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Leadership scholar-practitioners seldom need to be sold on the benefits of working together. Rather leadership educators want to know how to teach adult leadership scholar-practitioners how to work together across differences. The aim of this paper is to guide leadership development practitioners on how to nurture leadership that can address the complex problems the changing global arena demand of us today and into the future. We argue when preparing adult leadership scholar-practitioners, using adult learning theories and paying attention to the interdisciplinary roots of the field of leadership might lead to better learning and engagement with real world challenges. In this paper we present a leadership development model we call interdisciplinary leadership. First, we discuss the interdisciplinary roots of leadership. Second, we describe interdisciplinary leadership as a tapestry – an intricate combination of identities, practices, and outcomes used to prepare people to address complex problems. Finally, we describe the mission, structure, curriculum, and instructional strategies that can be used by leadership educators when applying interdisciplinary leadership. This model acknowledges the identity, practices, and outcomes needed to develop scholar-practitioners of leadership and provides practical techniques to help leadership educators prepare leaders to work together across differences to address complex problems.

The purpose of this article is to share with leadership educators a writing exercise designed to provide doctoral students enrolled in an Administrative and Policy Leadership course an opportunity to gain experience with building collective will for policy advocacy on a social justice issue. This article describes the use of a letter writing assignment including the background and justification for using letter writing rather than other forms of writing across the curriculum, instructions for students to complete the assignment, and examples and ideas for grading and providing constructive and instructive feedback to leadership students. The article concludes with recommendations and potential assignment modifications for leadership educators that choose to adopt this type of writing assignment within their leadership training curriculum.