Leadership Can Be Taught. Sharon Daloz Parks
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particularly in times of stress and fear. What is new is that there is now a hunger for leadership that (3) can deal with the intensification of systemic complexity emerging from the cybernetic, economic, political, and ecological realities that have created a more connected and interdependent world; and (4) can respond adaptively to the depth, scope, and pace of change that combined with complexity creates unprecedented conditions. Finally, (5) this new landscape creates a new moral moment in history.1 Critical choices must be made within significantly changed conditions, a greater diversity of perspectives must be taken into account, assumed values are challenged, and there is a deepened hunger for leadership that can exercise a moral imagination and moral courage on behalf of the common good.
Leadership for the Common Good in a Complex, Changing World
The image at the root of the concept of the common good is “the commons.” Aligning command-and-control, trait-based, and other prevailing models of leadership with the common good becomes more difficult as “the commons” is being transformed. The new commons in which we now find ourselves is both global in scope and relentlessly local in impact. In a simpler time, the village green, the market square, Main Street, the wharf, the great plaza, the town, the city, or even the nation offered a sense of a shared life within a manageable frame. Today’s new commons requires participation in a more dynamic, interdependent, and vast web of life—within a frame growing increasingly unmanageable.2 In the complexity and change of this new complex commons, hardworking managers who contribute their best find that success in the past does not necessarily translate into the present as new forces thwart their best intentions. Even highly talented people are vulnerable to finding themselves blindsided and their efforts stymied as the new landscape seems to be a place where “vision” has become problematic and competencies are required that can’t be reduced to a toolbox.
Leadership for today’s world requires enlarging one’s capacity to see the whole board, as in a chess match—to see the complex, often volatile interdependence among the multiple systems that constitute the new commons. This capacity is vital to the best aspirations of democratic societies, for democracy presses toward inclusion but functions poorly without leadership.3 Because power in democratic systems tends to be more circular than linear, to rest in networks more than in hierarchies, those who would practice effective leadership must practice a high degree of imagination, pragmatism, and trust, without falling prey to naïveté.4 They must hold steady in the face of uncertainty and threat, while remaining creatively open to the demands of changing circumstances, enabling people who may represent significant differences to create together something that is both workable and worthy. Whether it is being worked out within the life of a corporation or the life of a marginalized community, effective leadership in the service of democratic principles is not an easy practice.
Despite these changes and challenges, a deep ambivalence remains regarding the object of today’s hungers for leadership. Are we simply to wait for born leaders to appear? There is a strong temptation (as in every age) simply to look for gifted persons who will hold positions of formal authority and who will make the needed difference. Traditional understandings of leadership akin to this impulse focus on personality characteristics, situation analysis, and transactions of power and influence. Now, however, a growing consensus among leadership theorists and practitioners is that in a networked society with power and information widely distributed, the presumption of “born leaders” along with command-and-control leadership models are inadequate. Yet, though there have been calls for a recomposing of the art and myth of leadership, larger-than-life heroic leaders continue to be studied and offered as models.5 Why? Because we haven’t developed good alternatives—both in content and method.
Can Leadership Be Taught?
If leaders are not simply “born,” can leadership be taught? It has been well acknowledged that it is difficult to teach for the world of professional practice. It is particularly difficult to teach for the practice of leadership. Teaching and learning are typically conceived as a matter of transmitting knowledge: teaching as telling. Conventionally, such transfer of knowledge is presumed to occur through a formal or informal process of reading, lecture, or presentation from an expert in the field, perhaps some discussion (primarily involving students’ questions and the teacher’s answers), note taking, and perhaps also term papers and exams. Within this paradigm of teaching and learning, and across every sector and profession, it is one thing to teach knowledge of the field, and it is quite another to prepare people to exercise the judgment and skill needed to bring that knowledge into the intricate systems of relationships that constitute the dynamic world of practice. It is yet another challenge altogether to prepare someone to practice leadership within the profession and the communities it serves—to prepare a physician, for example, to practice leadership within a hospital system and the regional, national, or world health care systems as well as to care for individual patients.
Learning by Doing and the Artistry of Good Coaching
In his classic, Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schon eloquently argued that people cannot simply be told what they need to know in the complexity of practice. They must learn to see for themselves. What is needed is access to coaches who initiate the learner into the “traditions of the calling” and help them by “the right kind of telling” to see on their own behalf and in their own way what they most need to see. “We ought, then,” he wrote, “to study the experience of learning by doing and the artistry of good coaching. We should base our study on the working assumption that both processes are intelligent and—within limits to be discovered—intelligible. And we ought to search for examples wherever we can find them.”6
Building on these assumptions, this book affirms that leadership can be taught. We do so by looking in depth at one particular approach to practicing and teaching leadership that responds to Schon’s call for “learning by doing and the artistry of good coaching.” This is found in the work of Ronald Heifetz, author of Leadership Without Easy Answers, and coauthor with Marty Linsky of Leadership On the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading.7 Across more than two decades, Heifetz and his colleagues at Harvard University have pioneered a distinctive, bold approach to learning and teaching leadership, created and practiced in a manner that is responsive to the hungers for a new story about what leadership means and asks—and ways of learning it. Other theorists and practitioners also have begun to explore new understandings of leadership that more adequately honor an interdependent, systemic awareness, and the need for significant shifts in perspective and practice. Fewer, however, have wrestled with the attendant questions: Can leadership be learned? If it can be learned, can it be taught? And, if so, what methods or approaches will work? Is teaching an act of leadership? If leading involves risk, what are the risks involved in teaching leadership? Can new insight move beyond conceptual awakening and actually change leadership behavior at the level of default settings—habitual ways of responding, especially in crisis and under stress?
The response of Heifetz and his colleagues to these questions is an approach that artfully integrates a set of ideas—a framework for understanding a practice of leadership fitting to today’s world—with a corresponding teaching methodology that is congruent with those ideas. The methodology is called case-in-point.
Case-in-Point
Case-in-point teaching, as Heifetz and his colleagues have developed it, draws on several well-established learning traditions and methods—seminar, simulation, presentation of ideas and perspectives (through lecture, reading, and film), discussion and dialogue, clinical-therapeutic practice, coaching, the laboratory, the art studio, writing as a form of disciplined reflection, and the case study method.
The celebrated case study method pioneered by Harvard’s law and business schools is a powerful research methodology (critical to helping scholar-practitioners analyze data and work inductively with concepts that may apply broadly across multiple contexts). It is also a powerful pedagogical tool (giving students multiple situations, concepts, and images to work with as they think about experiences that they haven’t yet had).8
Educators, at least since John Dewey, have persuasively argued that human beings, and particularly adults, learn best from their