Leadership Can Be Taught. Sharon Daloz Parks
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is only a slight moment of waiting before a woman speaks up to suggest that he should allow the people in the group to identify with him by revealing a more personal side of himself so that he is not just a one-dimensional authority figure.
“So you would tend to trust me more if I were more self-revealing—perhaps particularly in terms of being vulnerable? But you probably wouldn’t like it if I tell you how excited I am about the publication of my book and how proud I am of the endorsements and reviews. It would probably speak to you more if I told you about how worried I felt about the reviews, my sleepless nights, and how I’ve taken it out on my kids … ”
The woman interrupts,
“You can’t go too far, we don’t want you to …”
“Isn’t that interesting,” Heifetz interrupts. “I need to be humble and vulnerable, but I need not to be pathetic. (Laughter) That’s not a very big hoop to jump through. Between pathetic on one hand and vulnerable on the other is not much space—and you’re saying I have to gauge it just right.”
Another says,
“You need to have abilities that I can respect.”
“Yes,” the instructor confirms. “I need to have some sort of abilities, skills, competence, right? Each of you has in mind, it is my guess, some criteria for competence, but they are not highly explicit criteria. It wouldn’t be easy for you to write down on a piece of paper your four criteria and then weight them, and then list the behaviors by which I would manifest them. It’s all much more unconscious than that, it’s more of a blur and gut reaction, isn’t it? We’d have to work pretty hard to make explicit what those criteria are by which you would evaluate me, with only the little bit you can get in these ninety minutes—not a lot of data. I do appreciate that you have a very serious problem, because you can’t tell whether or not I’m just conning you, if I’m manipulative, if I’m trustworthy—particularly for an enterprise as personal as leadership development.”
He continues,
“So at some level this course requires taking a risk. Leadership does too.”
A student asks,
“What kinds of risks would we be taking here?”
“Well, if we use ourselves as a case-in-point and our process of working together becomes more transparent, we will analyze how we are operating, what’s effective about it, what’s brilliant about it, and what’s sloppy about it, so that we can each become more effective. We will do that not only in here but also in small groups. Each of you will be in a small group that will meet every week. In these groups each of you will present a case of your own leadership failure, and the rest of the people in your group will be consultants to you so that you can see how you might have done things differently or maybe couldn’t have done things differently.”
“But,” he goes on, “in that process of helping each other learn—both in this big class and in the small groups—we may be mixed in our effectiveness so that a person comes away with 60 percent good stuff, forty percent bad stuff, and maybe some hurt feelings because we didn’t operate with enough finesse in providing good feedback.”
“Can you define what kind of a leader you think you are?” asks a woman who sounds curious, discerning, and a bit like a frustrated participant in a game of twenty questions. “What is your leadership style, how do you think of your self as a leader?”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Why couldn’t you answer that question if you’re teaching a course—?”
“Well, let’s think about that.”
Another student picks up this new thread of thought:
“A person is not a leader all the time. In fact, I wouldn’t think that an instructor is necessarily a leader. I think that there are certain situations when certain talents and skills come into play and leadership is necessary. That’s why you can’t answer that question—that’s not a fair question to ask somebody that’s a bright instructor in front of a class.”
Another student jumps in:
“Yes, it is. Here’s a class on leadership. I’m trying to get a sense of what this guy thinks leadership is about.”
The previous student says,
“But right now I would say this person is not a leader right now. This person is an instructor right now.”
Yet another student joins in:
“Well, can’t instructors be leaders?”
A student who has not previously spoken earnestly leans into the conversation and speaks up authoritatively:
“I don’t think he can answer the question because he may be able to lead me, but he may not be a very good leader for you. I see him very much as a leader right now. The question is whether he’s a good leader for me or for somebody else in this classroom.”
There follows a series of comments from a broad scattering of students:
“I also think he wants us to learn from ourselves. Maybe he wants us to figure it out.”
“You can have an assessment of yourself that may not match what everyone else thinks about you.”
“But the question is, what is his assessment of himself?”
Realizing that this might be an important question, another student reflects,
“I may think I’m a fair leader. I listen to people, and all this stuff. But everybody else may say, ‘That’s absolutely not true.’” Then turning to the instructor he says, “So you can tell us what kind of leader you are, but the best way is to show us. I also think that you’re right about an instructor. The leadership may be part of the skills you bring to bear on the classroom, but it’s only one thing. So the only thing I want to know about you is how you teach—and I know that just by watching you teach.”
“But look at what we’re doing,” says a man in the top row with a mixture of dismay and insight in his voice. “We’re answering on his behalf. All of a sudden we’re talking third person.” Then, looking directly at the instructor he demands, “I want to hear from you.”
The instructor responds respectfully,
“I think that if I were to answer her question, it would be a trap. So can somebody analyze why it would be a trap?”
“The two over there, they actually answered the question,” asserts a student on the fourth row off to the right side. The woman said that she found you to be a leader, but the other one didn’t perceive you to be a leader. So it’s individuals who determine ‘leadership.’”
The instructor picks up the beat reflectively:
“So we’re back in this kind of situation where I suppose one person will want me to perform this way, and another that way, and another yet another way, and before your know it, anything I say is going to immediately upset two-thirds of the people here. Furthermore, if I answered the question, I would be validating a set of assumptions that some people hold about leadership, without making those assumptions explicit so we can then analyze them. Then each of you would go about having your private conversation in your own mind, evaluating and weighing what I had said without my having any opportunity to engage you regarding your criteria, your definitions of leadership, and whether your conceptions of leadership were even useful as a frame of reference. My job isn’t to let you carry on these discussions about something so central as, ‘What is a leader?’ in the privacy of your own mind. My task is to surface those assumptions so we can begin scrutinizing them to see which of them you really want to hold on to and which you want to begin to discard.”
He pauses. And then he continues, speaking with a kind of earnestness that is difficult to ignore—that sense again that something more than a course is at stake:
“And that is the most significant trap. One