Course Materials for: Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership - An Ontological Model

Abstract:     
Slide deck and course materials for Erasmus Academie Leadership Course June 8-12, 2009.

The following paragraph describes this course for someone who has no knowledge of what this material is about.

This Leadership course is different from others you may know of or have experienced. This course is based on the proposition that within everyone there is a natural latent leadership ability. Rather than teaching you "leadership strategies" or being a "how to guide", this course will help you identify and remove obstacles that keep you from accessing your innate leadership talent. Some obstacles to great leadership are inherent in and shared by all people-- a consequence of the way our brains work. And some obstacles are specific to each individual-- the result of individual history and experience. This course works to make you aware of these obstacles, and allows you to remove them and access your natural capacity for leadership

History and More on the Course

This presentation is based on our (and our co-instructors’) work over the last six years in developing a course of the same title at the University of Rochester Simon School of Business (which course is now also taught at the US Air Force Academy, was recently delivered at the Erasmus Academie (Rotterdam), a version of which is taught at the Erasmus University Law School, and will be taught at Texas A&M University). The course is still under development and will be for several more years. The course is designed to leave the participants being leaders and exercising leadership effectively as their natural self expression,

The course is not designed to merely leave the participants with knowledge (that is not designed to leave students “knowing” about leaders and leadership and able to discuss the issues surrounding leader and leadership). Rather the course is designed to give students actual access to being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership. Our promise as instructors to the students is that if they honor their word to fulfill the requests we make of them they will leave the course being leaders and exercising leadership effectively.

The research project that led to the creation of this course (and the papers and slides on leadership that are in the attached pdf file) originated from our interest in laying the foundations for a science of leadership. We agree with Warren Bennis (2002, p. 2) and Joseph Rost (1993, p. 8) who conclude respectively: "It is almost a cliche of the leadership literature that a single definition of leadership is lacking." and "The scholars do not know what it is they are studying, and the practitioners do not know what it is they are practicing."

Attacking the question of what leadership is required us to get into what it is to be a leader and what it is to exercise leadership effectively. Getting to the core of being a leader led naturally to attacking the task of creating leaders and the natural laboratory for exploring that question was the classroom. Mark Zupan, Dean of the U. of Rochester Simon School of Business provided us the laboratory to do this and the course was created.

We resolve the puzzle over what leadership is by uniquely distinguishing leader and leadership as the intersection of four precise aspects which are respectively:
Leader and Leadership as
1. Linguistic Abstractions (leader and leadership as “realms of possibility”),
2. Phenomena (leader and leadership as experienced, that is, as exercised, or what one observes or is impacted by),
3. Concepts (the temporal domains in which leader and leadership function),
4. Terms (leader and leadership as definitions)

The access provided to (and therefore what is revealed about) leader and leadership when dealt with as a realm of possibility is different than the access provided to (and therefore what is revealed about) leader or leadership when they are dealt with as a phenomenon, or as a concept, or as a term.

We argue that when the four perspectives are taken together, as a whole they provide access to mastering what leader and leadership actually are. This enables us to get our arms around the being of a leader and the effective exercise of leadership. Having mastered this overall context, we can then get our hands on the levers and dials of being a leader, and the effective exercise of leadership.

What follows - in a single pdf document of 478 pages of PowerPoint slides, Word documents, and exhibits (roughly equivalent to a 200 page book) - is a collection of virtually all the materials used in the course.

Our desire is to make the course available to anyone to teach it, to communicate it and to extend it. This second pass release of the material is not fully complete nor is it polished to our standards. We will continue to update and extend the material and will revise these files. We are releasing the material so that we can benefit from the comments, criticisms and suggestions of others who share our desire to accelerate the development of a true science of leadership. We want to see this material (or material derived from it) taught in every major business school and university.

While the course is still a work in progress, we, the authors and instructors, are making all the materials available through SSRN (Social Science Research Network) to anyone who wishes to teach versions of the course in any university or college setting.

For the full introductory paper to the course: “The Ontological Constraints Limiting Access to Leadership: What You Must Take Away to Create Access to Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership” see:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1238158

Working Paper Series