Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World

by Sharon Daloz Parks

Book Overview

If leaders are made, not born, what is the best way to teach the skills they need to be effective? Today's complex times require a new kind of leadership--one that encompasses a mind-set and capabilities that can't necessarily be taught by conventional methods. In this unique leadership book, Sharon Daloz Parks invites readers to step into the classroom of Harvard leadership virtuoso Ronald Heifetz and his colleagues to understand this dynamic type...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1591393094
• ISBN13: 9781591393092
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Leadership for Today's World

Every executive, educational leader, and public servant should read Park's book on leadership. Charisma does little to inspire and understand a workforce desperately in need of sensitive and humane leaders. Leading in challenging times requires creative responses and new images and metaphors for leadership.

Leadership as artistry: Great insights how PAL is taught, and how to think differently about leaders

First, let me disclose my bias - I took PAL-164 (the sequel to PAL-101) with Heifetz, which I thought was great. I also read both of Heifetz's books (required for the course) and also In Over Our Heads, by Robert Kegan, which Parks discusses in her book. So I found Parks' book to be valuable in that it helped me get even more out of the course. I especially like the recounting and analysis of class conversations and interviews with Alumni of the course. I also like that she integrates with other of others in this field. While I wonder whether many of those who have not taken PAL with Heifetz or Williams would benefit as much from this book, or find it as interesting as I did, I think this book would at least get them interested. I think there is merit to the case-in-point teaching method, and more instructors should try it out where appropriate. Parks touches on how teachers can start using this approach, a little it at a time. For those wishing to give the case-in-point method a try, this book is helpful. It complements Heifetz's other books, and is useful for others who would like to try or improve the 'experiential' teaching method in general. I found the last chapter was not as interesting as any of the earlier chapters (which I think largely repeats too much points she made earlier, just in more creative prose) and I wish she had included more class room discussion with more 'balcony' views. However, it is definitely worth checking out.

Leadership For The New Commons

I love some of Sharon Daloz Parks' thinking. I really think she is helping define a new way of looking at leadership in a world of flatter hierarchies and lack of deference to authority, where people expect to 'lead their own lives' increasingly, rather than take their lead from outside. I love a phrase she coined a while back - 'Leadership for the New Commons' - building on Laurence Lessig's work on defining the new open world of free intellectual exchange and lack of hierarchy that characterises how people interact through the web in particular, but increasingly in real life, too. The shape of things is changing so fast, I think she has argued, that people need to take responsibility for working it out themselves and reaching common agreements on the way forward - learning how to lead the definition and the way forward - rather than waiting for a leader to emerge and define the way forward for them. In an increasingly complex and chaotic world, she seems to argue, we all need that internal compass and our own rudder controls firmly switched to 'on' at all times to navigate the complexity. Harvard's case study methods have been criticized for being too slow. By the time they've taken a year to put together their case study of Google and prepare it as a teaching case, I heard one critical academic say recently, Google has bought YouTube and it's whole business model has moved on. I tend to agree. And the alternative case-in-point approach Sharon Daloz Parks describes helps break from the lumbering, slow-moving case studies that other business schools ponderously work their way through. There is a well-known quote from Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus about how anyone can be taught leadership and I've never quite believed it. I wanted to, but never quite could. With the new work of Sharon Daloz Parks and others in the field today, I am glad to say that I am being swayed to think that maybe it can happen. Phil Dourado. www.TheLeadershipHub.com

Another GREAT TAKE on Heifetz & Adaptive Leadership

Ron Heifetz is clearly one of the seminal leadership scholars, practitioners, and teachers in the field today. This superb volume, by Sharon Daloz Parks, takes off from where his two previous books ("Leadership Without Easy Answers" and "Leadership On the Line") leave off. "Leadership Can be Taught" takes its readers through Heifetz's Harvard Business School course "PAL 101--Exercising Leadership: Mobilizing Group Resources." For those of us who have studied Heifetz's two previous books and taken courses modeled off his HBS course (as I did at Columbia Teachers College almost a decade ago), "LCBT" provides an excellent refresher. My Columbia TC Professor (who must have TA'd for Heifetz when she was teaching at Harvard's Graduate School of Education) ran an outstanding version of his course in her own right. Using all of Heifetz's key principles and pedagogical techniques (and a very similar curriculum), she put us through our paces in teaching leadership "adaptively." It was a watershed learning experience of invaluable practical value to me. Although my field is leadership development in secondary-school education (for both teachers and students), I borrow heavily from Heifetz's theory and work at the graduate level. Although I doubt they were intended this way, I see these 3 works as a sort of trilogy on adaptive leadership. Heiftez's "Leadership On the Line" (co-written with Marty Linsky) is probably the most accessible of the three: clearly the place for any reader to start learning about H's powerful approach. "Leadership Without Easy Answers" is the most scholarly and thoroughly developed (with extensive historical examples, etc.). Daloz Parks's "LCBT" concentrates on Heifetz's leadership course itself. What is the experience of taking it like for his students? How do--or don't--its lessons stick with them as they resume their professional lives? Daloz Parks's answers to these questions are balanced, fair, accurate, and leavened with plenty of anecdotal evidence. We get glimpses of classroom interactions, and we hear Professor Heifetz speaking quite candidly about the advantages--as well as challenges--of his dynamic educational approach. Any serious scholar or teacher of leadership MUST peruse this product of the Harvard Business School Press. One of the beauties of Heifetz's approach is that it works in virtually any area: from business, to education, to public service, etc. Its principles apply equally in the commercial and not-for-profit sectors. In sum, I can't recommend "Leadership Can be Taught" highly enough to leaders and/or faculty in leadership-development programs of all stripes. Sharon Daloz Parks has done us all a great service in recording the impact of Heifetz's work on those fortunate enough to study with the master himself!