The CORE Leadership Model

What is a leadership model? More often than not, a leadership model is portrayed as a series of connected components such as self-development, institutional education, values, and ethics. The concept is that it takes different developmental strategies for each functional area of the model. In fact, many theories on leadership models state that the overriding goal of the model is to provide a means to disperse leadership training throughout the entire organization. A leadership model should further provide a well-defined means for understanding how a leader acts when faced with challenges. I agree with this concept wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, many of the current models on the market — at least in my research — lack a necessary and critically important behavioral aspect of leadership, focusing instead on the theories of leadership. The idea is that by learning and understanding theory, the leader will be able to apply it. The results have been mixed at best. I do believe that we may be providing better academic leadership education to our leaders, but without creating a direct correlation between learning, operational application, and then evaluating for effectiveness, we will always have a disconnect where the rubber meets the road.