Читать книгу Leadership Can Be Taught - Sharon Daloz Parks - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

Leadership for a Changing World

A Call to Adaptive Work

ON A COLD, rainy December afternoon, the last session of a course in leadership had just ended. Seated beside me, a bright, thoughtful young man was intently filling out his course evaluation form. Fourteen weeks earlier, I had observed him on the first day of class and suspected he might not take the course. The course begins in an unconventional manner, and he appeared well prepared to exercise other options. Yet now at the close of the term, here he was.

After he finished the evaluation, I told him I had noticed his skepticism on the opening day, and I wondered now how he felt about the course at the end. He responded immediately that the course had been very valuable. Then I asked, “Do you remember why you decided to stay?” After a long pause, he replied, “That would be hard to say—leadership is a word that holds a lot of hungers.”

His response has remained with me because his understated eloquence rang true. We live in a time when the hungers for leadership are strong and deep. As our world becomes more complex, diverse, and morally ambiguous, leadership trainings and programs abound and executive coaching has appeared on the scene. Yet there remains a gnawing awareness that our prevailing myths and many of our assumed practices of leadership match neither the central perils nor the finest aspirations spawned by the forces of dramatic change—affecting every society, institution, corporation, agency, organization, community, neighborhood, task force, or project team.

At least five key hungers conspire to create what is increasingly recognized as a growing crisis in leadership. Two of these are ancient, and three of them arise from the particular conditions of this moment in history: (1) Within every person there is a hunger to exercise some sense of personal agency—to have an effect, to contribute, to make a positive difference, to influence, help, build—and in this sense to lead. (2) Throughout human history, within every social group there is a hunger for authority that will provide orientation and reassurance, particularly in times of stress and fear. What is new is that there is now a hunger for leadership that (3) can deal with the intensification of systemic complexity emerging from the cybernetic, economic, political, and ecological realities that have created a more connected and interdependent world; and (4) can respond adaptively to the depth, scope, and pace of change that combined with complexity creates unprecedented conditions. Finally, (5) this new landscape creates a new moral moment in history.¹ Critical choices must be made within significantly changed conditions, a greater diversity of perspectives must be taken into account, assumed values are challenged, and there is a deepened hunger for leadership that can exercise a moral imagination and moral courage on behalf of the common good.

Leadership for the Common Good in a Complex, Changing World

The image at the root of the concept of the common good is “the commons.” Aligning command-and-control, trait-based, and other prevailing models of leadership with the common good becomes more difficult as “the commons” is being transformed. The new commons in which we now find ourselves is both global in scope and relentlessly local in impact. In a simpler time, the village green, the market square, Main Street, the wharf, the great plaza, the town, the city, or even the nation offered a sense of a shared life within a manageable frame. Today’s new commons requires participation in a more dynamic, interdependent, and vast web of life—within a frame growing increasingly unmanageable.² In the complexity and change of this new complex commons, hardworking managers who contribute their best find that success in the past does not necessarily translate into the present as new forces thwart their best intentions. Even highly talented people are vulnerable to finding themselves blindsided and their efforts stymied as the new landscape seems to be a place where “vision” has become problematic and competencies are required that can’t be reduced to a toolbox.

Leadership for today’s world requires enlarging one’s capacity to see the whole board, as in a chess match—to see the complex, often volatile interdependence among the multiple systems that constitute the new commons. This capacity is vital to the best aspirations of democratic societies, for democracy presses toward inclusion but functions poorly without leadership.³ Because power in democratic systems tends to be more circular than linear, to rest in networks more than in hierarchies, those who would practice effective leadership must practice a high degree of imagination, pragmatism, and trust, without falling prey to naïveté.⁴ They must hold steady in the face of uncertainty and threat, while remaining creatively open to the demands of changing circumstances, enabling people who may represent significant differences to create together something that is both workable and worthy. Whether it is being worked out within the life of a corporation or the life of a marginalized community, effective leadership in the service of democratic principles is not an easy practice.

Despite these changes and challenges, a deep ambivalence remains regarding the object of today’s hungers for leadership. Are we simply to wait for born leaders to appear? There is a strong temptation (as in every age) simply to look for gifted persons who will hold positions of formal authority and who will make the needed difference. Traditional understandings of leadership akin to this impulse focus on personality characteristics, situation analysis, and transactions of power and influence. Now, however, a growing consensus among leadership theorists and practitioners is that in a networked society with power and information widely distributed, the presumption of “born leaders” along with command-and-control leadership models are inadequate. Yet, though there have been calls for a recomposing of the art and myth of leadership, larger-than-life heroic leaders continue to be studied and offered as models.⁵ Why? Because we haven’t developed good alternatives—both in content and method.

Can Leadership Be Taught?

If leaders are not simply “born,” can leadership be taught? It has been well acknowledged that it is difficult to teach for the world of professional practice. It is particularly difficult to teach for the practice of leadership. Teaching and learning are typically conceived as a matter of transmitting knowledge: teaching as telling. Conventionally, such transfer of knowledge is presumed to occur through a formal or informal process of reading, lecture, or presentation from an expert in the field, perhaps some discussion (primarily involving students’ questions and the teacher’s answers), note taking, and perhaps also term papers and exams. Within this paradigm of teaching and learning, and across every sector and profession, it is one thing to teach knowledge of the field, and it is quite another to prepare people to exercise the judgment and skill needed to bring that knowledge into the intricate systems of relationships that constitute the dynamic world of practice. It is yet another challenge altogether to prepare someone to practice leadership within the profession and the communities it serves—to prepare a physician, for example, to practice leadership within a hospital system and the regional, national, or world health care systems as well as to care for individual patients.

Learning by Doing and the Artistry of Good Coaching

In his classic, Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schon eloquently argued that people cannot simply be told what they need to know in the complexity of practice. They must learn to see for themselves. What is needed is access to coaches who initiate the learner into the “traditions of the calling” and help them by “the right kind of telling” to see on their own behalf and in their own way what they most need to see. “We ought, then,” he wrote, “to study the experience of learning by doing and the artistry of good coaching. We should base our study on the working assumption that both processes are intelligent and—within limits to be discovered—intelligible. And we ought to search for examples wherever we can find them.”⁶

Building on these assumptions, this book affirms that leadership can be taught. We do so by looking in depth at one particular approach to practicing and teaching leadership that responds to Schon’s call for “learning by doing and the artistry of good coaching.” This is found in the work of Ronald Heifetz, author of Leadership Without Easy Answers, and coauthor with Marty Linsky of Leadership On the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading.⁷ Across more than two decades, Heifetz and his colleagues at Harvard University have pioneered a distinctive, bold approach to learning and teaching leadership, created and practiced in a manner that is responsive to the hungers for a new story about what leadership means and asks—and ways of learning it. Other theorists and practitioners also have begun to explore new understandings of leadership that more adequately honor an interdependent, systemic awareness, and the need for significant shifts in perspective and practice. Fewer, however, have wrestled with the attendant questions: Can leadership be learned? If it can be learned, can it be taught? And, if so, what methods or approaches will work? Is teaching an act of leadership? If leading involves risk, what are the risks involved in teaching leadership? Can new insight move beyond conceptual awakening and actually change leadership behavior at the level of default settings—habitual ways of responding, especially in crisis and under stress?

The response of Heifetz and his colleagues to these questions is an approach that artfully integrates a set of ideas—a framework for understanding a practice of leadership fitting to today’s world—with a corresponding teaching methodology that is congruent with those ideas. The methodology is called case-in-point.

Case-in-Point

Case-in-point teaching, as Heifetz and his colleagues have developed it, draws on several well-established learning traditions and methods—seminar, simulation, presentation of ideas and perspectives (through lecture, reading, and film), discussion and dialogue, clinical-therapeutic practice, coaching, the laboratory, the art studio, writing as a form of disciplined reflection, and the case study method.

The celebrated case study method pioneered by Harvard’s law and business schools is a powerful research methodology (critical to helping scholar-practitioners analyze data and work inductively with concepts that may apply broadly across multiple contexts). It is also a powerful pedagogical tool (giving students multiple situations, concepts, and images to work with as they think about experiences that they haven’t yet had).⁸

Educators, at least since John Dewey, have persuasively argued that human beings, and particularly adults, learn best from their own experience. The traditional case study method draws on practical experience, but it is usually somewhat removed from the actual, immediate experience of the student. In the quest of a methodology that can teach further below the neck—to the default settings that people act from in a crisis—case-in-point teaching and learning seeks to make optimal use of the student’s own past and immediate experience.

In case-in-point teaching, what goes on in the classroom itself is an occasion for learning and practicing leadership within a social group. The class is recognized as a social system inevitably made up of a number of different factions and acted on by multiple forces. The class also has a clear and challenging purpose—to make progress in understanding and practicing leadership.

The teacher has a set of ideas and frameworks to offer. But instead of presenting a lecture, or starting with a written case from another context that may or may not be relevant to the learning of the people in the class, the teacher waits for a case to appear in the process of the class itself. Every group generates its own set of issues, shaped, in part, by what is set in motion by the context and content provided by the teacher-presenter and the events of the day.

The challenge is to make use of both the explicit and underlying issues that surface in the group by connecting those issues to the course content. The teacher, therefore, must reflect on what is happening in the class as it is happening, asking, “Is there any way I can use what is happening right here and now to illustrate the content I want the class to learn today?” In other words, the teacher imagines that what went on in the class for the last ten minutes was a case. Then the teacher works to use it to illustrate the theme, concept, or skill that he or she is trying to present. The work is to create a live encounter between the experience of the learner and the idea.

Everything that happens in the classroom is open to scrutiny—including the actions, inconsistencies, and blind spots of the teacher. The students are encouraged to “be on the dance floor” (that is, in the action) and also to “get on the balcony” to see if they can read the larger patterns of what is going on and figure out how to intervene in ways that will help the group make progress. All the while, the students are being offered concepts, metaphors, and frameworks that assist them in interpreting and naming what they are learning to see and do.

In this approach, the teacher remains the authority in the class-room—providing orientation and maintaining equilibrium in the group. But the teacher is also practicing leadership—skillfully allowing enough disequilibrium (confusion, frustration, disappointment, conflict, and stress) to help the group move from unexamined assumptions about the practice of leadership to seeing, understanding, and acting in tune with what the art and practice of leadership may actually require. In the process, the teacher must be aware of the various factions among the students in the room, the differing points of view that each represents, and then must find ways of recruiting, honoring, and sustaining the attention of each of them.

Four Critical Distinctions

Case-in-point teaching provides a model in real time of the practice of leadership that is being taught in the course. This approach rests on a framework for understanding and practicing leadership that rests in four critical distinctions: authority versus leadership, technical problems versus adaptive challenges, power versus progress, and personality versus presence.

Authority Versus Leadership

Heifetz and his colleagues draw a distinction between authority and leadership. Most people tend to presume that a leader is a person in a position of formal authority—the boss, CEO, president, chair, captain, supervisor, director—the head, or, similarly, the expert. All organizations depend on such roles and the functions they provide to maintain equilibrium within the social group. The functions of authority include providing orientation and direction, setting norms, resolving conflict, and, when necessary, providing protection. The approach to leadership we describe here, however, recognizes that the functions of authority often play a vital but markedly insufficient role in the practice of leadership.

In this view, the function of leadership is to mobilize people—groups, organizations, societies—to address their toughest problems. Effective leadership addresses problems that require people to move from a familiar but inadequate equilibrium—through disequilibrium—to a more adequate equilibrium. That is, today’s complex conditions require acts of leadership that assist people in moving beyond the edge of familiar patterns into the unknown terrain of greater complexity, new learning, and new behaviors, usually requiring loss, grief, conflict, risk, stress, and creativity. Often, deeply held values are both at stake and under review. Seen in this light, authority becomes only one resource and sometimes a constraint in the practice of leadership, and often a leader must act beyond his or her authorization.

Technical Problems Versus Adaptive Challenges

The second distinction at the heart of this approach flows from the first: the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges. Technical problems (even though they may be complex) can be solved with knowledge and procedures already in hand. In contrast, adaptive challenges require new learning, innovation, and new patterns of behavior. In this view, leadership is the activity of mobilizing people to address adaptive challenges—those challenges that cannot be resolved by expert knowledge and routine management alone. Adaptive challenges often appear as swamp issues—tangled, complex problems composed of multiple systems that resist technical analysis and thus stand in contrast to the high, hard ground issues that are easier to address but where less is at stake for the organization or the society.⁹ They ask for more than changes in routine or mere preference. They call for changes of heart and mind—the transformation of long-standing habits and deeply held assumptions and values.¹⁰

Today’s adaptive challenges may appear on any scale and within every domain. They include obvious global issues such as the growing vulnerability of all populations to untreatable epidemics, climate change, terrorism, and the widening social-economic divide. Adaptive challenges are equally likely to take the form of what is assumed to be a local, technical challenge but, in fact, requires a new mode of operating within a nonprofit agency, an engineering division, or a long-established product line.¹¹

Power Versus Progress

When leadership is understood as an activity—the activity of making progress on adaptive challenges—there is less attention to be paid to the transactions of power and influence and more attention given to the question of whether or not progress is being made on swamp issues. Accordingly, making progress on critical adaptive challenges becomes the basic measure of effective leadership in this approach. Note the shift. When a distinction is made between “authority and technical problems” on the one hand and “leadership and adaptive challenges” on the other, the issue becomes less a matter of personal power—who has it and how they wield it—and shifts to making progress on difficult issues. This third distinction orients the practice of leadership to questions of purpose and reorders the criteria for determining whether or not one is exercising leadership effectively.

Personality Versus Presence

The fourth distinction is closely related to the third. When the focus shifts from authority and technical problems to leadership and making progress on adaptive challenges, the charisma and the traits of the individual personality may become less critical. In this view, acts of leadership depend less on the magnetism and social dominance of heroic individuals and more on the capacities of individuals (who may be located in a wide variety of positions) to skillfully intervene in complex systems. Thus, the multifaceted capacity to be present becomes a key factor in effective leadership: the quality of one’s capacity to be fully present, comprehend what is happening, hold steady in the field of action, and make choices regarding when and how to intervene from within the social group (from wherever you sit) in ways that help the group to make progress on swamp issues.

With these four critical distinctions in hand, Heifetz and his colleagues have developed a framework for analysis and intervention within social systems to help make progress on tough, adaptive challenges.

An Assessment

A survey assessment of this approach, published in 1989, found that of the 165 former students who responded, more than half believed this approach to teaching and learning leadership to be either the “most useful” or “much more useful” than their other Harvard courses, and similarly the “most useful” or “much more useful” than previous leadership or management training.¹²

Seeking methods and approaches to leadership education that had depth, wisdom, and the potential to make a significant contribution to the larger good subsequently attracted the Lilly Endowment to this work. I was invited to further study, describe, and assess this approach using qualitative methods. Informed by the earlier survey, the consistently high level of student course evaluations, initial observations of the course, and my own teaching and research in the formation of leadership and ethics in three professional schools, I accepted. This approach was breaking some new ground, consolidating several strands of emergent theory and practice, and exploring ways of learning and practicing leadership more aligned with the emerging experience of complexity and change that characterizes the everyday challenges that managers, executives, project directors, and others face.

After several years of study and assessment, I have come to affirm that this approach provides both a response to today’s hungers for leadership and a remarkably effective teaching methodology.¹³ As a sustained experiment in rethinking leadership and how to learn it, this approach can spur the imagination of those who practice leadership and especially those who dare to teach leadership—instructors, coaches, supervisors, and mentors working within professional schools, corporate leadership and management training programs, undergraduate leadership programs, community development initiatives, or issue-oriented endeavors.

The Terrain Ahead

The purpose of this book, therefore, is to describe, interpret, and assess this particular approach as a vivid and effective example of how leadership for the common good—the well-being of today’s commons—can be taught in ways that are relevant across all sectors.

Building on observation, interviews, and analysis, this approach is explored along several sight lines: the content (the theory), the way it is taught (the method), the experience of the students, and the experience of teachers and coaches who have effectively taken up this approach. Chapter 2 steps right into the classroom, immersing the reader in the actual dynamics of the opening session of the course as taught at Harvard. Like the students themselves, you may emerge from this experience both intrigued and disoriented, asking “what’s really going on here?” Chapters 3 through 5 seek to answer that question by looking at key features of the theory and the course design.

Chapter 3 explains how the case-in-point approach may be used to develop skills for identifying issues and factions within any social group and intervening strategically on behalf of some larger purpose. This chapter also explores the deeper significance of the cognitive and emotional shift that the achievement of systemic awareness represents for the practice of leadership.

Chapter 4 reveals how the students’ own leadership failures are brought into disciplined dialogue with the theory to generate insight into personal blind spots and open a broader repertoire of creative responses for the next time.

Then, challenging the conventional assumption that personality is all and that leadership charisma is something one must be born with, chapter 5 conveys how this approach offers pathways for developing the more valuable quality of presence—the ability to intervene, to hold steady, inspire a group, and work in both verbal and nonverbal realms.

After the essence and structure of the approach are laid out in the first half of the book, another set of questions is taken up in the second half. These include two challenges in the transferability of the approach. First, how readily do the lessons of this approach transfer back into the workplace? Courses or training sessions may seem powerful in the moment, but often quickly fade when participants return to business as usual. What kind of staying power does this approach have? Second, how readily can it be picked up by other teacher-practitioners? Can its essential elements be used in quite different settings to good effect? In short, what are the prospects for cultivating the leadership now needed by broadening the reach of this promising approach?

Chapter 6 seeks to answer the first of these questions by following former students back into their workplaces and listening to them describe how they continue to use the insights of this approach. A key finding is that learning distilled into images and metaphors has remarkable staying power, even to the point of affecting people’s behavioral default settings.

Chapters 7 and 8 address the development and transferability of this approach from a teacher’s perspective. First, what does it feel like to create and practice a way of teaching that keeps the teacher on the edge of new learning and under constant scrutiny? Chapter 7 offers a rare opportunity to hear Ronald Heifetz reflect on the genesis of this approach and his own experience of learning to teach in this mode. Then, chapter 8 introduces several other teachers who have successfully adopted this approach and describes how it is modified and evolves when transferred into markedly different contexts—other institutions, executive coaching, professional consulting, undergraduate leadership development, and other cultures.

To fully assess the potential contribution of this approach, chapter 9 offers one additional perspective—a reconsideration of our culture’s myth of leadership itself. It unveils a deeper level of what is really going on here. By comparing today’s prevailing command and control models of leadership with an alternative model drawn from the creative process of artists, I will show how this approach helps us all make progress on what is arguably a central adaptive challenge of our time: the transformation of the prevailing myth of leadership. I believe that the mix of intrigue, disorientation, and hope that many experience when first encountering this approach to teaching and learning leadership stems precisely from this challenge. Our times call for a reconfigured understanding of the art of leadership because inherent in our ideas about leadership are deep assumptions about the social contract and how progress gets made. We are in the midst of creating a new understanding, birthing new images even as we learn to act in alignment with them.

Finally, chapter 10 reflects on the strengths and limits of this approach as a whole and its possible trajectories into the future.

Setting the Scene

Teaching and learning the art of leadership occurs in a wide range of places, both formal and informal. The approach described here has been cultivated primarily in the context of a professional school—the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where the work is now anchored in the school’s Center for Public Leadership. The Kennedy School is dedicated to enhancing the effectiveness of people who exercise leadership in public life, a function that necessarily places it in direct partnership with the other professional schools at the university—Business, Dentistry, Design, Divinity, Education, Law, Medicine, and Public Health.

The school seeks students who have demonstrated potential for leadership, managerial capability, analytical talent, and ethical sensitivity. These students come from the United States and the wider international community. Some are elected officials and legislators; some are military officers; others are present or prospective heads of government agencies, for-profit, or nonprofit organizations; still others are policy analysts or journalists. The students range in age from twenty-three to sixty (most are in mid-career), and they are enrolled in several degree and other special programs. Collectively they represent a broad field of experience, perspectives, ideologies, hopes, and concerns. Many of their courses focus on policy and analysis. They necessarily deal also with the questions of meaning, ethics, and leadership.

The scope and vitality of the school’s work is revealed, in part, in the activity of the Forum—an imaginatively designed, multipurpose space at the center of the school. Three floors of classroom, seminar, and office space open into a rotundalike area that continually hums with conversation—among the clusters of students that spill out of the surrounding classrooms, in the gatherings over coffee or lunch on the first level, in the soft-seating areas adjacent to the open stairways, and in the study group carrels that ring the perimeter of the second and third levels. Several times a week, this space is transformed into a formal amphitheater where national and international figures debate critical issues, and electronic media bring the life of the wider global commons into the heart of the school. The Forum promotes both informal meeting and deliberative dialogue across the differences of geography, gender, ethnicity, culture, ideology, and moral commitment. At the edge of this Forum, a set of double doors on the south 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.