idealawg

Recommended article on the sorry state of leadership education

strategy+business just published a fine article on the current state of leadership development. If you are interested in the topic, it is an article you should not miss. From "Mad about Leadership" which reviews and includes an excerpt from the book The End of Leadership:

...With a few notable exceptions, we’ve failed to recognize or acknowledge that the enterprise in which we are engaged is about as effective as faith healing. And, as [the author of The End of Leadership Barbara Kellerman] usefully notes, “the metrics are mostly missing” from the field of leadership development. In other words, we have no idea what works and what doesn’t when it comes to the education and training of leaders. I would go further and assert that we don’t even have metrics for what amounts to effective leadership in the first place (in contrast, for example, to the sound data available for judging the management of financial performance).

If anything, most corporate in-house leadership training is an even bigger waste of time and money than what goes on in business schools. Kellerman is right on target when she singles out the manifest inadequacies of the two corporate leadership development programs most often cited as world class: those at General Electric and Goldman Sachs. And those programs are run by the best minds in the business and supported by generous budgets!

Click to read the rest (and I hope you do!)

Are you an achiever, explorer, socializer, or killer: Is conflict resolution a game?

Here's a fun way to categorize yourself and others, at least for a short while. Although this typology has no scientific validity, like many of the other self-report assessments such as Myers-Briggs, it is a good reminder that we are not all the same, and that OSFA (one size fits all) is an ineffective and sometimes risky assumption. (Click to read about some of the problems with personality assessments.)

In my research of educational game design, I came upon the typology; it's Bartle's Taxonomy of Player Types. The four types are achiever, explorer, socializer, and killer. They were developed to describe the different ways people approach games and can be compared to the four suits in a card deck:

An easy way to remember these is to consider suits in a conventional pack of cards: achievers are Diamonds (they're always seeking treasure); explorers are Spades (they dig around for information); socialisers are Hearts (they empathise with other players); killers are Clubs (they hit people with them).

Another way to see these four:

• Killers and achievers act. Killers act on other players and achievers act on the world.
• Socializers and explorers interact. Socializers interact with other players and explorers interact with the world.

See a visual image, a graph, of the four types here at the top of page 111, here under the section The Four Bartle Types, or here about 1/5 of the way down under INTEREST GRAPH.

In order to find out what type you are (or, more exactly, what type you are today because these kinds of assessments are situational), take this quick test. It's fun, and, if you are like me, some of the questions

"Cultivating the Executive Mind: Is Mindfulness the Key to 21st Century Economic Survival?"

I have posted the link to this video before but for those who may have missed it . . .

From the mindful.org Web site:

Congratulations to our good friend and mindfulness teacher, Jeremy Hunter, who has just been appointed Professor of Practice at the Peter Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate School in California.

...

The hour-long webinar presented below—"Cultivating the Executive Mind: Is Mindfulness the Key to 21st Century Economic Survival?"—also explores Jeremy's mindfulness program at Drucker, which he says "is designed to teach managers to manage themselves."

Click to watch the video.

April 13-14: Conference on Law and Leadership

From the event Web page:

The Conference on Law and Leadership will bring together leaders in law, legal education and business to consider the role of lawyers as leaders in rapidly changing times. Co-hosted by Elon University School of Law and the Center for Creative Leadership, the conference will take place April 13-14, 2012 in Greensboro, N.C.

The Honorable Sandra Day O’Connor, United States Supreme Court Justice (ret.), and David Gergen, Professor and Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, will lead a discussion across the profession about the role of lawyers in navigating complex times. These keynote speakers will be joined by:

Click to read the rest.

More on the new psychology of leadership

In a previous post I recomended the book The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power; that post also links to a sample chapter. From Lead on Purpose, here's a good review of the book. Excerpt:

The vast majority of leadership advice — whether it’s relayed in leadership books, management conferences or discussed casually in blogs — focuses on the qualities of individual leaders. From examining the lives of different noted leaders to distilling specific personality traits that researchers think constitute sound leadership, the emphasis is always on the individual. In a relatively new book called The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence, and Power, the authors take a completely different approach. Instead of focusing on the leader, they focus on the followers.

Click to read the rest.

Note (added July 12, 2012): Click to view the overview of a talk given about the book to a group of women [pdf].

Old article: "The emerging field of Neuroleadership"

Click to read "The emerging field of Neuroleadership" by Dr. Al H. Ringleb and David Rock (Neuroleadership Journal).

"Which should be uppermost in students’ minds: a good job or a good life?"

Does law school have a role in teaching wisdom? Values? Integrity?

Or is the role of a legal education to impart the "doing" of law? Never mind, the "being" of a lawyer.

If the question of the role of law school has been occupying any of your thoughts, this Macquarie University Annual Lecture given by Professor Steven Schwartz may fuel further thought. You may say that he is talking about the role of undergraduate education. If so, are students coming to law school having completed (or begun) a process such as Schwartz describes? If not, is that of any consequence to the profession? To clients?

Does this lecture provoke questions or thoughts in your mind? I found it so rich that I have read the talk a number of times, each time coming away with new impressions and ideas.

Excerpt from "The dangers of knowledge without wisdom":

The Vice-President of an American university recently asked his students: “Why have you come to university?” The students said, “I want a good job” or “I need a degree to get a promotion at work”. Not surprising. Just what he expected. But, when he framed the question in a larger context: “What kind of life to you want to be leading five or ten years from now?” the answers were different. Students talked about purpose, meaning, identity, integrity and relationships.

There is a hunger for the kind of insight and wisdom that a narrow skills education cannot satisfy.

...

Whatever profession students choose to pursue, they will benefit not only as professionals but also as human beings from being exposed to the greatest works of fiction, history, biography, philosophy and science.

It is from these sources that they will learn about love and loss, about memory and desire, about loyalty and duty, about our world and our universe and about what it means to be a human being.

Click to read the rest (MercatorNet).

Behaviorism doesn't work? Humanism is overrated? So say the authors of this oft-read article

The classic article "Neuroscience of Leadership" (strategy+business) is several years old now, but it's still worth reading. Or rereading if you haven't done so recently. I thought of the article last week when I saw someone recommending a management approach based on behaviorism. Specifically, I thought of these words by the article's authors David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz:

Many existing models for changing people’s behavior are drawn from a field called behaviorism. The field emerged in the 1930s and was led by psychologist B.F. Skinner and advertising executive John B. Watson, building on Ivan Pavlov’s famous concept of the condi- tioned response: Associate the ringing of a bell with food, and a dog can be made to salivate at the sound. The behaviorists generalized this observation to people, and established an approach to change that has some- times been caricatured as: “Lay out the M&Ms.” For each person, there is one set of incentives — one combination of candy colors — that makes the best motivator. Present the right incentives, and the desired change will naturally occur. If change doesn’t occur, then the mix of M&M colors must be adjusted.

Yet there is plenty of evidence from both clinical research and workplace observation that change efforts based on typical incentives and threats (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed in the long run. For example, when people routinely come late to meetings, a manager may reprimand them. This may

Learning leadership at the movies: Warren Bennis is our guide

In this slide show, leadership guru Warren Bennis takes us through several movies and gives his thoughts on the leadership lesson demonstrated by each. Click to watch the show and read the commentary "Leadership goes to the movies" (Washington Post).

Movies include:

• All Quiet on the Western Front
• The King's Speech
• Inside Job
• Fog of War
• Ikiru
• Forrest Gump
• The Way We Were
• 12 Angry Men

I see that you may attend a program with the same title "Leadership Goes to the Movies" in Albuquerque next week. For those of you who want to see movies used to illustrate another kind of lesson, you will have that opportunity in Denver on March 2; click for all the details. And click here for a list books about using movies to teach.

 

Want to use movie clips in your presentations or with clients? Here are several resources

At a local group of which I am a member, we are having a program that will include a look at how to use movies to educate and inspire in presentations. (Those in the Denver area are invited to attend.) Wishing to be an informed viewer, I did some research on this type of movie use. Below is what I found, starting with books.

• The Motion Picture Prescription: Watch This Movie and Call Me in the Morning: 200 Movies to Help You Heal Life's Problems
• Reel Therapy: How Movies Inspire You to Overcome Life's Problems
• Positive Psychology At The Movies: Using Films to Build Virtues and Character Strengths
• Movie Therapy
• E-Motion Picture Magic: A Movie Lover's Guide to Healing and Transformation
• Reel Spirit: A Guide to Movies That Inspire, Explore and Empower
• Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals
• Movie Therapy, Moving Therapy!
• Rent Two Films and Let's Talk in the Morning: Using Popular Movies in Psychotherapy

An article about one use of film: "Cinematic geography" (Research Matters-Arizona State University) Excerpt:

People narrate their lives through stories, especially as they age.

"In older age, people reminisce and review their lives," says Kevin McHugh, associate professor of geography at ASU. "They try to create a coherent story linking past and present."

McHugh has found that the cinema offers a compelling laboratory for examining this process.

Other resources:

• Movieclips: Hollywood Film Clips Made Easy
• 8 Inspirational Videos That Will Instantly Pump Up Your Motivation
• I'll add others when I discover them. Do you have any suggestions?

Other film-related links:

• "Movies Tuned to Our Brains: Will this year's Oscar go to an obscure math ratio?" (Wall Street Journal)
• "Law at the Movies" (ABA Journal)
• "Learning leadership at the movies: Warren Bennis is our guide" (idealawg)
• "11 must-see movies for entrepreneurs" (Orange County Register)