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

The challenge in our time is that as our world becomes more complex, the normative ways in which many adults make meaning are increasingly inadequate—whether we are dealing with workplace demands, with questions of how to vote in national elections, or the relationships within our households. More is now asked of us, and as one of Kegan’s book titl

Weber understood charisma as arising within relationships—a function of two-way interaction between the leader and the follower.

this more effective deployment of self is cultivated by a potent set of concepts, metaphors, and practices. These foster the formation of five central competencies:

In the fourth moment, previous assumptions are recomposed in the light of the new insight. This doesn’t happen automatically. The linkages between the new insight in one domain of experience and the implications for practice at another point in time have to be consciously forged. While the moment of image comes as a gift, the process of re-patterni

The invisibility that I had experienced was one of ignorance. When people don’t know a lot about you, they don’t have a lot to use against you. That’s the protective part. But they also don’t know a lot about how to help you either, so no one can stand with you, really … You have to be visible in order to get what you want.

Fire tempers arrogance, shatters illusion, threatens destruction, bears gifts, keeps us open to complexity, ambiguity, and mystery—and makes the ongoing creation of life possible.

making progress on critical adaptive challenges becomes the basic measure of effective leadership in this approach.

Precisely because the approach is effective in meeting people in their own place of readiness for learning at a given moment in time, an individual learns aspects of the approach but rarely the totality of its interdependent elements.

a more effective deployment of self,