Teaching Leadership

An Integrative Approach

Barbara C. Crosby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317579281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Teaching Leadership provides guidance for leadership educators in a variety of organizational and community contexts and across academic disciplines. An experienced leadership educator, Crosby promotes an inclusive vision of leadership that recognizes the inherent leadership potential in everyone. Featuring interviews with 25 respected leadership educators, Teaching Leadership complicates and enriches the leader-follower dichotomy to advance a holistic and practice-oriented model of leadership education. Using the metaphor of 'heart, head, and hands, ' Crosby shows how authentic leadership is an embodied practice based equally in emotional, intellectual, and experiential learning.

Part I

Using Personal Narrative to Foster Self-Understanding and Commitment

While personal narratives are woven throughout this book, this part focuses specifically on the creation of such narratives as a foundation of leadership development. By leadership development I mean achieving a more mature view of oneself as a (sometime) leader and (frequent) follower and becoming more skilled in helping others achieve the common good.

In the first chapter, several leadership educators join me in describing the “heart” of leadership development. How did we become committed to leadership development work? How were we influenced by family, gender, race/ethnicity, economic circumstances, religion, education, professional paths, and culture? I hope that these stories will prompt you to start responding to these questions yourself.

The second chapter is more “heady.” Why is personal narrative so important in leadership development? What are some of the major theories of adult development and leadership that shed light on important components and uses of these narratives? The third chapter describes specific tried-and-true narrative exercises that can help you and the participants in your classes and workshops deepen their understanding of themselves as leaders (and followers) and strengthen their commitment to leadership work.

In Leadership for the Common Good (2005) John Bryson and I emphasize two starting places for leadership—first, understanding one’s self and others and, second, understanding the context that summons you to leadership. Part I of the current book focuses on the first of these; subsequent parts will focus on diagnosing context and using your personal assets to lead in that context.

My Commitment to Leadership Development

I am a child of the 1950s, 1960s American South, and I never intended to be a teacher, much less a teacher of leadership. My only career aim was to get out—get out of my parents’ house and out of Augusta, Georgia. College was my ticket and I settled on Vanderbilt University because it offered me the best scholarship. My four years at Vanderbilt are still vivid four decades later. They gave me the opening to the larger worlds I sought, helped me see that the South and its inhabitants could break the hold of segregation, revealed new heroes, and gave me the conviction that my contemporaries and I could alter the course of our society. This conviction persisted despite the blows of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April of my senior year, followed in June by the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

My conviction about the impact of organized citizens pursuing just causes has persisted despite many other blows since. It has been a consistent thread through my years as a newspaper reporter and editor, my volunteer work, my time in governors’ offices, my work for a Minnesota nonprofit, and my three decades teaching and writing about leadership and public affairs. I’ve seen triumphs and setbacks, breakthroughs and shenanigans. One question has become central for me and has led to my commitment to excellence in teaching leadership: How do individuals and groups become committed to beneficial social change and how do they achieve it? This question led me to leave my job with the Minnesota Project in 1984 and devote substantial time to developing the book that eventually became Leadership for the Common Good (1992), co-written with John Bryson.

In 1984 I also enrolled in the Leadership and Social Policy seminar being conducted by Dr. Robert Terry at the Humphrey Institute (now School) of Public Affairs. I wanted to gain a more solid academic base for my analysis of major social and political change efforts. Bob’s great assets were a relentless curiosity and great intellectual generosity. Moreover, he was a shameless extrovert who never encountered someone he couldn’t talk to. He loved messing with participants in his Humphrey School seminars, in order to shake us out of our habitual ways of thinking and seeing. He did so with considerable humor, however, and usually had participants appreciating his repartee if not becoming acolytes. Occasionally, though, seminar participants were skeptical, if not downright offended, by his pushing various boundaries and sometimes stepping over them without permission.

Bob was a generous colleague and a frustrating one. He invited me to help staff the seminars and programs at the Reflective Leadership Center. He helped me move from a nervous novice at leading seminars to a seasoned vet and showed by example what it was like to bring one’s whole self to the task of teaching. At the same time, he was not an easy man to hold accountable and to keep on the right side of boundaries. His charisma was an asset but also shielded him from some of the usual constraints on an academic administrator.

During the 1980s, I gained clearer understanding that my mission as a writer and activist was to comprehend leadership and followership. Thanks to Bob Terry, I became part of a thinking circle that tried to get a handle on what leadership was all about. We were teaching seminars about leadership at the same time, so this was definitely a case of building the bridge as we walked on it. What an exhilarating endeavor! This, of course, was in the days before leadership studies had developed as an academic field. (Only later did we realize we were helping to build the field.) We invited several insightful scholars from elsewhere to join our thinking circle, people like James MacGregor Burns, Barbara Kellerman, Ron Heifetz, and Harold Prince. From our work emerged the frameworks and exercises we tried out in our seminar sessions. Some worked like a charm, others bombed, and some required reworking.

My commitment to excellence in leadership teaching emerged from my desire to help other people find their leadership calling and succeed in bringing diverse groups of people together to tackle complex problems. Plus, I had found even as a master’s candidate teaching news writing well before my time at the Humphrey School that I got a kick out of teaching. Teaching—whether in a classroom, a workshop setting, a discussion circle, or in an auditorium full of people—is at once what I live for and about the scariest thing I ever do. It’s scary because leadership is a serious subject. People who summon the courage to tackle inequities, shake up the status quo, and confront abusive power mongers are putting themselves on the line. There’s also the need to practice what I preach—I can’t just talk about leadership, I have to practice it in my own context. Yikes!

Perhaps the biggest barrier for me, though, has been nearly debilitating anxiety about speaking to more than a few people at a time. I have spent years getting to the bottom of this anxiety and training myself to manage it so that I can do what I am called to do. In the late 1980s, in a seminar on women and leadership that I had helped organize, I heard with empathy the story of an accomplished woman leader, who said she threw up before every major talk. I never lost my dinner over an upcoming presentation, but I often lay awake the night before convinced that I would forget every line and wind up a miserable failure. I envisioned a firing squad sitting in the front row.

Being female has had its disadvantages as well, as has being a nontraditional academic. For a long time, I had an exceptionalist perspective on being female in various male preserves like journalism in the 1960s—that is, I assumed that if I was smart enough and worked hard enough I would be able to achieve what I wanted. Experience taught me about the shortcomings of this view; feminist analysis gave me a lens through which to critique my own attitudes and build solider connections to other women.

I am sustained by a marvelous partnership with John Bryson that is now in its fifth decade; by my children John Kee Sooja and Jessica Ah-Reum Crosby Bryson, who have become sharp analysts and generous human beings; and by my many hardworking colleagues and reliable (if often quirky) friends. I also have the pleasure of contemplating the growth of leadership studies, the strengthening of the leadership centers with which I am associated, and my fellow scholars’ growing attention to the questions that animate my own commitment to leadership education. Finally, I get a thrill from each and every person who comes up to me after taking one of my classes or reading something I’ve written and says, I’ve been using the ideas and tools you taught me and they actually work!

1

Using Personal Narrative and the Heart

So where do we leadership educators begin? With ourselves, of course; with self-examination.

Why do we care about developing leaders and leadership? What do we bring to this work in the way of inheritances, skills, experience, and vulnerabilities? What story are we crafting of ourselves at this point in the early 21st century on Planet Earth?

On the opposite page is a story in which I answer these questions. Other leadership educators have their own unique stories to tell. Most of the people you will meet in this book teach leadership courses or coordinate leadership programs; some mix leadership into consulting or coaching work. For example, Yvonne Cheek, a veteran facilitator and organizational development consultant, says, “I infuse leadership development in all the work I do.” These educators’ academic degrees are in psychology, political science, organizational behavior, public administration, sociology, business administration, engineering, music, and other fields. (My own are in political science, journalism and mass communication, and leadership studies.) Of those with Ph.D.s, some had practical experience after their undergraduate education and others pursued advanced degrees right away.

What seems to matter most are some key formative experiences. They range from finding oneself on stage with a reggae band, to attending boarding school, to experiencing injustice, to finding a guru, to enduring family difficulties and loss.

Formation

Chuck Palus grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in a Catholic, blue-collar middle-class family. He felt smothered by Catholicism, and was happier being a Boy Scout. “I was tinkering and figuring the world out,” he says. “I was the first person in my extended family to go to college. I got a bit of money to go to Penn State.” There he studied engineering. One evening he showed up for a campus reggae concert and suddenly found himself caught up in the band that was playing that night. The band leader coaxed him onto the stage to introduce the group. “I’d never done anything like this, but I went ahead and introduced the group, and realized I could do things I’d never contemplated.” From Penn State he went to work for DuPont. “It was five years of figuring things out. That’s what I do.” He was assigned a role in quality assurance, and became intrigued by the human side of engineering projects. He decided to study psychology and human systems at Boston College, where he would receive a Ph.D. in developmental psychology. While in graduate school, he was an instructor with Outward Bound, an organization that focuses on character development through outdoor experiences. “It was fun and exciting.” It also allowed him to see the potential for personal transformation when people are offered challenging assignments in a supportive environment. “I started working with young people in Outward Bound and transitioned to working with adults in organizations with the Center for Creative Leadership.”

Gill Hickman grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the segregated American South. At that time in the African American community, “if you had capabilities you were volunteered. Teachers, ministers, and parents volunteered you for leadership roles. I was always put in leadership positions in church, Girl Scouts, and clubs.”

In Sunday school, the minister said because we are preparing you to be leaders, I am going to turn Sunday School classes over to the youth. Gill, I want you to teach the adult class. I said I can’t, my mother is in that class. He insisted so I really prepared, I drew on many sources, I thought about how to get people interested. I was 15. It turned out to be an incredible experience.

—Gill Hickman

“My teachers and my parents reinforced the message that I could do anything I wanted to do. They said, ‘Look, there are barriers to you as an African American, but so what.’ ” Her mother was a role model. “She was a first lieutenant in World War II, an army nurse with the Tuskegee airmen. She became evening coordinator, which made her head of the whole VA hospital for the evening shift, before she retired. She was always pushing and encouraging me to take leadership roles.”

Hickman also was caught up in the civil rights movement as a young person. “Children were involved in the movement. I saw that anyone could be a leader. I saw that you can make a difference at all levels of society from the family to the highest level. You can engage.”

As a teenager Hickman won a scholarship to attend a college prep school in Massachusetts.

Going to boarding school gave me the academic background for college but also exposed me to so many things I wouldn’t have had in the South. We were exposed to libraries and plays and art museums—those things would mainly have been off limits in Alabama. Teachers challenged us to be critical thinkers and make up our own minds. It was very democratic. Students really set rules of the school. I did a lot that shapes me today. It was really a critical point in my development.

After graduating from the University of Denver, Hickman began a career as a university administrator in California. “I was asked to do some teaching, so I did. Later the dean came up and said, do you realize you’ve been teaching for free? You must like it, he said. I realized I did. I fell in love with college teaching.” She later became part of the core faculty at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond.

Unlike Gill Hickman, Sonia Ospina sensed from a very early age that she was destined to be a teacher. As a child in Colombia, she found herself playing school, teaching, helping her brother learn. “When I had to choose my first career it was so obvious that I had to be a teacher. It wasn’t necessarily what my parents wanted.”

She never thought of herself as a leader, but rather simply wanted to contribute, to serve. “In high school, for example, there was a hurricane in Central America. I collected money to send, because I felt we needed to do something. It was quite successful. I was in charge of the senior yearbook, and that involved lots of responsibility.” She saw herself as “more of a nerd,” compared to more visible, popular people. Later, friends from that time would describe her as having been a role model, but she didn’t think of herself that way.

When Ospina went to university in Bogotá, she became involved in extracurricular service projects that opened her eyes to poverty in her country. She remembers, in particular, working with a Catholic charity. One night she was planning activities with a group of nuns at a convent when a kid knocked on the door. “The kid was hollering, screaming, asking to be let in, but the nuns said this happens every night. At that moment I said this doesn’t make sense. I thought, this is ridiculous. It has stuck in my mind forever: That people can become so callous. It marked me. I disconnected from the group, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Preface
• Leadership Educator Biographies
• Part I Using Personal Narrative to Foster Self-Understanding and Commitment
• Part II Hosting and Hospitality
• Part III Tackling Organizational and Societal Problems: Leadership Praxis
• Part IV Strengthening Citizenship
• Part V Assessing, Coaching, Mentoring
• Appendix A: Methodology
• Appendix B: Teaching Leadership Glossary
• Appendix C: Guidance for Transforming Public Policy Teams
• Appendix D: Storify Assignment
• Index