Leadership 101

In this leadership class don’t expect to the professor to teach.

A hundred students
sit in a room waiting for the course to
begin. At exactly 10 o’clock the professor
stands to read his introductory notes:
You will not be late. You will not eat in
class. Everything is being taped for your
record. You will not disclose what
happens in this room to anyone else.

By Tristan Jones | Special to The Christian Science Monitor

He then falls silent. A minute passes.
The students become increasingly
uncomfortable. Another minute ticks by.

Eventually a student musters the courage
to speak. "Perhaps we should use this
time to discuss our thoughts on world
affairs," she suggests. Silence. "I’ve
heard too much about that topic,"
someone else replies. The proposal has
failed. More silence.

This is a typical scene from Leadership
101, a course to prepare tomorrow’s
movers and shakers for the risks of trying to lead.

The unconventional technique is fast gaining respectability in both the
public and private spheres, thanks largely to the efforts of Harvard
University’s Ronald Heifetz, a former lecturer in psychiatry who has
adapted methods used in group therapy into a classroom setting. His
second book on the subject, "Leadership on the Line," written with
Marty Linsky, was published earlier this year.

Dr. Heifetz doesn’t think of leaders as individuals with the ability to
influence or persuade others. Instead, he wants to help people work
through particularly difficult issues, or what he terms "adaptive
challenges."

"An adaptive challenge," he explains, "is a
problem that can’t be rectified by simply
drawing on your existing repertoire of
solutions."

Students sitting in the classroom, nervously
watching their silent professor, are faced
with an adaptive challenge. They want to
learn about leadership, but the teacher is not
playing ball. Their usual responses are
suddenly inadequate. To solve this problem
they will need to invent and discover new
ways of learning.

Reactions to this pedagogical style cover the
gamut. "People who like order may move
immediately to try to create some sort of
structure," explains Heifetz. "Others may
thrive in chaos and attempt to upset the
equilibrium even more."

However, certain behaviors emerge with surprising predictability. The
professor will frequently be criticized for "refusing to teach." Feeling
betrayed, exasperated, or just plain bored, students may start to
break the simple rules laid out at the start, arriving late, or perhaps
bringing lunch to pass the time as the class endlessly debates how it
should proceed.

For some, the monotony is broken only when an argument erupts or
when the professor sparks a discussion by playing a film or piece of
music.

The semester-long course is peppered with unusual components.
Weekly meetings bring five or six students together to analyze
examples of "leadership failure" – chosen from their own
experiences. And then there’s the mysterious "music night," an
evening event at which students are asked to read a poem or story
that "plucks their heartstrings" and then vocalize their feelings in a
song – literally – to enable them to "connect with the group."

But the twice-weekly "large-group meeting" – when the 100 students
come together – is where the real action happens.

After a couple of weeks, the group begins to use itself as its own
case study. The complaints, the gestures of dissent, the arguments
– everything becomes fodder for further discussion and influences the
ever-shifting dynamics. Why do certain people have more influence
than others? How do some get sidelined while others get their way?

The professor acts as a moderator, but occasionally adds his own
insights. By examining the group’s behavior, students learn about
leadership through experience rather than by rote.

At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where the course has
been taught by Heifetz and his team for 18 years, it has earned itself
a somewhat schizophrenic reputation: To some, it’s the best
professional development program in existence; to others, it ranks
with staying in bed as a sensible use of time and tuition fees.

Leadership 101 has been dubbed "the cult" by its critics. One
student, who asked for anonymity, complains, "You’re expected to
make a leap of faith – if you can’t suspend your disbelief, the course
can be rough." The lack of solid "proof" that anyone is actually
developing leadership skills is a common cause of frustration.
Skeptics point to the intense emotional environment of the course to
suggest that students can easily get carried away with the promise
of finally "getting it" if they only try hard enough.

Despite these misgivings, the course’s popularity appears
well-deserved. Alumni tend to gush about the impact it has had on
their work.

Carla Cataldo, for example, remembers how the group would
personalize issues as a way of sidelining difficult topics.
Understanding this dynamic has proved useful in the 14 years since
she took the class. Now Ms. Cataldo is managing her own
community-development consultancy. "The experience of drawing ire
from the class, and being a lightning rod for their frustrations," she
says, "taught me a lot about how to deal with hostile communities."

Paul Uhlig, who took the course five years ago, is applying another
lesson to his work as a cardiac surgeon: how to make people face
difficult issues without feeling threatened.

Dr. Uhlig is concerned that the culture of medicine, with its sharp
boundaries between doctors and patients, is in dire need of reform.
His team at Concord (N.H.) Hospital has been working toward such
reform. Doctors make the ward rounds together. As many as 12
practitioners hold group conversations with patients and families,
allowing each participant to express concerns and pose questions.

"The class taught me what to expect when you want people to
change," Uhlig says. "You have to create the right level of discomfort,
to move people into an area that can be productive without
overstepping the threshold." The team was already among the best in
the country: Taking risks in an attempt to be better still is a delicate
undertaking.

Despite the difficulty, the experiment seems to have been a success.
Over the program’s first three years, the team cut in half the number
of deaths following surgery, and surveys now give the hospital high
marks for patient satisfaction – in the 97th percentile on a national
scale.

Another common challenge of leadership is bearing bad tidings, not a
task that many people relish. But Ian McAuley, a lecturer at
Canberra University who took the class in 1986, is teaching the
government of Australian state of Tasmania to do exactly that.

Tasmania’s economy has entered a period of serious decline.
Stemming this decline, says Dr. McAuley, means "getting people to
accept certain things: Water is limited; demand for our commodities
is down." He argues that the process of adjusting aspirations is itself
a prerequisite for renewed growth, freeing people to think in new ways
and explore opportunities.

In practice this has meant a change in the way government officials
speak to the public. Tasmania’s premier, Jim Bacon, is careful not to
promise the impossible. Flashy stage-managed events have been
replaced with low-profile town-hall meetings. The emphasis is on
listening, and acknowledging hardships, rather than on selling a
comprehensive manifesto for the future.

In a culture that increasingly celebrates "heroes," nothing could be
further from traditional notions of leadership than this. Alumni of
Leadership 101 take personal risks for public gains. "It’s a strange
thing," says one former student, "to see your greatest potentials and
your deepest flaws set out in front of 100 other people, and to learn
how to use the experience for good."

• Tristan Jones participated in Leadership 101 as a graduate student
at the Kennedy School of Government.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0813/p14s01-lecs.html