Leadership Can Be Taught. Sharon Daloz Parks
Читать онлайн книгу.
But maybe in a work environment, with somebody I work with more interpersonally, humility would be more important.”
“Yes,” the instructor responds. “We see once again there’s not a lot of overlap. One faction wants to see me be humble and another faction wants to see me be self-confident.”
“You can be both,” says a woman in the first row.
“Well, maybe you can be both,” the instructor responds, “but there’s not a lot of room for figuring out how to do both. Not in this culture. So what am I supposed to do, invent a new culture quickly?”
The same woman acknowledges, “You can’t.”
“So I’ve got to work with what I’ve got,” observes the professor.
A young woman starts to speak, and a student across the room says, “Can’t hear you.” She starts again at higher volume:
“I guess this goes to maybe another concern I have, and I think it relates to what she is saying—about whether you as the leader or whatever are going to have an open mind about what leadership is and who leaders are. I’m a little concerned from the readings and examples that we’re looking at white guys.”
She continues,
“I think the majority of the examples in the readings and in class are of people that the press or the history books know about, and I’m sure that there are a lot of leaders that we don’t know about in our common culture—”
“So what you’re suggesting,” responds Heifetz, “is that we ought to make a key distinction between leadership and prominence, or even dominance, or even authority. Leadership is not the same as any of these. That doesn’t mean they’re mutually exclusive—you might be dominant and exercise leadership. You might even exercise leadership from a position of authority, but you might not—a lot of dominant people don’t exercise any leadership. And God knows that a lot of people in positions of authority don’t exercise any leadership. But what is leadership if it’s not these things when you tend to immediately equate them, as we do in most cultures? People refer to the leadership of the organization, the Congress, the country, or the military—and they are always referring to those people in senior positions of authority. But who knows if they are actually exercising any leadership? All we know is that they have gotten very good at finding out what people expect and how to dive through that hoop where enough peoples’ expectations overlap, or at least where the expectations of the critical factions overlap. They know how to gain authority and people give them power.
“Indeed,” he continues, “that’s all we’ve been talking about here. We’ve been talking about what expectations do I need to meet in order to get power from you? If you are going to choose to take this course, you are going to give me some of your attention. Attention is a critical source of power. People vie for attention. You might think of attention as the currency. There are two primary forms of authorization from which you gain attention: the formal authorization (in this case of the school), which only gets me in the door, and informal authorization that you will or will not choose to give me based on some of the things we have been talking about—competencies and certain sorts of personal accessibility. Humility may not fit for a lot of people. But at least everybody probably will agree that if you’re going to give somebody authority, they have to have values that overlap with some of your values. They have to sort of have their heart in the right place. They might be very competent, but they can’t abuse your trust.”
“But the complexity of authority relationships isn’t just a product of the person who’s trying to get the authority. What makes authority relationships complicated is that they consist of different publics, constituencies, and factions that each expect you to behave differently and give you authority according to different criteria. (Is he strong? Is he weak? Can she be humble? Will she take a stand and take the punches or will she try to hedge all the time?) So anybody in a position of authority is immediately caught in this bind of whose expectations to frustrate and whose to meet.”
A woman in her early thirties thoughtfully asks a question that she seems to have been working on since early in the class session:
“Can you be honest and credible—and effective?”
No hands in the air. The class seems to recognize that an important question has just been laid on the table, and the professor responds in kind:
“If you walk that razor’s edge, it can be done. But your feet will get cut up—and you might fall off. Part of our work here is to figure out how to not get too cut up and how not to fall off.”
There follows a kind of sober silence, and then a woman sitting on the radiator in the back of the class stands up to make herself visible and heard as she reflects,
“It seems to me that it would be really difficult. I’m just thinking about the position people are in right now, having to think about trying to make a commitment to a course on the basis of something that looks uncertain, given that this is the first day of classes for most people, and we don’t know what we’re comparing it with. It seems like there are lots of attempts to try and say, give me something that I can put my hands around and say a definite yes or no to. I think that what we’re hearing is that doesn’t happen; and we’re going to each have to struggle to get to our own decision.”
The professor responds respectfully:
“Part of the problem is that people know how to learn in particular ways, but this course requires that you stretch how you learn so as to be more similar to the ways you’re going to have to learn, or the ways you should have been learning, out in real organizational situations where nobody’s telling you what to learn according to an outline, and where you have got to put the knowledge together and organize it—because, indeed, there’s been a lot of very important ideas that have already been presented here. But for many of you, they’ve sifted right through your fingers because you don’t yet have the capacity to identify those important ideas because they didn’t come in a form you were expecting. I didn’t present them in a way that could make it a more familiar learning or school process. I didn’t say, ‘Roman numeral one, [he writes on the board] Authority-Leadership Distinction. Roman numeral two, Influence and Tackling Tough Problems; Roman numeral three, Authority. Point A: A product of expectations. Point B: can be divided into Formal and Informal. You see?’ ”
A man on the first row heaves a sigh, leans back in his chair, and in a tone of rueful humor says,
“This is how I feel right now. I’ve just come from a situation where I thought that I was exercising leadership, and I thought that I was accomplishing something that I thought was good for the people I was trying to serve. And everybody hated me [laughter], and I never seemed to do anything that was right. Now I say, ‘Well, let me take this leadership course.’ (Laughter) And I come in here, and you say to me, ‘No, you have to go back through all those things that you were doing wrong in order to learn how to do it right.’ So—.”
As more tension-releasing laughter ripples across the class, the instructor patiently joins the humor of the moment yet affirms:
“Yes, I know, but I can’t think of any encyclopedia for you to learn more from than the encyclopedia of your own failures and successes. If you really can understand what you saw wrong, what you did wrong, what was effective, and what you could have done differently, you’ll carry that lesson with you much more than you will carry lessons that are distilled from other people’s experiences.”
A man who looks maybe forty and very thoughtful observes out loud:
“It dispels the notion that I had—that people had convinced me of—that I was a natural leader, and now I’m really doubting that. And I hear you say, ‘No, the notion that leaders are born needs to go out the window.’ ”
The instructor sends the ball back across the court:
“You’re lucky that you’re finding this out at a young age.”
(Laughter)
The man responds,