Leadership development within higher education has grown in importance over recent years. A study by John Burgoyne and his colleagues in 2009 noted that development is now ‘high on the agendas of policy-makers and senior managers in higher education institutions’. However, they observed that there was room for much closer alignment between development and the strategic goals that institutions had set themselves. Their report also found that although some evaluation of the effectiveness of leadership development was widespread, it was mostly informal rather than systematic. In consequence, higher education institutions (HEIs) were often unclear about the effectiveness of their investment in leadership development. The key theme of the present paper is how to meet this challenge.
