“…One reason for the failure of formal leadership training is that a leader only develops from formal programming or job/life experience to the extent that he or she is purposefully engaging in an autonomous and self‐regulated growth process—a process defined in the current article as leader self‐development . Although other critical accelerators of leader development include goal‐setting (Johnson, Garrison, Hernez‐Broome, Fleenor, & Steed, ), learning orientation (Dragoni, Tesluk, Russell, & Oh, ), challenging experiences (McCauley, Ruderman, Ohlott, & Morrow, ), experimentation with new identities (Ibarra, ; Miscenko, Guenter, & Day, ), and feedback (DeRue & Wellman, ), the sine qua non is the leader's own internal processes.…”