Principles and Practices of Leadership for the Public Good

PUAF 692, Spring 2007

University of Maryland, School of Public Policy

Judy Sorum Brown, Ph. D

Office phone: 301-277-1477

Fax: 301-277-6177

e-mail JudyBrown@aol.com

To contact me quickly leave a voice-mail message at 301-277-1477.

Office hours: after class and by appointment

Class meets seven Friday’s

9 am--4 pm (with a lunch break)

Room 1107 Van Munching

          Session #1: Feb 2—Perspectives on leadership.  Assignment: Leadership autobiography due February 5.

          Session #2: February 16—Mapping the leadership field.

          Session #3: March 2—Heifetz as our guide.  Assignment: Heifetz paper due March 5.

          Session #4:— March 9 Inner dimensions of leadership; note your choice of second text is due by end of class today.

          Session #5:— April 13 Our second texts as guides; Assignment for today: brief presentation on second text.  Second text paper due April 16 .

          Session #6:—April 27 Our “shadowed” leaders as guides. Assignment: Leadership shadow write-up sent to all by April 30th.

          Session #7: May 4—The challenge of an integrated view.  Assignment:

Final Papers due: Monday, May 7th.   

 

Please note that we will also have some e-mail dialogue between class sessions.

 

This course is designed as a series of “leadership off-sites” in which we will spend a full day together exploring theories, the practice/skills of leadership, and the experiences of people who lead.  The longer all-day Friday class format allows us to settle into the subject in a more thoughtful way.  And the format is akin to “leadership off-sites” that organizations create for their leaders to give them a chance to step back from the day to day demands of their work, and to learn together.  

 

The class is designed to enable us each:

 

  • To bring to a conscious level and articulate our own experience and current theory of leadership as we begin our work together;

 

  • To explore a wide range of theoretical and experiential perspectives (through text, readings from many periods and many sources, exercises, and contact with leaders), and thus to have an increasingly accurate, full and rich map of the field of leadership;

 

  • By semester's end, to have articulated a richer, fuller, more integrative and satisfying theory of leadership which provides guidance to each of us as we move forward in our professional work life;

 

  • To be able to use that theory in several ways—in our own practice of leadership (whether we are serving in a role that designates us as a leader, or whether we are simply leading from where we are), as a follower of other leaders, as one who observes leaders and assesses their effectiveness, as someone who supports, coaches or advises leaders, and as a citizen whose vote helps select our political leaders;

 

  • To deepen, during the time of the class (and hopefully throughout ones professional and private life) ones awareness of the dimensions and nuances of leadership, so that one is increasingly able to absorb and take in its complexities, as one leads and as one follows.

 

My theory about this class:

 

My theory is that each of us learns and grows by reflecting on our own experience, by reading widely, by learning from others in the profession (including each other in this class), and by working in a hands-on way with the application of powerful ideas.  The way we will evaluate how well this is happening (because much happens in quiet interior spaces within each of us) is by the quality (not necessarily quantity) of participation in class sessions and in our between session e-mail exchanges, by contributions to the work of the class and the learning of your classmates, and by the quality of your written work. 

 

I don’t use the logic of the bell-shaped curve in this course.  I follow the logic of preparing airline pilots and brain surgeons:  I expect everybody to be able to achieve a very high level of excellence.  That takes a lot of work, however and much of the work entails conversation and writing, both of which reflect our thinking.  About writing: The best way to write is to write.  Writing more produces better writing.  Better writing reflects better thinking.  One leadership author insists that words, precisely chosen, are the only tool that a leader has.

 

Texts:

 

Required text:

 

Heifetz, Ronald A.  (1994).  Leadership Without Easy Answers.  Cambridge, MA:  Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press

 

Second text (note that only one of the following is required): Everyone chooses one second text from the list below or you may choose something else if it’s OK’d by me.

 

Bolman, Lee G. and Deal, Terrence E.  (1997).  Reframing Organizations:  Artistry, Choice and Leadership.   San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers

Boyatzis, Richard E and McKee, Annie. (2005)  Resonant Leadership.  Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

Collins, Jim.  (2001.)  Good to Great.  New York: Harper Collins.

Gardner, John W. (1990).  On leadership.  New York: The Free Press

Goleman, Daniel, McKee, Annie and Boyatzis, Richard E.  (2002). Primal Leadership:  Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence.  Boston, MA:  Harvard Business School Press

 

Greenleaf, Robert K.  (1991) Servant Leadership; a journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. Mahwah, NJ:  Paulist Press,

 

Pearson, Carol.  (1998). The Hero Within.  New York:  HarperCollins

 

Palmer, Parker. (2004) A Hidden Wholeness; The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. SanFrancisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

 

Senge, Peter M.  (1990).The Fifth Discipline.  New York:  Doubleday

 

Senge, Peter, Scharmer, C. Otto, Jaworski, Joseph, Flowers, Betty Sue.  (2004).  Presence:  Human Purpose and the Field of the Future.  Cambridge, MA:  The Society for Organizational Learning.

 

 

The plan (to start with):

 

Here’s a going-in plan for this semester, to be adjusted as need be by what we are learning, and the opportunities that present themselves to us. 

 

1)     Our first work will be to remind ourselves what we already know and believe about leadership by interviewing each other and creating, each of us, a leadership autobiography—of our experiences, of where we are in our thinking as we begin our work together, and what questions about leadership are most on our mind.

 

2)     Next we will begin to create a map for ourselves of the field of leadership:  How do people in the field think about leadership?  What are the dominant mindsets?  And those outside of the field?  What seem to be their perspectives?  We’ll spend some time exploring the work of several leading theorists and writers about leadership.  Included among those will be the work of Ron Heifetz whose book Leadership Without Easy Answers is the one text we will all read and discuss and thus it is a framework that we will have in common.  His work will also be the subject of your first written paper.   

 

3)     Everybody will select a second leadership text (from among Bolman and Deal, Gardner, Goleman, Pearson, Senge, and others on the list above—or another of your choosing, approved by me).  Please choose a book that is new to you.  Your assignment is to write a short piece on that text sketching the ideas in it and their application to the realities of leading as you see them. Now and then during the semester, I will provide, in class and via e-mail, additional readings beyond our texts, chosen to enrich our understanding of leadership.   I will provide you a full bibliography.

 

4)     Everybody will identify a leader or manager to “shadow” for a day, and during that day you will interview the person.  By April 30 you will have shared your reflections on the leadership shadow experience and the interview with your classmates and me via e-mail.  This will provide us all with a kind of “bird’s eye” or “e-mail eye” view of a number of interesting leaders.   

 

5)     We’ll have the perspectives of any leaders whom we might invite to join us for a class session as well as leaders whom you might observe during various campus leadership forums. 

 

6)     With these ideas and experiences woven with your own experiences, you will then be in the midst of the final paper, clarifying for yourself the perspectives on leadership, which you wish to have guide you professionally as you move ahead in your work.  During that time we will be wrestling in class with those leadership questions and ideas at the heart of your work and continuing to draw on the multitude of resources that we have assembled during the semester.

 

How we will work together:

 

As much as is possible, our way of working together in class, and outside in related activities, will reflect the way that good professional colleagues work together to learn and to make sense of challenges, and to help each other in meeting stewardship responsibilities in their profession.  You will need to have completed assignments and digested assigned readings before class in order to participate effectively, and you should anticipate in-class activities and assignments as part of your own learning process and necessary to your subsequent written assignments.   

 

Our class time will be active and since a major portion of our learning will be from that experience together, if you miss class, you will miss much of what you need in order to do your work (just as professionally, we can't afford to miss key meetings). If you know you must miss class, please e-mail all of us and let us know what’s up, so we don’t worry about you, and so one of your classmates can collect any materials for you. 

 

Your final paper will be due by close of business May 7.  It should be a carefully written, thoughtful, integrative paper on your emerging theory of leadership (or of a particular question about leadership with which you are wrestling) and the primary sources, theoretical and experiential, which have shaped your views.  You could be working on it all semester, if you wish.  If you wish, you may turn in a draft of your final paper near the end of our class sessions.  I will read it, comment on it, but not grade the draft.  My hope is that writing your final paper will help you steer yourself professionally over a lifetime and will also enable you to offer effective guidance to colleagues as they face leadership challenges. 

 

Grades will be determined as follows:

         

30% on class participation broadly understood, including your contribution to the quality of our class conversation, your being present for various in-class learning activities and your contribution to the learning of your classmates.

 

15% on your written work on Ron Heifetz’ Leadership Without Easy Answers.

 

15% on your written work on your choice of a second text.

 

10% on your reflections on your leadership shadow experience.

 

30% final paper 20-40 pages double-spaced.

 

Some final reflections:

 

Now, having laid out some thoughts in the form of a syllabus, I wish to write you a more personal note, a letter of sorts, about what I think we are embarking on here.  We are beginning an exploration that is unique in several important ways:

          ·We are experimenting and learning in a very different class format.  I proposed this format because it suits the material much more comfortably than the usual 3 hours a week, and because it is the way practicing leaders learn more about leadership—usually in leadership off-sites.   Our experience is important to the school because it represents an early experience with a format like that of our Executive Masters in Public Policy.  So we are experimenting, learning, breaking trail.

          ·We are creating together a unique learning experience, unique because of who we are, unique because of this time in our lives and this time in attention to issues of leadership. We will shape this experience and our learning in ways unique to us and this time.

          ·We will be mapping the field of leadership in a way it is seldom seen: in terms of emergent understandings gaining more and more attention in leadership circles and in the literature.  We think of them as new; some are in a sense very, very old, as well.  I would characterize those understandings as the answer (tentative perhaps) to a series of questions which we will explore in our work together:

 

1)       How are the inner dimensions of leading (for instance, awareness, conceptualization, cognition, psychology, beliefs,) related to the outer dimensions of leading (vision, motivation, communication, courage, sustainability). 

2)       What are the practices and structures that sustain both the inner and outer dimensions?

3)       How is leading related to the process of learning? 

4)       How is leading both an individual and collective undertaking? 

5)       How do nature and the sciences that study natural phenomena provide us with guidance for understanding leadership? 

6)       How is creativity a window into the challenges of leadership? 

7)       What is the nature of collaborative leadership across various dimensions of difference, including the private, public and non-profit sectors?

8)       What are approaches to leadership that reflect these emergent understandings?

 

I will do my level best to guide our explorations, but I am counting on you to provide leadership, as well, in our work—to speak your confusions and wonderings, to ask us to stop when something is not clear, or you have been hit with an insight that must be shared, to make suggestions about improving our processes and our assignments, to provide feedback to each other and to me, and most of all to be as thoroughly engaged as is humanly possible in the work which we are beginning together.

 

Judy