The advantages of a transorganisational approach for developing senior executives

Purpose – Developing capable and competent executives remains a critical and ongoing challenge for many organisations due to the ever changing landscape of the global business environment. Traditional executive development methods in artificial, once removed “classroom” type environments do not prepare executives sufficiently with the experience and insights needed to handle the complexities and uncertainties that befall them in the current volatile business environment. The purpose of this paper is to study the development of senior executives in a more real-world and authentic manner, that a leading Asia-based conglomerate has developed a senior executive “peer-to-peer” learning approach that brings together chief executives and senior managers from a number of businesses so they can share and learn from each other. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents by way of a narrative description an alternative approach to classroom-based executive development. The paper looks at some of the limitations of more traditional executive development methods by contrasting these with a peer-to-peer learning framework that has been used successfully over the last 12 years. It outlines the why, what and how to implement a peer-to-peer learning practice based on transorganisational development (TD) practices to facilitate individual and organisational change. Findings – Getting senior executives out of the “classroom” and in front of executives from other businesses and organisations in a real-world peer-to-peer learning environment, exposes “participants” to a more credible, grounded and authentic development opportunity, that is difficult to replicate with more traditional methods. The diversity of delegates and companies that engage in this approach enable “participants” to explore new ideas and to confront, in very direct ways, their predispositions to repeat well-learned institutional responses which may have helped them succeed in the past. Originality/value – Although much of the literature on TD focuses predominately on the initiation, planning and implementation of system or organisation wide change, little has been written to emphasise how TD makes a viable contribution to the understanding of the processes of change at an individual level. By highlighting this the authors intend to make the relationship more explicit, thereby opening up prospects for TD’s wider use in the field senior executive development.