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Leadership and leadership training: Page 1 of 16 Leadership processes and leadership development: ADVERTISEMENT Reflections from a social constructionist paradigm Dian Marie Hosking This paper applies arguments about the processes of construction to leadership training, and development. It begins by noting calls for, and the benefits of,paradigm diversity. The second section outlines a ‘social constructionist’ paradigm in which the focus is on socially and historically constructed realities and the processes of reality construction . In this view, multiple social realities are simultaneously constructed – not as variations on ‘real’ reality or as subjective knowledge – but as different local ontologies or cultures. The last part of the paper explores how leadership training and development might be differently conceived, given this changed paradigm context. Useful practices are suggested to include ways that: (a) work with local leadership constructions; (b) involve all participants – not just formally appointed leaders; (c) generate and support multiple local constructions, and so; (d) construct and legitimate the principle of open, multi-logical collaborative ways of relating. Transitional Spaces, New Questions, New Possibilities Talk about leadership processes and relations, as with all kinds of talk, necessarily implicates many taken-for-granteds. Just what is assumed and what offered for discussion depends on the particular local-cultural narratives of communicating participants. ‘Taken-for-granted’ knowledge, also spoken of as assumptions, recently became the focus of many methodologies of change, development, and learning. For example, in organisational change work, programmes often work with clients to ‘surface’ fu