Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World

Our job is to hold people through a process. We structure the course so people can learn from their experiences and from the experience of others.

ANALYZE.

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.

discernment). There is no guarantee that one’s interpretation and intervention will be timely and useful in the collective imagination of the group and serve to create new realities.

inspiration is dangerous. To teach a politician or a business manager how to be inspiring without also trying to teach them the importance of being trustworthy with the power they will gain because of their inspirational capacity is negligent, even immoral.

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.

TAKE THE HEAT AND HOLD STEADY.

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.

“a key question in the practice of leadership becomes: How can one recognize and counteract the expected forms of work avoidance and help people learn despite resistance?” A