Leadership Can Be Taught

CHAPTER SIX

What Endures?

The Power of Language, Image, and Metaphor

ANY COURSE, program, seminar, training, workshop, or coach-client relationship may be experienced as valuable at the time and incorporated into what one knows. But in the long term, it may have little effect on ongoing thought and action. Leadership education is intended to affect significantly the actual practice of professional life however, so the critical question is, “What endures?”

It is enormously difficult to trace reliably the direct cause-and-effect relationship between professional education and subsequent practice. So it is rare that leadership educators can claim more than anecdotal evidence for the value of their enterprise—often drawn from comments made during ...