Leadership Can Be Taught. Sharon Daloz Parks
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to learn. But the more significant trap, in terms of my purpose (which is for you to learn how to exercise leadership more effectively)—is that I would be undermining that purpose if I answered the question. A third of you might leave the room for entirely the wrong reasons, reasons that we didn’t even have available to analyze.”
He pauses again, and then takes up the question in another light:
“But if what you’re really trying to do is figure out, ‘Should you trust me?’—which is, I think, where your question is coming from, I would suggest to you that the greatest teachers of the great masters of the violin of this century were two people. One was a Russian named Leopold Auer, who taught in the Moscow conservatory before the Russian revolution—the first Russian revolution. The second master was a man named Ivan Galamian, an Armenian man, who taught at Julliard. Neither of them could play the violin very well, but they trained all the masters. So whether or not I’m your ideal type of a leader may not be the right competency, if my task is to help you learn how to be most competent.”
There is a pause as this piece of complexity seeks a toehold in people’s imaginations.
A woman remarks reflectively,
“It seems to me that some people want the answer from you—”
And the instructor chimes in,
“Isn’t that intriguing?”
(Laughter)
“And other people,” she continues, “are rather enjoying having us say what leadership is or exploring how do you help us figure out what it is.”
“So you are saying,” continues the instructor affirmatively, “that different people have different ways of learning. Some people like to learn by the chaos and the fuzz of a discussion, and other people want to learn in a more orderly fashion by hearing a person with authority speak. And I’m sure that those different styles of learning will provide some of the grist for the mill that energizes this course.”
A Frenchman raises his hand, and when the professor nods in his direction, he hesitantly offers,
“I do not know if you have this game in English—cat and mouse? It seems like we are playing that game.”
The instructor responds immediately,
“Yes, we do have that game in this culture. And it is a bit like that, isn’t it? It’s hard to know which is which in the territory of authority relationships. Am I the cat or the mouse? And which one are you? In authority relationships we might think that as the instructor, I am the cat. But since I only have authority if students give it to me, the students are the cat, and I am the mouse. It is very ambiguous in an interesting sort of way.”
This exchange seems to help the class feel more comfortable with their sense of being somehow off balance, and a man who looks to be mid-career and is at once both open and calculating says,
“My opinion is that you, right now, are being a very effective leader in terms of the definition of leadership that you gave before. Because you said earlier that leadership assists in mobilizing a group to make a hard decision. Now, this is a group that needs to make a decision about whether or not we’re going to take this course. And you are leading us to discuss among ourselves what is it about your style of giving the presentation here that is going to entice us to stay or leave. So that’s what you’re doing. You are exercising leadership according to your definition of leadership. But we also have to figure out whether or not this is a definition of what we would like to be as a leader and whether this is what we’re wanting to learn.”
The instructor responds,
“That’s true. Some of you may not be here with the purpose of learning how to more effectively mobilize people in a community or an organization to take on important problems. You may be here primarily to find out how you can get people to give you more authority or to confer more power upon you. Now, I think that’s a valid reason to be in this course, but not a valid reason totally by itself. Because I think knowing how to gain power, to work with power, and how to work with authority is one of the areas that we have to investigate in thinking about leadership. But it’s not the whole of it. That’s only investigating the instruments. We also have to figure out how to play the instruments. And if you’re not interested fundamentally in making music, that is, in serving your communities or serving your organizations or serving your society so as to tackle the tough problems, if really all you’re interested in is the instruments, then this course will probably frustrate you.”
“Part of my work,” acknowledges the instructor, “is to recognize that I am going to frustrate some people’s expectations, and I need to do it at a rate they can stand without their killing me off. For example, if you are in a situation where you think people’s expectations need to change—let’s say, for example, they keep expecting you to behave decisively and to know where you’re going. But you realize that the situation calls for experimentation, trying things out, improvisation, the willingness not to know exactly where you’re going. Well, how do you get that across to people if people think that means that you’re not worthy of authority? In their terminology they’ll say, “You’re not a leader. You’re not being decisive. You’re zig-zagging. You’re improvising when you’re supposed to know where we’re going.’ So how in that situation, where you don’t know where you’re going (because nobody does), how are you supposed to say to people, ‘Your expectations are wrong. You expect me to know where I’m going. But I need you to trust me to not know where I’m going’?”
An Asian woman asks whether the reading list, which is dominated by white male authors and westerners, suggests that minority members of the class will have to adapt to majority norms.
The instructor responds,
“In the course of this term, you are going to identify all sorts of blind spots, failings, mistakes, and wasted opportunities on my part. And hopefully those will serve as grist for the mill if you learn something about your own blind spots, failure, and wasted opportunities. I don’t present myself as having constructed the perfect syllabus or having designed the perfect course, but simply to have provided an environment, a design, that enables all of us to learn from what all of us do.”
A woman who appears only partially satisfied with this response joins the conversation:
“I’m very intrigued by this subject, although I have significant concerns with the dynamics that—how close to the dynamic today will the typical class be, or do you usually drive things along more?”
“Sometimes yes, and sometimes less. (Laughter) You have to learn to stomach chaos and confusion if you’re going to be leading people in the midst of conflicting values, who are facing hard challenges and engaging in all sorts of avoidance behavior. You’re going to have to develop a stomach for that and for not being provided with certainty. So there’s a purpose to my letting this be more chaotic than some of you might like.”
A man seeking definition says challengingly,
“So this class is about group dynamics as much as leadership?”
The instructor pauses, looks at the challenger with a steady gaze, and responds evenly:
“Being able to diagnose what happens in a social system or in a political system is a critical component of any exercise of leadership. You can’t lead without knowing the system you’re pushing around.”
As the class moves into a second hour, a student over to the left who has been standing in the aisle and leaning against the wall straightens up, takes a step forward, and says,
“I have a problem with some of what we’re coming up with. If you look at other kinds of leadership, like if you were to say Jesus was a leader, or any other charismatic type, you wouldn’t see characteristics like humility or—well, what I mean is someone like Napoleon, he didn’t have a whole lot of humility. You wouldn’t describe him as vulnerable or having—and—”
The student seems to be groping but hangs in:
“I think what that