Harvard psychology of leadership 1508 04 LD

Psychology 1508:
Leadership Cultivation
“Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can
present every moment with the cumulative force of a
whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of
another you have only an extemporaneous half
possession. That which each can do best, none but his
Maker can teach him. Where is the master who could
have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or
Newton?... Do that which is assigned to you, and you
cannot hope too much or dare too much.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson



Are Leaders Born?
• Leadership is a skill
“If you truly believe leaders are born to
lead, you may avoid engaging in
situations and experiences that trigger
your full leadership potential. You may
even engage in those situations and
experiences, but fail to derive the deep
meaning from those events that can
enhance your leadership development.
Your beliefs about leadership can
become self-fulfilling and self-limiting.”
Bruce Avolio

• Acquired/stable skills (Wood & Bandura, 1989)

Are Leaders Made?
• Engenders passivity
“Education is a remarkable thing, but it is well to
remember from time to time that nothing that is
worth knowing can be taught.”
Oscar Wilde


Leaders Make Themselves!
“They all agree that leaders are made, not born,
and made more by themselves than by any
external means.”
Warren Bennis
“All of the leaders I talked with agreed that no one
can teach you how to become yourself, to take
charge, to express yourself, except you.”
Warren
Bennis
• Conditions rather than causes (Hackman, 2001)


The Leadership Development Field
“Leadership scholars should consider why the gap...
between theory and practice persists. Why, for example,
is there a rather large literature on ethical leadership, but
scant or even no evidence that this literature makes
much of a difference?... Does the divide between what
we preach and what we practice say something about
the nature of leadership educations? If yes, how should

leadership teaching and training be changed so as to
make it more effective?”
Kellerman & Webster


The Leadership Development Field
“Although studies have shown
that real change can result
from training, most of the time
the change doesn’t seem to
be sustained, which is why it
is often called the honeymoon
effect. Considering that more
than 60 billion dollars spent in
North America alone on
training, this is a sobering
observation.”
Goleman et al.


What Are We Trying to Cultivate?
• Emotional Intelligence
“While the precise ratio of EI to cognitive abilities
depends on how each are measured and on the
unique demands of a given organization, our rule of
thumb holds that EI contributes 80 to 90 percent of
the competencies that distinguish outstanding from
average leaders—and sometimes more. To be sure,
purely cognitive competencies, such as technical
expertise, surface in such studies—but often as

threshold abilities, the skills people need simply to
do an average job.”
Daniel Goleman


Soft Is Hard
• Limbic vs. neo-cortex change


Soft Is Hard
• Limbic vs. neo-cortex change
“The problem is that most training programs for
enhancing emotional intelligence abilities, such as
leadership, target the neocortex rather than the limbic
brain... The thinking brain can comprehend something
after a single hearing or reading. The limbic brain, on
the other hand, is a much slower learner—particularly
when the challenge is to relearn deeply ingrained
habits... Leadership learning, therefore, requires a
different model from what works for the thinking brain:
It needs lots of practice and repetition.”
Daniel Goleman


No Five Easy Steps to Leadership


EI Leadership Skills
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Self-awareness
Openness to criticism
Ability to manage emotions
Motivation
Self-confidence
Honesty and integrity
Ability to develop others
Courage


Authenticity
“Authority is granted to people who are perceived
as authoring their own words, their own actions,
their own lives.”
Parker Palmer
“To be authentic is literally to be your own author,
to discover your native energies and desires, and
then to find your own way of acting on them.”
Warren Bennis


Know Thyself and Be Thyself
“Know thyself.”

The Oracle of Delphi

“This above all: To thine own self be true, And it
must follow as night follows day, Thou canst
not then be false to any man.”
Shakespeare

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique;
good teaching comes from the identity and
integrity of the teacher
Parker Palmer


Step 1: Know Thyself


“‘Know thyself’ was the inscription over the
Oracle at Delphi. And it is still the most difficult
task any of us faces. But until you truly know
yourself, strengths and weaknesses, know what
you want to do and why you want to do it, you
cannot succeed in any but the most superficial
sense of the word.”
Warren Bennis

• Key to well-being (Campbell et al., 1996)


Knowing Oneself, Knowing Others
“If a person is perpetually oblivious to his own feelings,

he will also be tuned out to how others feel.”
Daniel Goleman
“In going down into the secrets of his own mind he has
descended into the secrets of all minds.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We must remember that knowledge of one’s own deep
nature is also simultaneously knowledge of human
nature in general.”
Abraham Maslow

• The extrinsic incentives bias (Heath, 1999)


Getting to Know Ourselves
• Reflection
“Managers’ self-ratings are
less accurate than others’
ratings when compared to
‘objective criterion
measures.... Generally
speaking, managers appear
to have little knowledge of
their own strengths and
weaknesses.”
Beverly Alimo-Mecalfe


360 Degrees Feedback (Forward)
• Predicting success (McEvoy & Beatty, 1989)
• Finding leverage points

Step 2: Be Thyself


“Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming
yourself. It’s precisely that simple, and it’s also that
difficult.”
Warren Bennis

• The “One Type of Leader” myth
• How can I be a leader; let me count the ways
• Overlap between passions and strengths
“Excellent team leaders... are aware of their natural
styles—they know what they like to do, what they can do
easily and well, and what they can accomplish only with
difficulty if at all. They learn over time how to exploit
their special stregths and preferences, and how to
contain or circumvent their weaknesses.”
Richard Hackman


Strengths

Passions
Zone of
Great
Leadership

Strengthening Our Strengths
“We’re typically over-qualified in naming our weaknesses
and much less savvy about those things at which we are
naturally good.”
Stavros & Torres
“Only when you operate from strengths can you achieve
true excellence... One cannot build performance on
weaknesses.... It takes far more energy to improve from
incompetence to mediocrity than to improve from first-rate
performance to excellence.”
Peter Drucker
“The real tragedy of life is not that each of us doesn’t have
enough strengths, it’s that we fail to use the ones we
have.”
Buckingham & Clifton


Success Through Strengths
“Confidence is more than empty ‘pep talk.’ There was a
movement in California to build self-esteem because
somebody had decided schoolchildren did not have
enough self-esteem. You don’t build self-esteem by
patting people on the back and telling them they’re
wonderful. Confidence is a much more complex
phenomenon that comes from experiencing one’s
strengths in action.”
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
“Presidents don’t do great things by dwelling on their
limitations, but by focusing on their possibilities.”
Henry Kissinger