12. Management/Leadership: Profession, Professional, Professionalization

This chapter argues the timeliness of establishing leadership as a semi-profession through certification processes driven by managerial professional associations/unions. We point to positioning leadership as a semi-profession as a vehicle for driving a professionalization through knowledge-sharing among development professionals and managers, development of a common vocabulary and not least by directing the attention of scarce, yet often “uneducated” managerial talent to the fact that leadership is a skill that can and should be acquired and nurtured. Although a lack of a grand unifying theory of leadership complicates a certification of leadership, it is argued that the cost of bad leadership and the upside of professional leadership merits that more attention be directed to the development and deployment of professional leadership competence.