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CHAPTER TWO

How Do We Begin?

Differing Expectations

IT IS SEPTEMBER. Cambridge is all blue sky and leaves ready to turn into flame. High spirits and purposefulness abound as the pace quickens in Harvard Square and classes get under way across the university, including PAL 101—Exercising Leadership: Mobilizing Group Resources.

Close to the appointed hour, there is a steady hubbub of talk among the ninety students who have found a seat in six horseshoe-shaped tiers of desks. Sitting in the aisles, up the steps, and on the radiators across the back of the room are almost another hundred students plus their book bags, jackets, and briefcases. These students have arrived on time, but all the chairs have been filled, so they are wedging themselves onto whatever perches they can find. Some are certain they want this course; for others the course is still on trial. Everyone is wondering how many students will be admitted.

Two teaching assistants (TAs) are setting up a tape recorder and checking the microphones.¹ Another is passing around syllabi. Still another is informally fielding questions about if and how students will be admitted to the course. About ten minutes after the hour, the instructor, Ronald Heifetz, steps to the front of the room.

He is carefully groomed, wearing a trim, classic, comfortable suit and tie. He is in his forties, slim, not very tall, has dark hair, and bears a mix of seriousness and anticipation. As the rustling subsides into the conventional opening-of-class silence, he just stands there, simply looking back at the class, making eye contact around the room, not speaking. The silence lengthens uncomfortably. No one is quite as sure as they were a few moments earlier about who they are and what they are doing. In that pause, the expected conventions are broken open.

The pause is finally ended by the instructor, who asks a question:

“How many of you have been in a position where you were given a new role, some kind of responsibility and authority, and then walked into a room for the first time where people were gathered for a meeting, and they expected you to be responsible for how they would proceed?”

Most of the students, ranging in age from mid-twenties to sixty, raise their hands. Then he says, “Well, then many of you know something about the position I’m in right now.” (There is quiet laughter of recognition around the room.) “So,” he continues, “maybe we can begin learning about leadership and authority by studying the position I’m in right now.” There is another pause.

Then he says,

“What are my options? How should I be thinking strategically about my first moves and second moves and third moves? Is that first moment—when you walk in and a group of people are doing what people usually do to somebody who they haven’t met before who’s in a position of authority in relationship to them, that is, largely checking him or her out—is that moment important? What have you done when you have been in that situation?”

If the class needs more prompting, he suggests, “What do other teachers do?”

A series of suggestions and responses ensues:

“You could tell a joke.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To build rapport with the class—to put people at ease.”

“Yes, and would that be a good thing to do?”

“Might be.”

“Yes, it might be, but rapport and learning aren’t necessarily the same. This is a class on learning leadership, and most of you have been exercising leadership already, which is why you are here. I have too much respect for the scars you already have on your back from trying to do that.”

There is another pause as the truth of what he has just said sinks in, and the class recognizes that something more than a class may be at stake here.

“So,” he continues, “I am reluctant to begin with a joke. What else might I do?”

“You need to gain respect.”

“Yes, that would be nice. How would I do that?”

“You don’t need to do that; you’re at Harvard.”

“But we all know that being a teacher at Harvard only gets you about ten minutes.”

(Laughter)

“You could tell us what we can expect in the course.”

“Yes, you come with a set of expectations, don’t you? And already I have countered some of your expectations. What are the risks of that?”

“We may find it interesting, or we may be disappointed.”

“So what would be the right move?”

A woman named Gretchen suggests,

“At some point I think it’s important to say that I have some concern, because I understand the course enrollment will be limited. I don’t know how that’s going to be handled. So it might be important to hear from you about that.”

“So what you would like to see is that I very quickly read what is going to be a dominant issue in the group, and if I don’t speak to that concern right away, then there is going to be disappointment, and I would lose some credibility. Let’s say, for example, that I never spoke to your concern. Let’s say I was really lame. Let’s say you asked me a question about it, and I said, that’s not in the script, that’s not what we’re doing in this first session.”

“Then you ought to be a politician!” a student calls out from the back of the room.

“Politicians are generally pretty good at assessing the current concern and speaking to it,” the instructor responds.

“They speak to something,” says a student sitting directly in front of the instructor in the second row, “but it’s not usually the real concern. They prevaricate, they hedge, they work around the system, but they don’t address the question directly if it’s something they don’t want to answer.”

“And why would they do that, do you think?” asks the instructor.

“They’re serving their interest. They don’t want to be put on the spot. They don’t want to be painted into a corner.”

“Well, whose interest—?”

“And they also want to address the topics that they have on their agenda,” says the student, obviously wanting to be sure he isn’t painted into a corner.

The professor leans forward, hands on the desk, and says directly, clearly, and also with a sense of exploration,

“To commit is to alienate. So when you say ‘their self-interest,’ their self-interest is complicated because they need to win votes. So that means here they are, and there’s this large group of people—two hundred people who show up for a class of a hundred. They’d like to make everybody happy. I mean, what else would make a politician happy other than making everybody happy? But everybody isn’t 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 a second thing that I’ve introduced in this conversation,” says Heifetz, signaling a shift of focus, “is about what expectation does somebody in authority need to meet in order to maintain or gain credibility?”

There 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 is a trap in terms of just upsetting two-thirds of you. I’m not so afraid of doing that—though every instructor is tempted to perform according to your expectations, even at the loss of challenging you 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 goes to is that I don’t think I would put ‘humility’ on my list for this class, because I think in a teaching situation it’s not important to me to have a teacher, a professor, who is humble. Maybe self-confidence is more important. But maybe in a work environment, with somebody I work with more interpersonally, humility would be more important.”

“Yes,” the instructor responds. “We see once again there’s not a lot of overlap. One faction wants to see me be humble and another faction wants to see me be self-confident.”

“You can be both,” says a woman in the first row.

“Well, maybe you can be both,” the instructor responds, “but there’s not a lot of room for figuring out how to do both. Not in this culture. So what am I supposed to do, invent a new culture quickly?”

The same woman acknowledges, “You can’t.”

“So I’ve got to work with what I’ve got,” observes the professor.

A young woman starts to speak, and a student across the room says, “Can’t hear you.” She starts again at higher volume:

“I guess this goes to maybe another concern I have, and I think it relates to what she is saying—about whether you as the leader or whatever are going to have an open mind about what leadership is and who leaders are. I’m a little concerned from the readings and examples that we’re looking at white guys.”

She continues,

“I think the majority of the examples in the readings and in class are of people that the press or the history books know about, and I’m sure that there are a lot of leaders that we don’t know about in our common culture—”

“So what you’re suggesting,” responds Heifetz, “is that we ought to make a key distinction between leadership and prominence, or even dominance, or even authority. Leadership is not the same as any of these. That doesn’t mean they’re mutually exclusive—you might be dominant and exercise leadership. You might even exercise leadership from a position of authority, but you might not—a lot of dominant people don’t exercise any leadership. And God knows that a lot of people in positions of authority don’t exercise any leadership. But what is leadership if it’s not these things when you tend to immediately equate them, as we do in most cultures? People refer to the leadership of the organization, the Congress, the country, or the military—and they are always referring to those people in senior positions of authority. But who knows if they are actually exercising any leadership? All we know is that they have gotten very good at finding out what people expect and how to dive through that hoop where enough peoples’ expectations overlap, or at least where the expectations of the critical factions overlap. They know how to gain authority and people give them power.

“Indeed,” he continues, “that’s all we’ve been talking about here. We’ve been talking about what expectations do I need to meet in order to get power from you? If you are going to choose to take this course, you are going to give me some of your attention. Attention is a critical source of power. People vie for attention. You might think of attention as the currency. There are two primary forms of authorization from which you gain attention: the formal authorization (in this case of the school), which only gets me in the door, and informal authorization that you will or will not choose to give me based on some of the things we have been talking about—competencies and certain sorts of personal accessibility. Humility may not fit for a lot of people. But at least everybody probably will agree that if you’re going to give somebody authority, they have to have values that overlap with some of your values. They have to sort of have their heart in the right place. They might be very competent, but they can’t abuse your trust.”

“But the complexity of authority relationships isn’t just a product of the person who’s trying to get the authority. What makes authority relationships complicated is that they consist of different publics, constituencies, and factions that each expect you to behave differently and give you authority according to different criteria. (Is he strong? Is he weak? Can she be humble? Will she take a stand and take the punches or will she try to hedge all the time?) So anybody in a position of authority is immediately caught in this bind of whose expectations to frustrate and whose to meet.”

A woman in her early thirties thoughtfully asks a question that she seems to have been working on since early in the class session:

“Can you be honest and credible—and effective?”

No hands in the air. The class seems to recognize that an important question has just been laid on the table, and the professor responds in kind:

“If you walk that razor’s edge, it can be done. But your feet will get cut up—and you might fall off. Part of our work here is to figure out how to not get too cut up and how not to fall off.”

There follows a kind of sober silence, and then a woman sitting on the radiator in the back of the class stands up to make herself visible and heard as she reflects,

“It seems to me that it would be really difficult. I’m just thinking about the position people are in right now, having to think about trying to make a commitment to a course on the basis of something that looks uncertain, given that this is the first day of classes for most people, and we don’t know what we’re comparing it with. It seems like there are lots of attempts to try and say, give me something that I can put my hands around and say a definite yes or no to. I think that what we’re hearing is that doesn’t happen; and we’re going to each have to struggle to get to our own decision.”

The professor responds respectfully:

“Part of the problem is that people know how to learn in particular ways, but this course requires that you stretch how you learn so as to be more similar to the ways you’re going to have to learn, or the ways you should have been learning, out in real organizational situations where nobody’s telling you what to learn according to an outline, and where you have got to put the knowledge together and organize it—because, indeed, there’s been a lot of very important ideas that have already been presented here. But for many of you, they’ve sifted right through your fingers because you don’t yet have the capacity to identify those important ideas because they didn’t come in a form you were expecting. I didn’t present them in a way that could make it a more familiar learning or school process. I didn’t say, ‘Roman numeral one, [he writes on the board] Authority-Leadership Distinction. Roman numeral two, Influence and Tackling Tough Problems; Roman numeral three, Authority. Point A: A product of expectations. Point B: can be divided into Formal and Informal. You see?’ ”

A man on the first row heaves a sigh, leans back in his chair, and in a tone of rueful humor says,

“This is how I feel right now. I’ve just come from a situation where I thought that I was exercising leadership, and I thought that I was accomplishing something that I thought was good for the people I was trying to serve. And everybody hated me [laughter], and I never seemed to do anything that was right. Now I say, ‘Well, let me take this leadership course.’ (Laughter) And I come in here, and you say to me, ‘No, you have to go back through all those things that you were doing wrong in order to learn how to do it right.’ So—.”

As more tension-releasing laughter ripples across the class, the instructor patiently joins the humor of the moment yet affirms:

“Yes, I know, but I can’t think of any encyclopedia for you to learn more from than the encyclopedia of your own failures and successes. If you really can understand what you saw wrong, what you did wrong, what was effective, and what you could have done differently, you’ll carry that lesson with you much more than you will carry lessons that are distilled from other people’s experiences.”

A man who looks maybe forty and very thoughtful observes out loud:

“It dispels the notion that I had—that people had convinced me of—that I was a natural leader, and now I’m really doubting that. And I hear you say, ‘No, the notion that leaders are born needs to go out the window.’ ”

The instructor sends the ball back across the court:

“You’re lucky that you’re finding this out at a young age.”

(Laughter)

The man responds,

“I’m not as young as I look.”

(More laughter)

The end of the stated class time is approaching, and a few students begin to leave—either because they have decided this is not the course for them or simply because they have to sprint to the other side of the university for their next class. The instructor acknowledges the legitimacy of people exiting early on the first day, but emphatically lays out some clear ground rules that include arriving on time and not leaving early—“Essential,” he says, “in a class in which the class itself is the primary subject matter.” He also speaks of “norms of civility” that he trusts the class to operate with.

This causes a woman to remark,

“Related to that question, how about confidentiality, or should we change names and places to respect the people that we worked with and will be talking about during our case studies?”

“That’s a tricky question,” responds the professor. “I think that would be a good question to take up on Wednesday when we talk in more depth about how the small groups will work and how the case consultations will work.”

Then,

“Okay, see you Wednesday.”