Psychology 1508: Leadership Cultivation

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole lifes 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 doesnt 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 leadersand sometimes more. To be sure, purely cognitive competencies, such as technical expertise, surface in such studiesbut 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 learnerparticularly 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
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 ones 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. Its precisely that simple, and its 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 stylesthey 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

Passions Zone of Great Leadership

Strengths

Strengthening Our Strengths

Were 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 doesnt have enough strengths, its 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 dont build self-esteem by patting people on the back and telling them theyre wonderful. Confidence is a much more complex phenomenon that comes from experiencing ones strengths in action. Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Presidents dont do great things by dwelling on their limitations, but by focusing on their possibilities. Henry Kissinger