"This book is a highly accessible, comprehensive compendium of leadership development strategies and a 'must read' for anyone trying to improve his or her own skills or those of another." Nancy T. Tippins, Senior Vice President and Managing Principal, Valtera Corporation "Drs. Yost and Plunkett have achieved a great feat-delivering practical developmental advice that is rooted in research. I highly recommend their book to anyone who wishes to develop stronger leadership skills." Robert E. Lewis, PhD, Director, APT, Inc. "Mary Mannion Plunkett and Paul Yost provide a well researched, authentic, and easy to apply guide for managers and HR professionals in understanding and applying leadership development principles. Based on the authors' real experiences in corporate settings, this is advice and counsel you should adopt as your own." Peter M. Morton, VP Leadership Development (retired), The Boeing Company; VP Human Resources (retired), Boeing Commercial Airplanes PLEASE USE THE SHORT MORTON QUOTE FOR BACK OF BOOK, AND THIS LONGER ONE BELOW FOR THE "PRAISE FOR" PAGE INSIDE: "Mary Mannion Plunkett and Paul Yost did something remarkable in the exploration of leadership and career development: they asked leaders themselves about development experiences; they did it in a systematic and scientific way, they applied it to a diagonal and diverse slice of company managers, and they tracked careers through a longitudinal study over many years. Real Time Leadership Development provides unique insight into seminal career events that produce real learning, provoke actual behavior change, and cause leadership evolution. It also shows real insight into the responsibility of leaders (and the tools they can use) to develop successors. We should have known this all along; ask a retired executive what she/he remembers of their career and rarely will you hear about a course they took or a book they read; mostly they will recall the challenges they experienced in their first staff assignment where they had responsibility without authority; the time they presided over a task force to fix something that was broken; the time they gave themselves a failing grade (even if the organization gave them a pass) for lacking the courage to speak truth to power; and so on. Real Time Leadership Development is more than a distillation of career change pointers from the authors' own research; in it you will also find best practices in traditional tasks of leadership development: performance management, mentoring, networking, leadership training, high potential and succession management, and systematic human resource development. Kudos to Mary and Paul for shining a spotlight of facts and data on previously mysterious and opinion-laden processes, and on what stimulates authentic evolution of leadership potential latent in most of us. And for providing useful, easily assimilated tools and processes in an accessible format to implement best practices they have seen in human resource and leadership development." Peter M. Morton, VP Leadership Development (retired), The Boeing Company; VP Human Resources (retired), Boeing Commercial Airplanes