THE JOURNEY

of Gareth & I from 2017 to 2022

& 9 influential factors on Leadership Development

In 2017, I had the opportunity to experience a 12-week course to study leadership as a part of my master’s degree in International Management in the UK. Earlier to that, I always associated leadership with something big, just for someone in a big organization or a country, and ambiguous. The leadership perception wall was consciously and subconsciously socially constructed. Each day, each brick in the wall was slowly taken down to open a diverse picture of leadership.

It seems that when we focus on something, opportunities start showing up. I was invited to be a speaker in a collaborative leadership conference. My journey of leadership development moved to the next chapter when I met one of the most experienced professors on leadership topic - Gareth. He guided me in my study interviewing different SMEs' owners/managers to be able to publish the leadership book 'The leadership development journey'.

The book aims to give you a clear big picture of different perspectives on leadership in literature/practice and the common patterns that help the interviewed leaders develop their leadership capability/identity in SMEs’ context. The book was published in 2018.

After publishing the book, I still wanted to publish our study in an international paper, I however went back to Vietnam in 2018. My focus changed to my biz in Vietnam. Gareth was not giving up on helping me to reach out to different international journals. We got turned off by 3 different journals, Gareth didn't give up on me.

Yesterday finally we got accepted by the Journal of Management Development.

It is a beautiful journey, isn't it? Having someone trusting your vision and not giving up on your vision with you.

HOPE YOU NEVER GIVE UP ON YOUR JOURNEY!

---About our study---

Based on interviewing almost hundreds of entrepreneurial leaders, we found that: the leadership development journey in this study is a self-development process embedded in a social learning environment. The study found nine influential factors on leadership development:

• Social factors: parents, teamwork sport activities,

teachers, role models, mentors/coaches, community-based

networks

• Self factors: self-learning, experimentation,

self-reflection