmental assignment.

Developmental Relationships

Learning can also come from engagement in job-based developmental relationships that challenge and support a person. These can be in the form of good relationships with a helpful boss, a mentor, or a formal or informal coaching arrangement. Bosses, mentors, and coaches can play many roles. Though many think of relationships mainly as ways to gain support (and they certainly are), the best developmental relationships also provide challenges in the forms of ongoing feedback, evaluation of strategies for change, standards for self-evaluation, perspectives different from one’s own, pressure to fulfill commitments to learning, and serving as an example of competence in one’s desired area of development.

Table 15-1. Key Lessons from Four Types of Job Assignments

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McCauley and Douglas (2004) describe several strategies for using developmental relationships to enhance job learning, including

• regarding the boss as a partner in development
• seeking out multiple relationships for development
• figuring out which roles are needed to help with current learning goals (for example, feedback provider, sounding board, assignment broker, cheerleader) and finding the right people to meet these needs
• making full use of lateral, subordinate, and external relationships
• not assuming relationships need to be long term or intense to be helpful
• being especially aware of the need for help during times of transition.

Table 15-2. Assessing the Developmental Quality of a Job: Questions to Ask

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Source: Adapted from McCauley (2006).

Table 15-4 provides a tool, in the form of a set of questions, that can be helpful in assessing a potentially developmental relationship. These questions are probably best used when one can pair a developmental relationship with another new learning opportunity, such as a change in job or new challenges added to one’s current role.

Relationships don’t have to be positive to provide learning opportunities. Research shows that even experiences with an inept or negative boss can produce learning (Mc-Call, Lombardo, and Morrison 1988; Douglas 2006). From these negative role model experiences, managers learn lessons, such as how not to treat people, integrity, and managing upward.

Table 15-3. Questions to Ask to Facilitate Learning from a Developmental Assignment

Source: Adapted from Ohlott (2004).

Of course, a constructive boss is most frequently cited as a developmental relationship on the job. From good bosses, people report learning things like how to effectively manage those who report directly to them, strategic skills, and guiding principles for facing the challenges of leadership. The impact of a good boss is evident across cultures as well, and may be particularly strong in countries where superiors garner more respect and authority. In India and Singapore, for example, constructive bosses are seen as playing a significant role in helping subordinates learn from job assignments (Yip and Wilson 2010).

Table 15-4. Questions for Exploring a Developmental Relationship

Source: Adapted from McCauley and Douglas (2004).

Mistakes and Setbacks

Job-related crises, large and small, both organizational and personal, are often crucibles for learning (Moxley and Pulley 2004). These are often unexpected but significant events that usually cause some sense of loss (of confidence, status, credibility, or the like) with which the individual must deal. Mistakes, particularly when visible to others or when causing significant business losses, are one kind of setback remembered as painful and yet rich in learning by many managers. From making mistakes, people learn resilience, technical and management skills, and often something about their own strengths and limitations. Career setbacks, such as being fired, downsized, demoted, or simply plateaued (formally advised as no longer promotable), cause managers to reassess actions, performance, and goals and to develop new understandings of self and work-related strengths and weaknesses. In all these situations, it often takes time and support for people to be able to draw lessons from the experience of a work-related hardship, but it is often rich and introspective learning—and hard won.

How People Learn from Job Experiences

A job is a kind of “holding environment”—a virtual classroom that can work to stimulate and challenge an individual to learn and grow or can deaden the mind with a repetition of tasks and no new demands. People learn from their experiences when they recognize that the experience demands new ways of thinking or new skills; when they have the opportunities needed to apply and practice those; and when they have support from superiors, co-workers, and the organizational culture. If that is not the case (that is, if people are underchallenged or not supported), they can easily lose motivation to learn and to perform, even in their areas of expertise.

My colleagues and I believe that the best development experiences are those that contain three elements—assessment, challenge, and support (McCauley, Van Velsor, and Ruder-man 2010). Many assignments that leaders mention contain, almost by definition, heavy doses of challenge. That’s part of what causes them to be remembered (degree of difficulty, loss, interpersonal problems). What’s often missing are the assessment and support elements—which actually may either be simply missing or not remembered because they were not an intentional part of the development system.

Assessment is important because of the role self-awareness plays in learning and development (Hall 2004). Self-awareness is commonly understood as the ability to recognize various aspects of your identity, to understand your own strengths and weaknesses, and to appreciate the impact of those on others. For most individuals, self-awareness is an area to be developed throughout a career, and many managers have a self-perception that is not entirely in line with how their skills and behaviors are seen by others (Harris and Schaubroeck 1988; Mabe and West 1982). Periodic opportunities to assess or reassess skills and development needs are helpful when starting a new assignment, in particular, because they alert the individual to the changing demands and fit between those demands and his or her current competencies. Assessment can also be helpful in letting someone know when learning has been achieved and skills have improved. Multi-rater feedback is useful in this regard, to help leaders know when the learning they have experienced through a series of developmental experiences has resulted in others being able to see improvement as a result of that learning.

In addition to assessment playing a vital role in learning, we know that the type and degree of challenge an experience holds for an individual are central to the likelihood that one can learn from that experience. In terms of type of challenge, it is clear that opportunities featuring certain kinds of challenges are key to learning on the job (McCauley and others 1994). Unfamiliar responsibilities, such as switching from a line or operations role to a staff role, require individuals to acquire new knowledge, perform in front of new bosses and peers, manage people from different backgrounds, and perhaps use new ways of solving problems. When a job requires focusing on developing new directions, an individual is challenged to create change in an ambiguous environment, reorganize existing structures or systems, or start something new—tasks that require thinking in new ways, encountering resistance, and building systems and structure. In moving into a new job, a manager can also encounter inherited problems, requiring that he or she bring their own skills and perspectives to bear on long-standing issues left behind by the previous incumbent. Jobs that come with inherited problems also help people learn to deal with adversity because solving those problems often requires making tough decisions.

Problems with employees also create developmental challenges for managers, in that they must become motivated to use a variety of approaches to help others improve their performance, learn to be good coaches, acquire the ability and knowledge base about when and how to let someone go, and so on. When an assignment involves high stakes, it provides a challenge because the results are clearly visible and the incumbent has direct accountability for key decisions and often feels intense pressure from higher management. In dealing with high stakes, people often improve their ability to handle stress, become more decisive, and improve their ability to deal with top management.

A job that involves significant responsibility for people, budgets, or large portions of the organization challenges the manager by its scope and scale. When faced with this kind of challenge, managers learn to coordinate and integrate across groups, to create management systems, and to delegate. Influencing without authority can be a challenge in almost any job when the work requires an individual to gain cooperation from peers or higher-ups to be successful. Managers learn to deal with organizational politics more effectively and to work across boundaries. When an individual must engage in handling external pressure, an assignment can require people to hone their negotiation skills, learn to better see things from others’ perspectives, and also enhance their ability to collaborate. Working across cultures or in a context of work group diversity gives people the opportunity to become more aware of their own biases, to recognize the need to overcome stereotypes, adapt to different circumstances and individual needs, and persuade people from different backgrounds to work together (Ohlott 2004; McCauley 2006).

Note that many of these job challenges involve some kind of boundary crossing—that is, moving from one function to another, from one level to another, or across boundaries between organizations or even between cultures or countries. Whenever an individual is required to move into a “space” that is new, there is an opportunity, and often a requirement, to acquire new perspectives and knowledge sets, solve problems in different ways, interact with people who see the world differently, and engage in new behaviors to be effective. Boundary-crossing experiences can therefore be rich learning events that provoke significant development (Yip 2007).

In terms of degree of challenge, it is important to remember that while challenge helps people recognize new skills are needed, motivates people to learn, and provides a degree of excitement often unmatched at work, too much challenge can overwhelm a learner. Challenge can get in the way of learning if the level of challenge is too high and without requisite support. Consider the situations depicted in figure 15-1. Situation A is what a developmental experience should feel like when existing skills overlap enough with task demands so as to ensure adequate competency, but there is also sufficient challenge (room for the development of new skills) in the experience. Situation B shows what the same assignment may feel like when an individual has been at it for some time, perhaps having reached what Nicholson and West call the stabilization stage (see the sidebar). At this stage, skills have grown to match job demands, and there is little, if any, room for development in the assignment at this point. Though an individual in this situation would need to add a new challenge to his or her current role, or move into a new role, to learn more, that individual should take care not to move into or create something like situation C, where the task or job demands outstrip his or her current abilities by a wide margin. This third diagram depicts an assignment that is probably too high a risk, both for the individual and for the organization. In the case where someone must be moved into a situation like this, serious attention should be paid to the adequacy and types of support the person will need to both learn and succeed.

This brings us to support, the third aspect important to maximizing learning on the job. In general, support is important in balancing and modulating the challenges people face. Though a low-challenge situation (as in situation B in figure 15-1) probably does not need the same kinds of support needed by a person facing a high-challenge situation (situation A in figure 15-1), if underchallenged, he or she may need support in the form of finding added learning opportunities in the current job or in a new role. Challenges stretch people and put them in a position of disequilibrium, but support helps people know they can handle the struggle of learning and can maintain a positive view of themselves as capable and worthy, even in the face of mistakes and possibly a temporary decline in performance.

Support means different things to different people. Though the largest source of support for many is other people—bosses, co-workers, family, friends, professional coaches, and the like—support can also come from organizational systems (for example, mentoring programs, support groups) or, more generally, from the organizational culture. Support is a key factor in maintaining an individual’s motivation to learn. It helps generate a sense of self-efficacy about learning, which in turn helps people exert effort to master challenges. If people do not receive adequate support for their learning, the challenges they are facing, to learn and to perform well, can often overwhelm them.

Maximizing learning on the job also means taking on a variety of experiences over the whole course of one’s career (Hall 2004; McCauley 2006; McCauley, Van Velsor, and Ruderman 2010). The more varied one’s experience base, the more likely it is that one can develop the broadest array of skills and perspectives, and the more likely it is that good performance can be maintained in the face of changing organizational and market or industry demands. Facing new challenges forces one to use existing strengths in new ways and to develop in areas not yet tested or refined. Challenge can be added to a current job, or one might take on a new job to broaden one’s base of experience or develop specific competencies.

Maximizing learning also has to do with understanding readiness. Readiness for learning is a function of how an individual sees himself or herself, personality preferences such as openness, prior experiences, and the other challenges he or she is currently facing (Avolio 2004). As mentioned above, self-awareness (of strengths and weaknesses) is an important facilitator of learning from a challenging assignment and can be facilitated by assessment, using formal means (for example, 360-degree instruments) and/or coaching. Finally, not everyone will be challenged by the same experiences or challenged by the same experience to a similar degree. Challenge is subjective and influenced not only by previously attained skills and perspectives but also by past experience with similar challenges or the degree of preparation for a current challenge. So taking an individualized approach, rather than one size fits all, is imperative.

What Gets in the Way of Learning on the Job

Despite all preparation, learning from one’s experiences can be difficult for many reasons. As mentioned above, inadequate readiness, and too few or too many job challenges without adequate support, can get in the way of learning from a potentially developmental job experience. Yet even in a job with appropriate challenges, the press of everyday work can easily get in the way of learning. Time has become a precious commodity, and people focus on devoting precious resources to the most urgent and highest-priority tasks. If learning is not one of those, it will suffer.

When pressed, people often do not give learning the attention or priority necessary to realize development outcomes. This is reinforced in organizations where the achievement of performance goals is more consistently and frequently rewarded than achieving learning goals. In an organizational culture that rewards performance to the exclusion of learning, inertia and past success can be major obstacles to continued learning. People like to use their strengths, to continue to get positive feedback for their behavior, and to continue to be rewarded for what they have been rewarded for in the past. In addition to the comfort this approach can bring, relying on strengths and sticking with tried-and-true behaviors usually seems like it makes the best use of that scarce resource, time.

Learning new skills and developing new approaches takes time and comes with the threat of performance declines, however temporary. Being able to see when new approaches are not working (that is, being focused on learning) requires time to reflect and skill in reflecting. People rarely feel they can take the time to pause and reflect about learning except when they suffer a significant failure. Unfortunately, because learning from failures often focuses only on what went wrong, it has the potential to erode self-esteem and reinforce one’s fear of taking risks in new and challenging situations.

For all these reasons, learning from experience feels risky, both to the individual facing added challenges and to the organization faced with providing them. Recognizing the need for new learning is stressful for the individual because it requires the person to admit to himself or herself and possibly to others that what he or she is doing or currently knows is inadequate for future work. No one wants to be perceived as weak or flawed, particularly in an organization where tolerance for weakness or “not knowing” (which often goes hand in hand with tolerance for learning) is low.

So when time is scarce or organizational support is lacking, people are less likely to use the tools that support learning, such as keeping a learning journal. Although one may not have time in the course of a hectic day to sit back and reflect, using a journal to note observations, feelings, thoughts, and critical events can be a useful way of preserving these experiences to reflect on later. Capturing reflections in a journal and reading back through them over time can be a powerful way of learning about work and self—gaining the ability to see oneself grow and change over time (Van Velsor, Moxley, and Bunker 2004).

Personality (or personal preferences) also plays a role in one’s comfort with learning. Cognitive capabilities, self-esteem and self-efficacy, and openness to experience can all affect one’s ability to learn from work experience. Yet awareness of these can help an individual better deal with the uncomfortable feeling of going against one’s grain that a job challenge can impose. These can be taken into account, to the extent that they are known, in making job assignments or adding job challenges. But given a minimum of any of these capabilities, when an individual is ready to learn—given the right opportunities, tools, and organizational support—development is likely to result.

How to Enhance Learning on the Job

There are a variety of tactics available for enhancing learning on the job. Many of these are straightforward and simple in their implementation. Others require taking a more systematic view of learning and development and letting go of the assumptions that classroom training and providing unsupported job challenges are the most effective ways to promote learning or the development of abilities such as leadership. Some ideas for enhancing learning across the organization are presented in table 15-5, organized under the categories of assessment, challenge, and support (although, clearly, some approaches provide more than one of these benefits).

Table 15-5. Enhancing Learning on the Job

Source: Adapted from McCauley (2006).

Helping individuals become clear about what they bring to a learning experience and what they will have the opportunity to develop is critical to helping them make the most of it. This means assessing both the individual’s skills and perspectives, and the challenges inherent in the job. There are various ways to do this assessment, including the use of multi-rater instruments, personality assessments, reflection techniques, and assessments of the jobs used for development in your organization. Formal or informal coaching relationships can also be a source of assessment, either at the beginning of an assignment or as an individual works through it.

Training people to reflect on job experiences is likely to be a challenging task because most managers tend not to have the time or inclination for this. And training in individual reflection techniques such as journaling will not have a positive effect on learning if the culture does not support taking the time to learn and to use tools to facilitate learning. Group reflection on learning can also be used—bringing people together on a regular basis to discuss what is being learned by those in new assignments and allowing more senior managers to model this behavior for others.

Support for learning is probably the most important thing of all to consider, because it is usually the most neglected aspect of creating a culture of learning on the job. Providing training to all employees on how to give and receive feedback can enable them to feel more comfortable providing good feedback to each other as they encounter challenges and opportunities to learn. Creating forums where effective learners can share their strategies or where expert managers can share rules of thumb for dealing with various kinds of challenge are ways to both create a learning culture and help those currently involved in developmental assignments or who will soon be moving into one.

It is particularly important to tailor support to both the level of challenge individuals are facing in their jobs and the kind of challenge they are facing. Supporting a challenging assignment often means supporting the learning curve of new knowledge and skills, and helping to build an employee’s confidence if he or she encounters obstacles and frustration. Supporting mistakes and setbacks can mean helping someone draw lessons from loss, rebuild confidence, and either maintain forward movement or find a way to take time away to reestablish some equilibrium. Supporting someone in a bad-boss situation may mean helping him or her deal with stress more effectively, develop effective coping skills, and identify what can be learned about self and leading others in this situation.

Developmental experiences do not have to be expensive, and they do not have to take people away from work. Learning opportunities abound in everyday work experiences. People are encountering challenges daily in their jobs; they are involved in many kinds of naturally occurring, informal or formal relationships at work; and we all make mistakes and encounter failures and setbacks as we learn and progress through our careers. So the raw material for rich learning on the job is readily available, and we all learn as a result. By better supporting and mining these experiences for all the powerful developmental opportunities they could potentially bring, we can easily, and even in these tight economic times, enhance the return on our talent development efforts.

Further Reading

Cynthia D. McCauley, Developmental Assignments: Creating Learning Experiences without Changing Jobs. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership, 2006.

Marian Ruderman and Patricia Ohlott, Learning from Life: Turning Life’s Lessons into Leadership Experience. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership, 2000.

Ellen Van Velsor, Cynthia McCauley, and Marian Ruderman, eds., The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development, 3rd edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010.

Rola Ruohong Wei and Jeffrey Yip, Leadership Wisdom: Discovering the Lessons of Experience. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership, 2008.

References

Avolio, B. 2004. Examining the Full Range Model of Leadership: Looking Back to Transform Forward. In Leader Development for Transforming Organizations, ed. D. Day, S. Zaccaro, and S. Halpin. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Douglas, C. 2006. Lessons of a Diverse Workforce. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership.

Hall, D. 2004. Self-Awareness, Identity, and Leader Development. In Leader Development for Transforming Organizations, ed. D. Day, S. Zaccaro, and S. Halpin. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Harris, M., and J. Schaubroeck. 1988. A Meta-Analysis of Self-Supervisor, Self-Peer, and Peer-Supervisor Ratings. Personnel Psychology, 41: 43–61.

Mabe, P., and S. West. 1982. Validity of Self-Evaluation of Ability: A Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology 67: 280–296.

McCall, M., M. Lombardo, and A. Morrison. 1988. The Lessons of Experience. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

McCauley, Cynthia D. 2006. Developmental Assignments: Creating Learning Experiences without Changing Jobs. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership.

McCauley, Cynthia D., and Christina A. Douglas. 2004. Developmental Relationships. In The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development, 2nd edition, ed. C. McCauley and E. Van Velsor. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

McCauley, C., M. Ruderman, P. Ohlott, and J. Morrow. 1994. Assessing the Developmental Components of Managerial Jobs. Journal of Applied Psychology 79, no. 4: 544–560.

McCauley, C., E. Van Velsor, and M. Ruderman. 2010. Our View of Leadership Development. In The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development, 3rd edition, ed. E. Van Velsor, C. McCauley, and M. Ruderman. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Morrison, A., R. White, and E. Van Velsor. 1992. Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Can Women Make It to the Top of America’s Largest Corporations? Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

Moxley, R., and M. Pulley. 2004. Hardships. In The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development, 2nd edition, ed. C. McCauley and E. Van Velsor. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Nicholson, N., and M. West. 1988. Managerial Job Change. New York: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1989. Transitions, Work Histories, and Careers. In Handbook of Career Theory, ed. M. Arthur, D. Hall, and B. Lawrence. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ohlott, Patricia. 2004. Job Assignments. In The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development, 2nd edition, ed. C. McCauley and E. Van Velsor. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Van Velsor, E., R. Moxley, and K. Bunker. 2004. The Leader Development Process. In The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development, 2nd edition, ed. C. McCauley and E. Van Velsor. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Yip, J. 2007. Crossing Boundaries. Leadership in Action 27, no. 5 (Jossey-Bass).

Yip, J., and M. Wilson. 2010. Learning from Assignments. In The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development, 3rd edition, ed. E. Van Velsor, C. McCauley, and M. Ruderman. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Zhang, Y., A. Chandrasekar, and R. Wei. 2009. Developing Chinese Leaders in the 21st Century: A White Paper. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership.

About the Author

Ellen Van Velsor is a senior fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. She is coeditor of the center’s Handbook of Leadership Development, 3rd edition (2010), and coauthor of Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Can Women Reach the Top of America’s Largest Corporations? (1987, 1991). She has written numerous book chapters and articles, including “Leadership Development as a Support to Ethical Action in Organizations” (2008), “A Complexity Perspective on Leadership Development” (2007), “Developing Organizational Capacity for Leadership” (2007), and “Constructive-Developmental Coaching” (2006). Her current research focuses on beliefs and practices related to globally responsible leadership. She has a BA in sociology from Stony Brook University, and an MA and PhD in sociology from the University of Florida.