By ROBERT W.

GUNN

CAN LEADERSHIP BE TAUGHT?

Old assumptions about the difficulties in developing leadership are outmoded. Instead, look to everyone's inherent capacity.
First of all, if leadership can be taught, several assumptions would have to be true. For example, there would have to be leadership teachers, people who have knowledge of leading and can instruct others in the art. The U.S. Army is a good example of institutions that try to teach leadership. The Army knows that by inculcating people with core values such as loyalty, courage and respect and by teaching them how to communicate and work as teams, they can teach them to take action in the face of fear, danger, and travail. The Army places its emphasis on the "content," the knowledge and experience associated with acts of leading. Certainly the Army's best leaders exhibit the behaviors it teaches. But when it comes right down to it, no one can predict which people will step forward in the heat of battle and act. Nor do these battle-tried leaders point to their training as the source of this ability. There seems to be something else, something that transcends all the classroom work, the simulation games and the other efforts the Army uses to try to produce leaders. Second, the claim that leadership can be taught implies that someone wants to learn and that individuals believe that leadership education can help them become leaders. The Center for Creative Leadership, an international institution focusing on leadership, operates on the assumption that developing leaders relates to the "whole person." In other words, the Center believes that to discover your leadership talents and achieve your full potential as a leader, you must first come to terms with your character, ego, and upbringing. While the "human dimension" of leadership certainly seems to correlate strongly with good leaders (people who have the human touch), this kind of self-discovery strikes many people as not particularly applicable to their job requirements. In addition, few people are willing to examine themselves as thoroughly as programs like this require. Add to this, that it's all too easy for people to point to strong leaders of flourishing organizations whose "dark" side seems to lie at the heart of their effectiveness.

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Finally, the idea that leadership can be taught suggests a curriculum and the notion that techniques of leading can be transmitted via frameworks, reading materials, and other instructional aids. In fact, a number of consulting firms have developed "change management" practices that try to create a social system of leadership. These practices sprang up in response to the plans of clients to implement large-scale changes - something everyone would agree requires leaders. In practice, these leadership projects end up being cumbersome, overly structured, and, for many people, disheartening. People know that leading is inherently "graceful" and that the best leadership experiences feel "easy" and can even be "fun," adjectives that scarcely characterize the typical efforts of consulting firms to teach leadership! What these leadership development efforts all have in common, irrespective of their underlying assumptions, is that each claims to produce leaders. The Army knows that in every crisis men and women will step forward to provide the necessary inspiration; senior executives have learned that when people are confronted with intensive examination of their effectiveness as leaders, they can undergo dramatic change; and consultants gratefully acknowledge the line mangers who step forward to champion the company's initiatives. While the individual results present powerful case histories, not one of these methods has concrete measures that prove its efficacy. Nor can any one school point to a common, unifying principle that may affect all of them. If there is such a unifying principle, what might it be? And what might explain why each system can claim success? Perhaps we are simply shortchanging the inherent capacity of people to lead. What if we were to suppose that each of us already possesses everything we need to direct the efforts of other people, that each of us has all of the inner resources we need to guide others effectively? In other words, that every individual already has the potential be a competent leader? If this conjecture were true, then "developing leaders" would be no more complicated than acting in accordance with this assumption. Well, how might this actually work in practice? First of all, "leading" would lose its cachet and begin to look like many other human activities - playing, thinking, resting, doing, and even exercising. When people are leading from their "deeper intelligence," actions and decisions flow naturally and without great effort. You simply realize that something needs doing, and you do it.

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Next, leaders would lose their mystique. With less emphasis on the difficulty of leading and the paucity of leaders, we would probably start to look upon leadership as something we all have in common. Ironically, by our unwitting belief that leadership is scarce, we lend confirmation to that very belief. The reality may be that if we all have the capacity to lead, then we must be stifling leadership by failing to acknowledge this natural human capacity. By innocently giving too much weight to an erroneous assumption, we make things harder than they need to be. Another likely outcome is that common sense would rule and simplicity prevail. Whenever people acknowledge that leading starts with them, it's hard for dumb ideas or complicated plans to gain much traction. Bad leadership isn't generally a case of a "leader" consciously setting forth to act in ways that are counterproductive, but rather a case of other people failing to speak up and nip the bad ideas in the bud. When people share responsibility and authority, they are capable of achieving very rapid results. Decisions, once made, are implemented quickly because everyone agrees on what must be done and does it. Such leadership also makes more resources available, in part by stopping initiatives that no longer contribute, in part by spending resources more effectively. In other words, each person throughout the organization begins applying his or her own leadership capacity to accomplish the desired ends. The momentum this kind of kind of effort can achieve is awesome, far surpassing people's normal expectations of what can be accomplished. Also, everyone's job becomes much easier and more fun as each individual's natural talents, knowledge, and experience are prized for their unique, creative contribution. Furthermore, these talents are freely given in service to the collective enterprise. No one holds anything back because there would be no point to that. Individuals not only direct their own work but also harmonize their efforts with those of others and stay mentally ahead of events. Of course, this produces a certain gracefulness. Another characteristic of latent leadership is that innovation and creativity are a natural occurrence as people listen to each other and their customers with greater thought and in sight. One important aspect of leading is "seeing" clearly, and ironically we see better with our ears than our eyes. Interestingly, these examples of how the latent capacity to lead might manifest itself can yield concrete measurements of their effectiveness - something the old assumptions cannot claim. Such measurements could include, for example, speed of action or decision-making, assessments of the number of people who demonstrate leadership capacity, employee satisfaction surveys, innovation rates, customer satisfaction or simply more consistent financial results.

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Our old assumptions about leading -- that it must be drilled into people as the Army thinks, that one must undergo years of psychological evaluation as the Center for Creative Leadership believes, or that it depends on a "system" as the consultants say - may have been right for times past, but it's unlikely that such assumptions will serve us well now. The world is moving too fast. The truth, we believe, is that everyone already has all of the capacities necessary for leading, so keeping up with the times is only a question of recognizing this innate ability and acting on. Granted, it requires faith not only for those in positions of authority but also for everyone else. Each of us needs to look within ourselves and see how we answer the question, "Am I able to lead?" Funny, isn't it? The natural response to this question is, "Of course I can lead!" This is not to say that individuals cannot learn how to lead more easily or more serenely - that is the art of leading, and it comes from a process of discovering how to be most effective. But it all starts with turning your back on the conventional wisdom and seeking to discover what you already know about leading. Then it is a question of just taking the most obvious step. So can leadership be taught? No! But then again it doesn't have to be taught. Leading effectively does not require learning something you don't already know but simply looking inside to discover your own answers to the question of how to express your natural gifts. For more information email Partners@AccompliGroup.com

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