Leadership Development Approaches: We Find the Customers Who Share Our Biases
Chris Maher shared a Quote about Leadership by Ronald A. Heifetz, 1996 from Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, Massachusetts):
“… Scholars who have studied ‘leadership’ have tended to side with the value-free connotation of the term because it lends itself more easily to analytic reasoning and empirical examination. But this will not do for them … We have to take sides. When we teach, write about, and model the exercise of leadership, we inevitably support or challenge people’s conceptions of themselves, their roles, and most importantly their ideas about how social systems make progress on problems. Leadership is a normative concept because implicit in people’s notions of leadership are images of a social contract. Imagine the differences in behavior when people operate with the idea that ‘leadership means influencing the community to follow the leader’s vision’ versus ‘leadership means influencing the community to face its problems.’ … socially useful goals not only have to meet the needs of followers, they also should elevate followers to a higher moral level.”
Some come into the leadership development field with a very strong belief that there is only one way to develop leaders (their way).
Will they find an audience and customers? Of course!
Their audience and customers are the ones who believe that there is only one answer to the leadership question, and they are in the presence of that answer. These customers stop searching after this point, believing they have arrived, unless something happens that get them to start searching.
… These leadership developers sell a lot of their own books and seminars.
Some come into the leadership development field with a very strong belief that there are a few ways to develop leaders (their way, and the ways of people they admire and colleagues they trust).
Will they find an audience and customers? Of course! Their audience and customers are the ones who believe that there are a few answers to the leadership question, and they are in the presence of one of those few answers. These customers will continue their search for those remaining answers.
… These leadership developers sell a lot of their own books and seminars, as well as books and seminars of other people in their (formal or informal) “network”.
Some come into the leadership development field with a very strong belief that they have mostly preconceived ideas of the “best” ways to develop leaders, and in fact, they often wonder how relevant their way – their models, their approaches – may be.
Will they find an audience and customers? Of course! Their audience and customers are the ones who believe that there are multitudes of answers to the leadership question, where sometimes the answers don’t even look remotely related to leadership – unless personally experienced and integrated – and they often wonder why the hell they signed up to hear whoever the hell this person is standing in front of them, but there was something about what this person has to say that triggered a little voice that said, “go there, listen” – and most of the time their minds are wandering and wondering until suddenly they catch some phrase or nugget that unravels the tangle of questions they asked years before and they realize that was why they paid money and spent time to be there. These customers will continue their search for pieces of the puzzle of an answer not knowing whether they would ever have the complete answer but they learn to be content with whatever emergent picture they now hold.
… These leadership developers sell very few (at least, at the beginning!) of their own books and seminars, as well as very few books and seminars of other people in their (formal or informal) “network”, and very few of even books and seminars of people they don’t know. It’s not that they don’t want to sell a lot of their own stuff, or even their colleagues’ stuff… it’s just that these leadership developers spend as much time – sometimes much more time – re-questioning their own assumptions about leadership as they do teaching and facilitating on what they currently claim to know.
What I’m really trying to say is… those of us who work in the field of “leadership development” find the customers we deserve.
