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

The work of the human imagination may be understood as a dynamic process composed of five moments, and the practice of artist-leadership continually moves among them. These are the following: (1) conscious conflict (held in relationship), (2) pause, (3) image or insight, (4) re-patterning, (5) interpretation/testimony and testing.

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.

Leadership is a way to describe the activity of persons engaging in the mobilization of people around them to make progress on the important challenges of their place and their time.

Questions of leadership are intimately linked with questions of power, and charisma is one way of talking about power. Along with the needs for belonging and recognition, human beings need some sense of power—the capacity to affect one’s world.

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.

The capacity of this approach to push things into an uncomfortable range is another feature of its competence in facilitating learning below the neck. It does, however, create tension between two characteristics of an effective learning environment: safety and challenge. Parker Palmer has eloquently argued for the practice of “creating a hospitable

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.

What was the purpose and what was the task of the consultation group session? It is remarkable how difficult it is for people to actually recognize and name the deep purpose of why they have convened—in this case, to learn the art and practice of leadership—that is, how to mobilize people to make progress on tough challenges.

Holding steady is a key metaphor at the core of this approach because it captures the recognition that in the process of adaptive leadership there are always powerful forces at play. Leaders who can be fully present and resist being buffeted about in the wind and chop of adaptive work help to provide the ballast that is critical to making progress.

Artists work within a set of relationships that they cannot fully control.