Leadership Can Be Taught. Sharon Daloz Parks
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experience, but it is usually somewhat removed from the actual, immediate experience of the student. In the quest of a methodology that can teach further below the neck—to the default settings that people act from in a crisis—case-in-point teaching and learning seeks to make optimal use of the student’s own past and immediate experience.
In case-in-point teaching, what goes on in the classroom itself is an occasion for learning and practicing leadership within a social group. The class is recognized as a social system inevitably made up of a number of different factions and acted on by multiple forces. The class also has a clear and challenging purpose—to make progress in understanding and practicing leadership.
The teacher has a set of ideas and frameworks to offer. But instead of presenting a lecture, or starting with a written case from another context that may or may not be relevant to the learning of the people in the class, the teacher waits for a case to appear in the process of the class itself. Every group generates its own set of issues, shaped, in part, by what is set in motion by the context and content provided by the teacher-presenter and the events of the day.
The challenge is to make use of both the explicit and underlying issues that surface in the group by connecting those issues to the course content. The teacher, therefore, must reflect on what is happening in the class as it is happening, asking, “Is there any way I can use what is happening right here and now to illustrate the content I want the class to learn today?” In other words, the teacher imagines that what went on in the class for the last ten minutes was a case. Then the teacher works to use it to illustrate the theme, concept, or skill that he or she is trying to present. The work is to create a live encounter between the experience of the learner and the idea.
Everything that happens in the classroom is open to scrutiny—including the actions, inconsistencies, and blind spots of the teacher. The students are encouraged to “be on the dance floor” (that is, in the action) and also to “get on the balcony” to see if they can read the larger patterns of what is going on and figure out how to intervene in ways that will help the group make progress. All the while, the students are being offered concepts, metaphors, and frameworks that assist them in interpreting and naming what they are learning to see and do.
In this approach, the teacher remains the authority in the class-room—providing orientation and maintaining equilibrium in the group. But the teacher is also practicing leadership—skillfully allowing enough disequilibrium (confusion, frustration, disappointment, conflict, and stress) to help the group move from unexamined assumptions about the practice of leadership to seeing, understanding, and acting in tune with what the art and practice of leadership may actually require. In the process, the teacher must be aware of the various factions among the students in the room, the differing points of view that each represents, and then must find ways of recruiting, honoring, and sustaining the attention of each of them.
Four Critical Distinctions
Case-in-point teaching provides a model in real time of the practice of leadership that is being taught in the course. This approach rests on a framework for understanding and practicing leadership that rests in four critical distinctions: authority versus leadership, technical problems versus adaptive challenges, power versus progress, and personality versus presence.
Authority Versus Leadership
Heifetz and his colleagues draw a distinction between authority and leadership. Most people tend to presume that a leader is a person in a position of formal authority—the boss, CEO, president, chair, captain, supervisor, director—the head, or, similarly, the expert. All organizations depend on such roles and the functions they provide to maintain equilibrium within the social group. The functions of authority include providing orientation and direction, setting norms, resolving conflict, and, when necessary, providing protection. The approach to leadership we describe here, however, recognizes that the functions of authority often play a vital but markedly insufficient role in the practice of leadership.
In this view, the function of leadership is to mobilize people—groups, organizations, societies—to address their toughest problems. Effective leadership addresses problems that require people to move from a familiar but inadequate equilibrium—through disequilibrium—to a more adequate equilibrium. That is, today’s complex conditions require acts of leadership that assist people in moving beyond the edge of familiar patterns into the unknown terrain of greater complexity, new learning, and new behaviors, usually requiring loss, grief, conflict, risk, stress, and creativity. Often, deeply held values are both at stake and under review. Seen in this light, authority becomes only one resource and sometimes a constraint in the practice of leadership, and often a leader must act beyond his or her authorization.
Technical Problems Versus Adaptive Challenges
The second distinction at the heart of this approach flows from the first: the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges. Technical problems (even though they may be complex) can be solved with knowledge and procedures already in hand. In contrast, adaptive challenges require new learning, innovation, and new patterns of behavior. In this view, leadership is the activity of mobilizing people to address adaptive challenges—those challenges that cannot be resolved by expert knowledge and routine management alone. Adaptive challenges often appear as swamp issues—tangled, complex problems composed of multiple systems that resist technical analysis and thus stand in contrast to the high, hard ground issues that are easier to address but where less is at stake for the organization or the society.9 They ask for more than changes in routine or mere preference. They call for changes of heart and mind—the transformation of long-standing habits and deeply held assumptions and values.10
Today’s adaptive challenges may appear on any scale and within every domain. They include obvious global issues such as the growing vulnerability of all populations to untreatable epidemics, climate change, terrorism, and the widening social-economic divide. Adaptive challenges are equally likely to take the form of what is assumed to be a local, technical challenge but, in fact, requires a new mode of operating within a nonprofit agency, an engineering division, or a long-established product line.11
Power Versus Progress
When leadership is understood as an activity—the activity of making progress on adaptive challenges—there is less attention to be paid to the transactions of power and influence and more attention given to the question of whether or not progress is being made on swamp issues. Accordingly, making progress on critical adaptive challenges becomes the basic measure of effective leadership in this approach. Note the shift. When a distinction is made between “authority and technical problems” on the one hand and “leadership and adaptive challenges” on the other, the issue becomes less a matter of personal power—who has it and how they wield it—and shifts to making progress on difficult issues. This third distinction orients the practice of leadership to questions of purpose and reorders the criteria for determining whether or not one is exercising leadership effectively.
Personality Versus Presence
The fourth distinction is closely related to the third. When the focus shifts from authority and technical problems to leadership and making progress on adaptive challenges, the charisma and the traits of the individual personality may become less critical. In this view, acts of leadership depend less on the magnetism and social dominance of heroic individuals and more on the capacities of individuals (who may be located in a wide variety of positions) to skillfully intervene in complex systems. Thus, the multifaceted capacity to be present becomes a key factor in effective leadership: the quality of one’s capacity to be fully present, comprehend what is happening, hold steady in the field of action, and make choices regarding when and how to intervene from within the social group (from wherever you sit) in ways that help the group to make progress on swamp issues.
With these four critical distinctions in hand, Heifetz and his colleagues have developed a framework for analysis and intervention within social systems to help make progress on tough, adaptive challenges.
An Assessment
A survey assessment of this approach, published in 1989, found that of the 165 former