Leadership in Action: Leadership Is Change - Or Is It?

How It All Began

Benchmarks, which is designed to assess skills and perspectives related to managerial effectiveness, was originally developed from research conducted in the 1980s. The bulk of the information on which Benchmarks was based came from two major studies, one dealing with “key events” and the other with executive derailment. In the key events research, seventy-nine senior executives from three Fortune 100 corporations were asked to think about their careers as managers, to identify events that had had a lasting impact, and to reflect on the lessons learned from those experiences. The derailment research involved interviews with nineteen top executives. Each was asked about two executives he or she knew well—one who had succeeded and ...