Leadership Can Be Taught. Sharon Daloz Parks
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to teaching and learning leadership to be either the “most useful” or “much more useful” than their other Harvard courses, and similarly the “most useful” or “much more useful” than previous leadership or management training.12
Seeking methods and approaches to leadership education that had depth, wisdom, and the potential to make a significant contribution to the larger good subsequently attracted the Lilly Endowment to this work. I was invited to further study, describe, and assess this approach using qualitative methods. Informed by the earlier survey, the consistently high level of student course evaluations, initial observations of the course, and my own teaching and research in the formation of leadership and ethics in three professional schools, I accepted. This approach was breaking some new ground, consolidating several strands of emergent theory and practice, and exploring ways of learning and practicing leadership more aligned with the emerging experience of complexity and change that characterizes the everyday challenges that managers, executives, project directors, and others face.
After several years of study and assessment, I have come to affirm that this approach provides both a response to today’s hungers for leadership and a remarkably effective teaching methodology.13 As a sustained experiment in rethinking leadership and how to learn it, this approach can spur the imagination of those who practice leadership and especially those who dare to teach leadership—instructors, coaches, supervisors, and mentors working within professional schools, corporate leadership and management training programs, undergraduate leadership programs, community development initiatives, or issue-oriented endeavors.
The Terrain Ahead
The purpose of this book, therefore, is to describe, interpret, and assess this particular approach as a vivid and effective example of how leadership for the common good—the well-being of today’s commons—can be taught in ways that are relevant across all sectors.
Building on observation, interviews, and analysis, this approach is explored along several sight lines: the content (the theory), the way it is taught (the method), the experience of the students, and the experience of teachers and coaches who have effectively taken up this approach. Chapter 2 steps right into the classroom, immersing the reader in the actual dynamics of the opening session of the course as taught at Harvard. Like the students themselves, you may emerge from this experience both intrigued and disoriented, asking “what’s really going on here?” Chapters 3 through 5 seek to answer that question by looking at key features of the theory and the course design.
Chapter 3 explains how the case-in-point approach may be used to develop skills for identifying issues and factions within any social group and intervening strategically on behalf of some larger purpose. This chapter also explores the deeper significance of the cognitive and emotional shift that the achievement of systemic awareness represents for the practice of leadership.
Chapter 4 reveals how the students’ own leadership failures are brought into disciplined dialogue with the theory to generate insight into personal blind spots and open a broader repertoire of creative responses for the next time.
Then, challenging the conventional assumption that personality is all and that leadership charisma is something one must be born with, chapter 5 conveys how this approach offers pathways for developing the more valuable quality of presence—the ability to intervene, to hold steady, inspire a group, and work in both verbal and nonverbal realms.
After the essence and structure of the approach are laid out in the first half of the book, another set of questions is taken up in the second half. These include two challenges in the transferability of the approach. First, how readily do the lessons of this approach transfer back into the workplace? Courses or training sessions may seem powerful in the moment, but often quickly fade when participants return to business as usual. What kind of staying power does this approach have? Second, how readily can it be picked up by other teacher-practitioners? Can its essential elements be used in quite different settings to good effect? In short, what are the prospects for cultivating the leadership now needed by broadening the reach of this promising approach?
Chapter 6 seeks to answer the first of these questions by following former students back into their workplaces and listening to them describe how they continue to use the insights of this approach. A key finding is that learning distilled into images and metaphors has remarkable staying power, even to the point of affecting people’s behavioral default settings.
Chapters 7 and 8 address the development and transferability of this approach from a teacher’s perspective. First, what does it feel like to create and practice a way of teaching that keeps the teacher on the edge of new learning and under constant scrutiny? Chapter 7 offers a rare opportunity to hear Ronald Heifetz reflect on the genesis of this approach and his own experience of learning to teach in this mode. Then, chapter 8 introduces several other teachers who have successfully adopted this approach and describes how it is modified and evolves when transferred into markedly different contexts—other institutions, executive coaching, professional consulting, undergraduate leadership development, and other cultures.
To fully assess the potential contribution of this approach, chapter 9 offers one additional perspective—a reconsideration of our culture’s myth of leadership itself. It unveils a deeper level of what is really going on here. By comparing today’s prevailing command and control models of leadership with an alternative model drawn from the creative process of artists, I will show how this approach helps us all make progress on what is arguably a central adaptive challenge of our time: the transformation of the prevailing myth of leadership. I believe that the mix of intrigue, disorientation, and hope that many experience when first encountering this approach to teaching and learning leadership stems precisely from this challenge. Our times call for a reconfigured understanding of the art of leadership because inherent in our ideas about leadership are deep assumptions about the social contract and how progress gets made. We are in the midst of creating a new understanding, birthing new images even as we learn to act in alignment with them.
Finally, chapter 10 reflects on the strengths and limits of this approach as a whole and its possible trajectories into the future.
Setting the Scene
Teaching and learning the art of leadership occurs in a wide range of places, both formal and informal. The approach described here has been cultivated primarily in the context of a professional school—the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where the work is now anchored in the school’s Center for Public Leadership. The Kennedy School is dedicated to enhancing the effectiveness of people who exercise leadership in public life, a function that necessarily places it in direct partnership with the other professional schools at the university—Business, Dentistry, Design, Divinity, Education, Law, Medicine, and Public Health.
The school seeks students who have demonstrated potential for leadership, managerial capability, analytical talent, and ethical sensitivity. These students come from the United States and the wider international community. Some are elected officials and legislators; some are military officers; others are present or prospective heads of government agencies, for-profit, or nonprofit organizations; still others are policy analysts or journalists. The students range in age from twenty-three to sixty (most are in mid-career), and they are enrolled in several degree and other special programs. Collectively they represent a broad field of experience, perspectives, ideologies, hopes, and concerns. Many of their courses focus on policy and analysis. They necessarily deal also with the questions of meaning, ethics, and leadership.
The scope and vitality of the school’s work is revealed, in part, in the activity of the Forum—an imaginatively designed, multipurpose space at the center of the school. Three floors of classroom, seminar, and office space open into a rotundalike area that continually hums with conversation—among the clusters of students that spill out of the surrounding classrooms, in the gatherings over coffee or lunch on the first level, in the soft-seating areas adjacent to the open stairways, and in the study group carrels that ring the perimeter of the second and third levels. Several times a week, this space is transformed into a formal amphitheater where national and international figures debate critical issues, and electronic media bring the life of the wider global commons into the heart of the school. The Forum promotes both