Leadership Can Be Taught. Sharon Daloz Parks
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side opens into a multitiered classroom with places for ninety students. This is the primary setting in which this approach to teaching leadership has been developed and practiced for the past two and a half decades.
Luxury and Necessity
The opportunity to learn the art and practice of leadership in such a setting might be perceived as a luxury far removed from the experience of most people who aspire to practice or teach leadership. Relatively few imagine that they have either the time or the financial resources to invest in learning something that is, after all, regarded by many as simply a gift or talent. But taking a closer look in the way this book provides leads to the discovery that this approach is not a luxury and need not be confined to any single setting. Rather, it can be used to reveal essential features of a practice of leadership that can be learned and used throughout today’s new commons. This approach, necessarily translated into other settings and expressions, is offered here as one powerful form of learning vital aspects of the art of leadership, a critical feature of the art of life—and a necessity in an increasingly interdependent, complex, dangerous, and demanding world.
Now, we step into the classroom.
CHAPTER TWO
How Do We Begin?
Differing Expectations
IT IS SEPTEMBER. Cambridge is all blue sky and leaves ready to turn into flame. High spirits and purposefulness abound as the pace quickens in Harvard Square and classes get under way across the university, including PAL 101—Exercising Leadership: Mobilizing Group Resources.
Close to the appointed hour, there is a steady hubbub of talk among the ninety students who have found a seat in six horseshoe-shaped tiers of desks. Sitting in the aisles, up the steps, and on the radiators across the back of the room are almost another hundred students plus their book bags, jackets, and briefcases. These students have arrived on time, but all the chairs have been filled, so they are wedging themselves onto whatever perches they can find. Some are certain they want this course; for others the course is still on trial. Everyone is wondering how many students will be admitted.
Two teaching assistants (TAs) are setting up a tape recorder and checking the microphones.1 Another is passing around syllabi. Still another is informally fielding questions about if and how students will be admitted to the course. About ten minutes after the hour, the instructor, Ronald Heifetz, steps to the front of the room.
He is carefully groomed, wearing a trim, classic, comfortable suit and tie. He is in his forties, slim, not very tall, has dark hair, and bears a mix of seriousness and anticipation. As the rustling subsides into the conventional opening-of-class silence, he just stands there, simply looking back at the class, making eye contact around the room, not speaking. The silence lengthens uncomfortably. No one is quite as sure as they were a few moments earlier about who they are and what they are doing. In that pause, the expected conventions are broken open.
The pause is finally ended by the instructor, who asks a question:
“How many of you have been in a position where you were given a new role, some kind of responsibility and authority, and then walked into a room for the first time where people were gathered for a meeting, and they expected you to be responsible for how they would proceed?”
Most of the students, ranging in age from mid-twenties to sixty, raise their hands. Then he says, “Well, then many of you know something about the position I’m in right now.” (There is quiet laughter of recognition around the room.) “So,” he continues, “maybe we can begin learning about leadership and authority by studying the position I’m in right now.” There is another pause.
Then he says,
“What are my options? How should I be thinking strategically about my first moves and second moves and third moves? Is that first moment—when you walk in and a group of people are doing what people usually do to somebody who they haven’t met before who’s in a position of authority in relationship to them, that is, largely checking him or her out—is that moment important? What have you done when you have been in that situation?”
If the class needs more prompting, he suggests, “What do other teachers do?”
A series of suggestions and responses ensues:
“You could tell a joke.”
“Why would I do that?”
“To build rapport with the class—to put people at ease.”
“Yes, and would that be a good thing to do?”
“Might be.”
“Yes, it might be, but rapport and learning aren’t necessarily the same. This is a class on learning leadership, and most of you have been exercising leadership already, which is why you are here. I have too much respect for the scars you already have on your back from trying to do that.”
There is another pause as the truth of what he has just said sinks in, and the class recognizes that something more than a class may be at stake here.
“So,” he continues, “I am reluctant to begin with a joke. What else might I do?”
“You need to gain respect.”
“Yes, that would be nice. How would I do that?”
“You don’t need to do that; you’re at Harvard.”
“But we all know that being a teacher at Harvard only gets you about ten minutes.”
(Laughter)
“You could tell us what we can expect in the course.”
“Yes, you come with a set of expectations, don’t you? And already I have countered some of your expectations. What are the risks of that?”
“We may find it interesting, or we may be disappointed.”
“So what would be the right move?”
A woman named Gretchen suggests,
“At some point I think it’s important to say that I have some concern, because I understand the course enrollment will be limited. I don’t know how that’s going to be handled. So it might be important to hear from you about that.”
“So what you would like to see is that I very quickly read what is going to be a dominant issue in the group, and if I don’t speak to that concern right away, then there is going to be disappointment, and I would lose some credibility. Let’s say, for example, that I never spoke to your concern. Let’s say I was really lame. Let’s say you asked me a question about it, and I said, that’s not in the script, that’s not what we’re doing in this first session.”
“Then you ought to be a politician!” a student calls out from the back of the room.
“Politicians are generally pretty good at assessing the current concern and speaking to it,” the instructor responds.
“They speak to something,” says a student sitting directly in front of the instructor in the second row, “but it’s not usually the real concern. They prevaricate, they hedge, they work around the system, but they don’t address the question directly if it’s something they don’t want to answer.”
“And why would they do that, do you think?” asks the instructor.
“They’re serving their interest. They don’t want to be put on the spot. They don’t want to be painted into a corner.”
“Well, whose interest—?”
“And they also want to address the topics that they have on their agenda,” says the student, obviously wanting to be sure he isn’t painted into a corner.
The professor leans forward, hands on the desk, and says directly, clearly, and also with a sense of exploration,
“To commit is to alienate. So when you say ‘their self-interest,’ their self-interest is complicated because they need to win votes. So that means here they