Can leadership be taught? More specifically, can it be taught by peers? (And what does William James have to do with it?)
At Stanford I work closely with the Arbuckle Leadership Fellows Program,
in which a cadre of second-year students leads the first-year
class through a series of small-group workshops
known as the Leadership Labs. Both the Leadership Fellows program and the Leadership Labs
themselves are examples of experiential learning, where conceptual theories provide a frame for hands-on, face-to-face activities.
Last year I did some thinking about experiential learning after reading Robert Richardson's William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism:
In the book's penultimate chapter, Richardson quotes from James's Some Problems of Philosophy:
The
intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substituting a
conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience
originally comes.
The profound meaning of this quote
for me is rooted in the fact that my work hinges upon the unique
ability of experiential learning to expand both our self-awareness and our behavioral repertoire, and (by extension) upon the inability of conventional modes of instruction to achieve the same results. Richardson continues:
For
this aspect of his later thinking, James has been called
anti-intellectual. A better description of his real position would be
anti-abstraction; best would be to recognize it as the culmination of a
lifelong protest on behalf of experience. This is not a new position
for James, of course. It is the same clear opposition to Plato, who
denigrates perceptual knowledge as mere sense impressions, and
contrasts them with ideas, which are true and eternal. Jame's life
work had been to reverse this polarity, to answer Plato...
[But the Platonic] model is much less useful in a field where there are few (if
any) universal truths, which is the case in my areas of expertise:
executive coaching, leadership development and group facilitation. I
can't tell anyone anything and have confidence that real learning will occur. I can disclose my own
sense-impressions, but the choice to view them as relevant and
meaningful remains in the hands of the learner. Ultimately all I can
do as an instructor is act on hunches, ask questions, and make
observations, and hope they register with the learner as lasting
sense-impressions and that the learner infuses them with
meaning. And that meaning must be created out of their own, personal
experiences as a leader or in a group.
So back to the question at hand: Can students teach leadership to their peers? Absolutely--but I'd highlight 3 important issues:
1) Leadership Is Learned, Not Taught
Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic and currently a professor of management at Harvard Business School, has said:
I don't think you can teach leadership, I think you can learn about it. I think you can learn about yourself. It comes from within, from
who are you inside and what makes you tick, and what are those tapes
playing in your head about what you want to be and what your
limitations are...
What we can do [in leadership development classes] is cause people to come together and learn about
themselves through dialogue... You learn about who you are, and if you
go inside yourself, you find out, "What are my passions?"...
Do you seek out honest feedback from people about who you are? The
hardest thing we have to do is see ourselves as others see us. And do
you gain that self-awareness? Some people think they have it, but
they've never really tested themselves, and that is crucial.
This is exactly what we seek to do with the Leadership Fellows, and
what we train them to do with their peers: Provide experiences
that will allow them to understand themselves better--their strengths,
their passions and their limitations--and engage in discussions that will expand their self-awareness through candid feedback.
2) Peers Are Guides and Facilitators, Not Teachers
If leadership is learned rather than taught, then it stands to reason that our Leadership Fellows aren't teaching, even though their students are learning. The Fellows do present some conceptual material to their peers to frame the exercises in the Labs, on topics such as active listening, emotional intelligence, or the stages of group development.
But the real value provided by the Fellows in the leadership development process comes not from their mastery of abstract concepts but from their ability to guide a small group of their peers through a series of experiences, ranging from highly structured exercises to open-ended role-plays based on business scenarios, and to facilitate discussions in which the participants get candid feedback on their effectiveness and reflect on their performance.
Having a highly differentiated authority figure--i.e. a teacher--leading an experiential learning process can actually inhibit learning, because the students will aim for the "right" answer and seek to win the teacher's approval, which can distort their authentic reactions to the experience. But there's rarely (if ever) one right answer when it comes to effective leadership, and if students aren't acting authentically in an experiential process, whatever they learn isn't going to stick. In contrast, a peer guide/facilitator, like one of our Leadership Fellows, has just enough authority and expertise to provide some structure, but not so much that it distorts their peers' response.
3) Leadership Is Everywhere, Not Just at the Top
Leadership isn't derived from titles or status, and being in a leadership position doesn't automatically make you a leader. (You may be able to use positional power to enforce your will, but I wouldn't call that leading.) Conversely, the lack of a formal position doesn't mean you lack opportunities to lead. Organizations need leaders at every level, not merely among the ranks of senior management. (David Bradford has noted that the idea of "middle management" gets all the attention when "middle leadership" is arguably far more important--although not as catchy.)
Our Leadership Fellows exemplify this type of "middle leadership"--they're in a differentiated role, and at the beginning of the Labs they have some authority on the basis of that role, but within a few weeks that differentiation erodes and their students come to see them more as peers than as authority figures. So their ability to lead rests not on their positional power but on their success at motivating and influencing--in other words, actual leadership.
And I'd argue that the experience of having a peer as a leader and seeing "middle leadership" in action may be one of the most important aspects of the Leadership Labs--because our first-year students realize that even in the relative absence of positional power, even when you don't have years of experience, you can still be a leader. Are all our Fellows equally successful at this? No, and that's why experienced coaches like me are here--to be a backstop, a safety net, to help them through the rough spots. Can the program be improved? Yes, and that's something we focus on every year. But I'm confident that every one of the Fellows I've worked with personally over the past 3 years has helped his or her students develop their leadership potential in some new and unexpected ways.
Photo of William James by Psychology Pictures. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
In short order 
I recently heard Walter Mosley interviewed on NPR, and one of his comments jumped out at me:
