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Foreword

The illusion is obstinate and enduring: A mortal is seemingly anointed by the gods, typically at the moment of conception, and is stamped with a unique gift that allows him or her to lead others. This person shines irrepressibly, and other mere mortals are compelled to follow.

As prevalent as this notion is, it is demonstrably false, and any person who has seriously studied leadership has found that it is not a predetermined affair. Many of the most significant shapers of history were themselves shaped gradually, not ready to make an impact on the world until time and the crucible of experience had first performed their duties. Leadership can (and often must) be learned by those who would hope to practice it.

This is not at all to suggest that leadership is easy to teach. Ronald Heifetz teaches it exceedingly well, however, and this book is Sharon Daloz Parks’s invaluable illumination of the teaching method Heifetz has developed for a diverse range of men and women who come through Harvard’s Kennedy School doors.

“The only thing that matters in art is the part that can’t be explained,” Georges Braque once observed. Perhaps the only thing that matters in leadership is the part that we struggle to capture and bottle. Yet when it is captured, as it is in Heifetz’s course and in these pages, it is a remarkable force for change. That makes this volume profitable not solely for scholars and educators, but for leaders and managers themselves: it is a guide for creating a learning-based and leadership-nurturing organization similar to Heifetz’s classroom setting.

That environment is unpredictable and exhilarating, a petri dish for human imagination and improvisation. As I read Parks’s account of the unconventional manner in which Heifetz launches the course (I will not give it away here), I found myself leaning forward in anticipation, certain that something unusual would happen. I would not be disappointed.

Heifetz’s legacy, in my estimation, will relate in some significant way to his work in dispelling the aforementioned, fatalistic illusion of leadership as a trait one is either born with or without. Related to it is the Myth of Charisma, captured by images of a Charlton Heston atop the mountain, a grand figure who dwarfs others.

Charisma, as a leadership factor, has been a false front, and it is a term that I have made it a point to use rarely, if ever. In the 1979 Peter Sellers film, Being There, a simple-minded gardener is mistaken for a charismatic genius, and his non sequitur comments are taken as brilliant insights into the state of society. It is a comically telling reminder that charisma is defined not by one’s innate abilities, but by whether one’s thoughts and actions have resonance within the larger group.

Social historian Max Weber exaggerated when he spoke of charisma within leaders as a heavenly “gift of grace”; still, his ideas about charisma have been misunderstood and exaggerated. Weber did not imply that it is merely a one-way power, a beam of energy that transforms any and all in its path. Rather, Weber understood charisma as arising within relationships—a function of two-way interaction between the leader and the follower.

This comes closer to the leadership concept that Parks observes in the Heifetz approach. She notes that the most accurate and helpful image of leadership is not a top-down one, but one in which the leader is a “resonant and responsive node in a dynamic network or field of energy and an agent of emergent possibility.” The good news is that this is an art that can be practiced, and it is done so splendidly in chapter 5.

Fred Rogers, who in his time as television’s Mister Rogers helped educate more American children than all of today’s schoolteachers taken together, liked to quote the old Quaker proverb, “attitudes are caught, not taught.” That is a meaningful nuance on the concept of inculcating leadership, emotional intelligence, character, or any number of skills involving human potential. Heifetz’s “casein-point” teaching methodology is in itself a positive contagion that spreads throughout the classroom, igniting students’ abilities in the area of meaningful reflection, communication, and jazz-like improvisation. Imagine what our organizations could be if they incorporated this approach!

Heifetz and Parks help bring to mind the idea of an energetic dance that binds the leader and followers, in which each side is fully present, active, and able to shape the other. In that sense, the teaching of leadership can—in fact, must—be a life-giving activity. Leadership scholars are not simply scribes jotting down the names of the few persons lucky enough to receive divine appointment; rather, they are engagers of ordinary persons, opening them up to potentials and possibilities that will in turn open still others to new possibilities.

In discussing various approaches to leadership, I often note a distinction made between two nineteenth-century British prime ministers. It was observed that when you had dinner with William Gladstone, you left thinking, “That Gladstone is the wittiest, the most intelligent, the most charming person around.” But when you had dinner with Benjamin Disraeli, you left thinking, “I’m the wittiest, the most intelligent, the most charming person around!” Gladstone shone, but Disraeli created an environment in which others could shine. The latter is the more powerful form of leadership, an adventure in which the leader is privileged to find treasure within others and put it to good use. That is the manner of adventure that Ronald Heifetz and Sharon Daloz Parks lead us through in these pages, and teachers, leaders, and organizations can be far richer for it.

—Warren Bennis

University professor and founding chairman of the LeadershipInstitute at the University of Southern California