Charitable Trust • RICHARD SOFFE
Chaos… Conflict… Courage… leadership in the 21st Century Tom Peters recently observed that “Leadership is as confusing as hell”. So what happens when you gather together 60 people from the US, Finland, Mongolia, Albania, Malaysia, Nigeria, Kenya and the UK to spend a week talking about it? In Harvard University last April it was Chaos, Conflict and Courage… but luckily that was just the subtitle for an intensive one week programme on Leadership for the 21st Century, as Richard Soffe explains. IN 2001 I received an award from The Farmers Club Charitable Trust to attend the Leadership Educators Program at Harvard University, Boston, USA. The aim was to develop my role in leadership education. It was an intensive two-week program (I’ll stick to the US spelling throughout) involving 33 participants from 10 countries, and it proved to be a great opportunity to exchange views, learning much from other people’s experiences of facilitating leadership education across the globe. Attending and participating in the Leadership Educators Program led to a number of further opportunities: •
Microsoft sponsored a series of regular telephone conference calls (these normally lasted over an hour), where six to 10 educators were able to keep one another upto-date and share their experiences on topics of mutual professional interest.
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I was invited to Kuwait to present a paper on Quality in Education at an international conference of educators.
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Contact with participants widened our network with international firms to discuss leadership education and management development.
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I was invited to take part in an important new development at Harvard University, selected as one of only two people from the previous year’s Educators Program to help lecture, teach and facilitate on their flagship programme, ‘Leadership in the 21st Century’. This was a great opportunity, as I was keen to teach leadership in business rather than meet other educators in the subject (for a second time).
As a result of this last invitation, I returned to Harvard in April 2002, as part of the lecturing team, to help deliver the program, the only Briton on the team. It was an intensive one-week program with 50 senior executives from nine countries around the world, the program being as much about developing people as sharpening their leadership skills (the use of LEADER as a noun was outlawed for the week).
Topics included: leadership with and without authority (for example, over issues of empowerment, of situational leadership where people take the lead on an ad hoc basis, or where they take the reins without formal authority); ‘cognitive bias’ (for example, understanding people’s personal baggage and their own agendas); managing hot moments; music and drama as a metaphor (this was particularly interesting, especially as most people are very cynical about it on first hearing: getting a conductor or theatre director to explain their type of leadership is fascinating and a great learning experience!); leadership as persuasion; leadership in crisis; leadership and violence; finding your voice; and staying alive.
Well managed It was interesting to find that the Harvard sessions involved a great deal of very well managed facilitation. Fewer than a third of the week’s sessions were taught as lectures. At first, participants did not like this: they wanted their problems solved by experts, difficulties sorted using tools introduced and handed out at each session. Most wanted to be lectured at. But it became clear that leadership is definitely not something to be taught as a toolkit. You can’t be prescriptive. Far more effective, this program showed, is to reflect on your own leadership skills, your own styles, your own ‘internal’ problems (it’s easier but less useful to blame organisational problems than find your own personal solutions to them). One of the aims of going was to find ways of boosting the effectiveness of our leadership programs at the University of Plymouth, in particular the Seale-Hayne ‘The Challenge of Rural Leadership course’. I also wanted to see how our work measures up to others’ worldwide. I was not surprised to find the academic level outstanding, as Harvard must be one of the top names worldwide. It’s exhilarating to come across some very sharp brains indeed! I was expecting to be impressed, and I was, but it was good to find that the University of Plymouth’s courses are not so very far behind the ‘world class’ classes!
Experience gained So what’s come out of the Harvard experience? •
I have been able to harvest a good range of new material for leadership programmes, and for farming and rural subjects to share.
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We now have a range of contacts and many new ‘friends’ involved in leadership education around the world.
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Attending the course gives us a better overview of the varied way leadership is taught in such varied cultures as the US, Arab countries, Africa and ex-Soviet Asia.
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new international link… for example, working together with organisations in Kuwait and Australia.
I was very impressed by the quality of the participants. It was also something of a surprise to find that 30% of the US contingent came from a security background: from the military, the CIA and the police. Attitudes to leadership education have changed since 11 September, and not just in the security sectors. People’s concerns about security are much higher than over here. The impact of 11 September was felt in many of our discussions. After you get over the shock of finding yourself next to the Director of Strategic Planning of the CIA (really), and other senior security figures, you then hear comments like: “We fought wars how we used to fight wars. Since 11 September, all that’s changed”. The trip held some other surprises. You would never believe how many times I was asked to taking off my shoes before boarding planes in the UK and USA, in case I was taking explosives in them. Perhaps sandals are exempt… maybe I’ll try them next time! Richard Soffe is Senior Lecturer in Management at the University of Plymouth, as well as Course Director for ‘The Challenge of Rural Leadership’, now in its eighth year at the Faculty of Land, Food and Leisure at the Seale-Hayne campus, Devon. He can be contacted at University of Plymouth, Seale-Hayne, Devon TQ12 6NQ, by telephone on 01626 325 669, or by fax on 01626 325 657.