Doing leadership development through mentoring in a social learning space: the case of the inaugural Leadership Learning Lab

The purpose of this paper is to describe and contextualize the processes of leadership development through mentoring in a Leadership Learning Lab (“the Lab”) and to explore the implications and applications of the Lab's approach as a social learning space.

The authors used a constructivist grounded theoretical approach and conducted semi-structured interviews with participants in the Lab, which operated out of a leadership center in a mid-sized Canadian business school.

The findings show that participants used their individual life experiences to practice leadership development through mentoring in a social learning space of prescribed uncertainty. The participants identified with becoming flexible, self-actualized leaders by learning to view their own experiences and those of their Lab partners through a leadership lens.

This study contributes to an understanding of the “doing” of leadership development in a social learning space and highlights three relational processes through which leadership development emerged through mentoring: rapport-building, democratization and reflection.