To look within: a holistic approach to inner development of leaders

Leaders set the tone and culture in their teams and organisations. Leader development involves developing the capacity of the leader in order to inspire, influence, and perform their role effectively. The two interwoven layers that every leader needs to access and nurture include 'being' and 'doing', as who the leader is, influences what they do. Several studies focus on competencies (doing) for leader development. While the inner layer has been studied as capacities, traits, values, and needs, relatively fewer studies focus on the 'being' layer as comprising qualities of the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual parts of being. This conceptual paper is oriented to the transformation and change needed inside-out and proposes a holistic framework which enables self-awareness and introspection across the above four domains. They are then mapped with reflected indicative capacities, competencies, external actions, and behaviours. Implications to leader development and future empirical research directions are discussed.