The Unconventional Leadership of Corporate Leaders in the 21st Century
This paper discusses the various traits that modern corporate leaders of the 21st century that have adopted a different approach towards leadership and have guided their company to newer heights. Amongst the leaders discussed in this research paper is, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page. The purpose of this paper is to explore the decisions and choices that these revolutionary leaders have made and what made them different. At the end of this paper, we will learn of what are the good ideologies or practices we can take from them.
Strengths coaching with leaders
psychology share much of a common heritage, in that they have both developed in response to the status quo of the field, which was deficit-based, pathologyfocused, and driven by fundamental assumptions about human nature that were less than positive, to put it mildly. In contrast, positive psychology and coaching psychology are abundance-based, solution-focused and driven (typically) by fundamental assumptions about human nature which hold that people have within them a natural tendency to want to grow and develop their potential, and when their environment supports them in doing so, they thrive (Linley & Harrington, 2005). This shift in emphasis and assumption has led many practitioners of positive psychology and coaching psychology to operate in ways different to traditional approaches to leadership and organisational capability development (see, for example, Biswas-Diener & Dean, 2007; Linley & Harrington, 2006). In this article, we will show how we have blended positive psychology, strengths approaches, and coaching psychology to develop leadership strengths coaching programmes and practices that are focused on developing senior leaders and enhancing the organisational capability of the corporations that employ them. We begin our article by introducing some of the history of strengths approaches in management and organisations, before going on to look specifically at how this has provided the foundation for our current work in strengths coaching for leaders. Having provided the background for our approach, we then describe some of our key practices, illustrating them with a number of short composite case examples, demonstrating the effects that they have had on our leadership clients and their organisations. To begin, though, we focus on one specific element of the leadership challenge where coaching psychologists can have a significant impact: leaders as climate engineers.
Initial Teacher Training: the French view
ABSTRACT This paper, against the background of trends in the development of initial teacher training in Europe as a whole, identifies and explains some of the recent, radical reforms which were introduced in France by a socialist government. These include the need to raise the status and the competence of the teaching profession; the creation of new teacher‐training institutions of university status (Instituts universitaires de formation des maitres); the introduction of common entry qualifications at degree level for both primary and secondary levels; the harmonisation and the extension to 2 years of the post‐degree teacher‐training course and the increase in emphasis placed on professional training, both theoretical and practical. These reforms provoked a storm of protest and an examination of the reasons for this reveals a multiplicity of crucial questions which have far‐reaching implications.