Leadership Can Be Taught. Sharon Daloz Parks
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the same. Some people want one thing,” he gestures toward one side of the room, “and other people want something else—right?” he asks, eyeing the other side of the room. “You have factions, each of which is pulling this politician in a different direction. So one faction poses a question and the politician immediately does this internal calculation: How is this going to play with my other factions? Can I afford to alienate them? I’d better hedge here. So, you are right, they’re always hedging. Now is it because they themselves are just constitutionally predisposed to be liars? To not commit to anything?”
(Laughter)
Another student speaks up:
“If they had the choice, they’d section off one section of the room, talk to that group, turn to the next section, tell them what they want to hear, and turn to the next section—they talk out of three sides of their mouth.”
“Yes, it often seems that way, doesn’t it?” responds Heifetz.
“Politicians are the links between the various divisions in our society and the decisions and policies we need to make to live together. Helping people to face painful choices and to learn new ways of being without losing credibility is difficult work. Talking to each faction alone is pretty attractive, but even that is hard to do, isn’t it? Look at the position I’m in. We all have a lot in common. But there are people of different ages, and perhaps thirty countries, plus at least ten subcultures within the United States represented in this room. How am I going to understand and meet your expectations?”
“You could ask us what our expectations are, what we want?”
“And what would be the risk of doing that?”
“We might want very different things,” one student reflects, and another adds, “We might want things that do not correspond with what you want to do with the class.”
“It’s important for you to listen to us,” a woman says with quiet, clear certainty.
“Yes, some of you probably value that very highly. But if I do that, others of you may think that I don’t know what I’m doing. What else should I do?”
“You could help people know whether or not they want to take the course.”
“What would I tell them? What do you think people want to know?”
“People want to know the outline of the course—and whether or not they can trust you.”
“The outline of the course is in the syllabus, which you have—but how are you going to know whether or not you can trust me?”
“Everyone knows about your book, so you are already credible,” quips a confident male voice from the far left of the room.
“Well, that’s very nice, but a lot of you have been in the classes of professors who have written books, and you have decided in the first five minutes that you don’t want to take the course.”
There is a murmur of confirmation, and then a woman in the back speaks up, a bit tentatively but displaying also a kind of savvy:
“Just to go back to your original question, I think the initial thing we all want from you is some form of entertainment. You can build a unity or a collective reaction by entertaining us initially—maybe entertainment is the wrong word—but you need to grab us.”
“Oh, I think entertainment is quite accurate—and you imply that fun is one of the performance criteria. Now fun doesn’t mean it’s going to be humorous. Sometimes people have fun watching mysteries and gladiator fights—people have weird notions of what’s fun. Learning can be fun—they don’t have to be mutually exclusive, although learning often has moments that are also painful. Important learning—good learning, deep learning, the kind of learning that takes place in here—has many facets.”
Another woman speaks clearly and compellingly across the room:
“I would like you to tell us what you think your course is about and what type of people you think should be involved with it. I mean, it’s one full term, there’s a lot of time put into it, there’s a lot of reading, there’s a lot of effort required, so I would like to have an idea of what you think we would be getting out of it.”
“Well,” responds the instructor, “what’s already clear from our discussion so far is that there are many different kinds of people in here, different values, and different purposes. So my aim is to design a course—with a teaching staff that provides critical help—that enables you to learn what you’re ready to learn. But that’s going to be different for this guy over here, or for the fun-loving woman in the back, or the woman concerned with enrollment here. Different people have different things to learn, and by the end of the term, my aim would be for people to have learned a lot that was relevant to them in regard to their own capacity to mobilize their communities or their organizations to make progress on the hardest of problems, which is what I think leadership is about—mobilizing people to make progress on the hardest of problems.”
“So if leadership is about getting people to tackle tough problems, what that’s going to look like in your hands—in the context you choose to operate in—may be very different from somebody in a different country or a different organization with a different set of problems. Furthermore, where she comes into this conversation is different from where you come into this conversation at this moment in time. Both of you are sitting in this class, but you have different things to learn about the tasks of leadership. The complexity of this job is to try to meet you at your level of readiness, with the issues that would be next for you.”
Peter asks,
“To roll two questions into one, how many people do you plan to be able to meet at their level of readiness?” (Laughter)
“Ninety percent of the people who take the course. There will be some people we fail with.”
Peter persists,
“I don’t mean of the people who are accepted into the course, how many will have their needs met. I mean how many people now sitting or standing in the room—what percentage of those will be accepted into the course?”
“Ah, Gretchen got an ally,” says the professor with a smile.
“Let me speak to this concern.” (Laughter)
The professor describes in some detail how the enrollment-selection process will occur, pointing out also that since not everyone presently in the room will finally choose to take the class, it is quite possible that there will not be an enrollment problem—and in any case, things will be clearer at the next meeting of the class.
When there seems to be a new level of clarity and satisfaction on this matter, the professor continues,
“So we’ve begun to explore two things at once. First of all, we’ve begun to illustrate one of the teaching methods that we’ll be using in this class, which is to use ourselves as a ‘case-in-point.’ By that I mean that the dynamics that take place in this classroom, including the dynamics between you and me and amongst you, will be available for us to examine.”
“You need to be aware of what is going on in the room. Jesuits call it ‘contemplation in action’—I speak of it as getting on the balcony so you can see the dance floor, and you need to get there several times a day. Reflection in action. It’s very difficult to do.”
“For example, why is it that one person is paid attention to and another person who says the same thing isn’t paid attention to? Why is it that Peter has already begun to take on a particular role in this class? How does the group contribute to his playing that role, how do I respond to him? Do I respond effectively or ineffectively, and is he playing his role effectively or ineffectively? Is it a useful role in the work of the group or is it just a personal habit? If it is a personal habit, how would you get sufficient mastery over yourself so you could draw on that habit in strategic moments when it is appropriate—but not at other times when the same behavior is inappropriate? We will ask ourselves those sorts of questions.”
“But