New Water Policy and Practice Issue 4, Number 1, Fall 2017 | Page 26

New Water Policy & Practice Journal
ship development professionals as a simple framework to help identify water lead-
ers who may be at risk of falling into the traps. Identifying these people early in
their careers can be particularly valuable, as an early intervention should result in
a significant return on investment over their careers.
Second, the guidance provided in this paper can be used by the same group
of people to help emerging water leaders to build the self-awareness, knowledge,
and skills needed to avoid or escape these traps. For example, a supervisor could
work with one of their direct reports who is falling into the “individualistic leader”
trap to jointly agree on a set of professional development activities that will help to
improve their leadership performance (e.g. working with an experienced mentor
who excels at playing the champion role and collaborating with others).
Third, the framework and guidance provided in this paper represents an
instrument for self-leadership. Specifically, it could be used by emerging water
leaders to reflect on their own leadership-related mindsets, personality traits and
behaviors, and assess whether they are currently in any of these traps, or have the
potential to fall into them. This should help to build self-awareness, which is a
pre-requisite for effective leadership and leadership development (Avolio 2005).
The guidance should also help them to design and steer their own leadership
development activities, which is a best practice principle of leader development
(Adair 2005).
There are also two significant limitations of the information presented in
this paper. First, the six leadership traps shown in Figure 1 are not exhaustive.
There are others. It is suggested, however, that the six described in this paper are
the most common and a manageable set to advance our knowledge base of leader-
ship development traps that can limit the growth of emerging water leaders.
The second limitation is that the conclusions of this paper are primarily
based on the experience of the author as a leadership development specialist who
has worked closely with a diverse group of water leaders at the project leader to
middle management level over the last 10 years. As such, no firm conclusions can
be reached about the extent to which these development traps are also present in
other groups of leaders who work in different contexts.
5. Conclusions
T
he primary aim of this paper has been to share some of the author’s learn-
ings from working as a leadership development specialist with a diverse
group of emerging water leaders to help improve our collective ability to
enable these leaders to drive positive change. The water sector is facing many pro-
found challenges, some of which affect the lives of the most vulnerable people on
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