strength and honor

Leadership and teaching excellence seem to have a lot in common. Is a great teacher a great leader? Is a great leader a great teacher?

Pete Reilly wrote about what it takes to be great in front of the class, and suggested three things (my paraphrasing):

1. Be grounded; be confident, open and connected to your audience
2. Remember you are serving your audience, not vice versa
3. Have the courage to be open and passionate.

In almost the same breath, I read about sustainable careers and why business school may not be worth revisiting. Dana (the author of Investoralist) states five reasons why she would not go back to business school again (my paraphrasing):

1. Graduates aren't fit to give business advice
2. Business schools create masochists [<-- :-D]
3. "I wouldn't trust me with your money"
4. We lost our senses of humor
5. Every gig is transient, take what you can and move on

Ironic.

If you have five minutes, both blogs are well worth a read. Together, they punctuate something I've felt strongly about for some time. Leadership requires much more than training. Business schools can do a disservice to their customers by giving graduates the impression that they are immediately able to lead and create success. Teachers colleges likewise don't appear to train teachers to lead.

Clayton Christensen once told me that MBA programs teach people to make decisions based on the rear-view mirror. Everything is inferred from the past, and based on a highly procedural, structured, methodology. This does not a leader make. No doubt that there are many talented leaders who have MBAs, but I don't think it was the MBA that made them so - they had that before they enrolled.

In both teaching and the corporate world, experience can give you the confidence to be adept in front of a room, but it doesn't ensure leadership. It seems that one is taught how to use authority versus leadership. We all know that authority is about power. And power (and its abuse) are why we still and likely always will need workers' rights laws and unions. It is also why some students don't get to learn.

Extending what Pete and Dana said, I say leadership is about vision, courage, commitment, empathy and inspiration.

• The vision to discern a path both compelling and meaningful.
• The courage to stand for something, and to be decisive.
• The commitment to remain a believer when it's hardest and you're in the doldrums, but more importantly to stand in front of, beside and behind everyone who works for you.
• The empathy to care for (really, to love) the people you work with and know and relish that each is, and contributes uniquely.
• The inspiration to exceed your grasp and the ability to infect others to do the same.

There's more I'm sure, but if these aren't there, leadership isn't there either.

I'm reminded of Gladiator, and Maximus' speech to his soldiers before the battle at the beginning of the movie:

Three weeks from now I will be harvesting my crops. Imagine where you will be, and it will be so. Hold the line! Stay with me! ...What we do in Life echoes in Eternity.

This guy was a leader and a teacher. Maybe Business Schools and Teachers' Colleges should consider building an arena...