Reading About Leading

In a far distant era (i.e., the 1970s), this magazine ran a column called "Gadfly," whose original contributor was the great Friends educator Eric W. Johnson. Johnson's byline included these words: "Eric Johnson became a headmaster at age 30, and since then he has been climbing steadily down the administrative ladder. His own children have grown, thus freeing him to pontificate without fear of contradiction by reality." Having leapt off the administrative ladder a few years ago myself, I can, if not pontificate about leadership, at least point to some favorite authorities on the subject.

One of these is Ronald Heifetz, who alone or with coauthors Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky has written several insightful books on leadership. Heifetz combines training and practice in psychiatry with his study of leadership, and has worked at the schools of medicine and government at Harvard University.

In his first book, Leadership Without Easy Answers, Heifetz set out some core beliefs: "many problems are embedded in complicated and interactive systems"; "much of behavior reflects an adaptation to circumstances"; and "I think of authority relationships in terms of service." These all apply well to independent schools — service obviously, but systems thinking as a corrective to the rather individualistic ways of much of independent education. Heifetz also helpfully clarifies the varied theories of leadership: the "trait" theory (leader as born hero), the "situationist" theory (leader as product of the times), the "contingency" theory (leaders as fitting the immediate circumstances), and the "transactionist" theory (leaders and followers as reciprocally influencing each other). The last is best illustrated by a sign I once saw hanging on the inner door of a fellow head's office: "There go my people. I must hurry and follow them for I am their leader."

In their recent book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Heifetz and colleagues develop their concepts into a practical guide for "Changing Your Organization and the World." Their primary thesis, now widely accepted in leadership circles, is the distinction between technical and adaptive leadership. They explain, "While technical problems may be very complex and critically important, they have... solutions that can be implemented by current knowledge." Adaptive challenges, on the other hand, require "going beyond any authoritative expertise to mobilize discovery, shedding certain entrenched ways, tolerating losses, and generating the capacity to thrive anew." Placing great emphasis on understanding the losses that leadership in changing circumstances will provoke, they lay out a fine road map for venturing into uncharted territory.

Almost all leadership gurus agree that leading means managing change. Two experts on change and its challenges are Chris Argyris and Robert Kegan. Argyris, one of the creators of the "learning organization" concept, distills the core problems of change in Overcoming Organizational Defenses. He begins with the radical claim that most leaders and managers "have learned to act skillfully, and the result is incompetence." To readers taken aback by this assertion, he describes the organizational defenses that make groups "overprotective and anti-learning, and unaware that this is the case." He contrasts "espoused theories of action" with "theories-in-use," and highlights the dual imperatives — to be in control, and not to upset others — that make team meetings especially ineffective. Finally, he proposes that we transform the unspoken rules that inhibit productive thinking. Instead of alternately "tell[ing] others what you believe will make them feel good about themselves" and "advocat[ing] your own position in order to win," he asks us to "increase others' capacity to confront their own ideas, face their unsurfaced assumptions, fears, and biases," to "attribute to [others] high capacity to self-reflect and self-examine," and to "combine advocacy with inquiry and self-reflection."

Kegan's Immunity to Change takes a more psychological route to a similar destination. (He is author, among other works, of The Evolving Self, a continuation of Erik Erikson's stage theory into adulthood, and draws on that study in his organizational work.) Kegan argues that people often have both a stated commitment to change, and competing commitments that rest on assumptions about what change will mean for them. Thus, a leader may profess belief in delegating, but fail to do so because of a deeper need to remain in charge. He cites colleague William Perry to capture with stark simplicity this tension in individuals: "What do they really want and what will they do to keep from getting it?"

Kegan believes that people can move through three adult stages of personal development: the socialized mind, for which "what I think to send [say or reveal] will be strongly influenced by what I think others will want to hear"; the self-authoring mind, which says "what I deem others need to hear to best further the agenda or mission of my design"; and, finally, the self-transforming mind, which "both values and is wary about any one stance, analysis, or agenda." The job of the leader is, first, to move along this continuum and, second, to help others to take similar steps. Here, and even more in How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work, Kegan (with Lisa Laskow Lahey) provides detailed advice, including extensive individual and group exercises, to help leaders achieve these goals. I once watched a new division head apply one of the shifts in this book, "From the Language of Complaint to the Language of Commitment," to inspire a remarkable attitude change in her faculty in the space of a single year.

Although nearly the eldest of these writers, Edgar Schein remains prolific and insightful. From Organizational Culture and Leadership (1980) to Humble Inquiry (2013), Schein has both led his professional field and increasingly refined his ideas to make them useful for anyone helping organizations or people change. He observed years ago that "one of the most decisive functions of leadership is the creation, the management, and sometimes even the destruction of culture." After developing a theory of culture analysis and intervention, he has moved in recent years to the more intimate realm of the helping relationship, proposing that the helper, including a leader or anyone else offering assistance, must learn to avoid the "expert" stance, "access [his or her] own ignorance," inquire without an agenda, and enlist the other party in the process of solving the problem. A mentor of mine observed, "You can spend days absorbing the wisdom of one page in Schein instead of studying the long to-do lists of other writers."

All these writers are theorists about leadership and change. An entirely different genre is the "Leadership According to" form, in which the words or deeds of some leader from the past are mined for nuggets, or a mother lode, of wisdom. One can choose to be led by Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, Ernest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, John Wooden, and even Attila the Hun.

My favorite among these books — which falsely suggests that I have plumbed them all — is an unusual one: Chris Lowney's Heroic Leadership. Who is — or rather are — his exemplars? His teaser of a subtitle, Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World, readies us for a surprise. A former seminarian, international J.P. Morgan managing director, and not-for-profit consultant, Lowney has chosen a "company" from our own field, one that built "the world's largest higher-education network... managed to have more than 30 colleges up and running within a decade" and some years later ran "700 secondary schools and colleges sprawled across five continents."

No, not the University of Phoenix or even Khan Academy, but the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, and especially their founder, Ignatius of Loyola, and his colleagues and early successors. Less than a century after their creation, the Jesuits were not only worldwide educators, but also mapmakers, linguists, mathematicians, and astronomers (a Jesuit headed the commission that created the Gregorian calendar).

Ignatius, Lowney observes, focused on followership rather than leadership: "Loyola's core appeal was not his own leadership traits — it was his ability to identify and unlock others' latent leadership potential." This was obviously vital to an organization whose span was greater than that of the 19th-century British Empire, but whose communication lines could require months or even years to get from headquarters to the field.

This principle was exemplified in the Jesuit order's "manual of operations," known as the Constitutions, of which "fully two-thirds is monopolized by guidelines for selecting and training recruits." The Jesuits seem to have anticipated such gurus as Robert K. Greenleaf (servant leadership) and Jim Collins (big hairy audacious goals, getting the right people on the bus) by more than four centuries.

Many readers will note, as I certainly did, that no book by a woman appears on this list. Checking myself for bias, I looked at ten lists of best leadership books, from Inc. and the Washington Post to Psychology Today. I found 210 recommendations for books by men, and seven for books by women — three of which were for Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals (coauthored male-female books, a tiny proportion, excluded). Now that many more women are in leadership roles in government, business, and not-for-profits, we need a Women's Ways of Leading to provide a different voice. I will be among the first to read it.