Leadership Can Be Taught
A Bold Approach for a Complex World
We live in a time when the desires for superior leadership run strong and deep. As our world
becomes more complex, diverse, and morally ambiguous—the essential components of successful
leadership continue to change with the times. Do current leadership programs meet today’s
challenges? What practice of leadership will mobilize people to face tough challenges that
require both loss and innovation? Can leadership be learned in ways that change behavior at the
level of default settings—the way people respond in a crisis and under stress?
In LEADERSHIP CAN BE TAUGHT: A Bold Approach for a Complex World (HBS Press;
November 7, 2005), Sharon Daloz Parks argues that in order to prepare future leaders, we will
need to go beyond conventional teaching and training methods to a more dynamic, adaptive
approach to leadership theory learned through a process called “case-in-point.” Pioneered by
Ronald Heifetz and his colleagues at Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership, this distinctive,
bold approach to learning and teaching leadership is created and practiced in a manner that is
responsive to the need for a new story about what leadership means—and how to learn it.
Through rich description including stories and anecdotes, Parks invites readers into the classroom
to experience Heifetz’s approach and case-in-point teaching firsthand.
This approach, as Heifetz and his colleagues have developed it, is based on four key distinctions:
leadership and authority, familiar problems and unprecedented conditions, power and progress,
and personality and presence. Case-in-point teaching draws on several well-established learning
methods including seminar, simulation, discussion and dialogue, clinical-therapeutic practice, and
coaching, but unlike traditional teaching methods that often focus on the experiences of past
leaders and managers, case-in-point uses individuals’ own experiences—and the classroom
environment itself—as a “crucible” for learning. This approach enables emerging leaders to
actively work through the complex demands of today’s workplace and build their skills as they
discover theory in practice and learn that you can offer acts of leadership “from wherever you
sit.”
Based on classroom observations, interviews, and analysis, case-in-point 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 practitioners, teachers, and coaches who have effectively taken
up this approach. Parks outlines and interprets the essential features of Heifetz’s work and aims
to answer the following questions: How readily do the lessons of this approach transfer back into
the workplace? What kind of staying power does this approach have? Can this approach be
picked up by other teacher-practitioners? Can its essential elements be used in quite different
settings to good effect? What are the implications of this approach for re-casting our prevailing
myths about leadership?
Challenging conventional ways of thinking about leadership and methods of leadership teaching
and training, Leadership Can Be Taught sheds light on a dynamic mode of learning and
challenges us to practice and teach leadership in more skilled, effective, and inspired forms.
|
