New Report Reveals Impact of Your Leadership Edge

The Your Leadership Edge (YLE) leadership development program hosted by the Kansas Leadership Center (KLC) aims to develop individuals’ leadership capacity on adaptive challenges, regardless of their formal leadership position or context. The program conceptualizes leadership as an activity and creative approach to solving organizational and community challenges.

Our researchers were curious to understand how YLE helps people bridge the gap between learning and practicing leadership.

The findings of this new study, conducted by KLC’s Third Floor Research and the LeAD Labs at Claremont Graduate University, showed that:

1. Transformational leader behavior and self-views significantly increased over time after the YLE program.
2. The YLE program goes beyond impacting behavioral changes and moves the needle on psychological changes in participants’ leadership self-concept (i.e., leader identity, self-efficacy, and self-awareness).
3. Behavior change is primarily attributed to an experimental mindset and the toolsets KLC uses to equip their participants.
4. Race is a significant predictor of leader developmental readiness and transformational leader behavior, with underrepresented minority (URM) participants scoring higher, on average, on both variables.
5. People’s motivation to learn from the YLE program surpassed their ability.
6. Individuals describe their leadership actions without relying on positional authority, while also acknowledging the presence of discomfort.