Evaluating Behavioral and Organizational Outcomes of Leadership Development in Human Service Organizations

ABSTRACT

The health of the human services sector depends upon equipping both emerging and current leaders with key leadership skills to help them increase their organization’s capacity and effectiveness. Yet while most leadership development programs intend that participants will acquire and apply new learning, program assessment tends to focus more on the acquisition of knowledge and skills rather than the application of learning through changed behaviors that lead to desired organizational outcomes. We provide a summary of current leadership development efforts and new orientations, describe the development of a flexible, embedded in practice, human services leadership and management certificate program, and highlight potential and planned strategies for evaluating and measuring change in both individual leaders or a collective group of leaders within or across organizations, and in organizational outcomes, all of which can be replicated and enhanced in future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Human service organizations
• leadership development
• evaluation
• behavioral outcomes
• organizational outcomes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.