Abstract

Increasingly, leadership development programs are being challenged to produce robust
evidence of their impact on leadership competencies of participants in South Africa. If used
properly, portfolio assessment of one`s own leadership development journey has the potential
to depict not just learning achievement, but also leadership growth and development. A
multinational corporation in South Africa outsourced to a business school a program to
develop leadership of selected 15 high-performing employees who were in transition to junior
management. To the end of this study, qualitative research was conducted to get a complex
and detailed understanding of how these participants perceived and self-assessed their own
development of a self-selected set of leadership competencies over a period of time using
portfolios. As the number was small, all the 15 personal and professional development
portfolios were collected and analyzed using open coding and constant comparison techniques to induce themes. Evidence in the portfolios showed that while emergent junior talents were able to identify specifically the leadership competencies they were developing, they actually had difficulties to capture strong, relevant, and dynamic pathways of how their leadership competencies evolved and developed over time. More importantly, evidence in the portfolio revealed that the internal reward system was less supportive as it valued individual
achievement of own performance target even at the expense of supporting others to develop
their leadership. The lack of support from mentors and colleagues stifled leadership
development of participants. This paper argues that it is vitally important that an organizations
own systems are integrated and coherent enough not to inadvertently impede leadership
development efforts.