Introductory Reading for Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological/Phenomenological Model

Abstract:     
This paper is the fifth of five pre-course reading assignments for our leadership course. This course was first taught at the University of Rochester Simon School of Business in 2004 working with students, alumni, executives, and faculty from various academic institutions. The course is based on the authors' work over the last ten years in teaching and developing this course, beginning for the first five years at the Simon School of Business, University of Rochester. Since then it has been taught at the United States Air Force Academy; the Erasmus Academie in Rotterdam; the Mays School of Business, Texas A&M University; in Panchgani, India under the auspices of the IC Centre for Governance and MW Corp; the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth; and in Whistler, British Columbia hosted by the Erhard - Jensen Ontological / Phenomenological Initiative. We will be teaching the course at the University of British Columbia in June 2013.

This leadership course is different from others you may know of or have experienced. This course is based on the proposition that: 1) given being and action by the right context for leader and leadership, everyone has the capacity to be a leader, and 2) there are certain personal obstacles that must be dealt with in order to actualize that capacity. In the course students master a context that gives them the being of a leader and the effective exercise of leadership as their natural self-expression.

Rather than teaching "leadership strategies" or being a "how to guide", this course allows participants to create for themselves that enabling and empowering context that gives one the being and action of a leader as one’s natural self-expression. And, in the course we provide participants the opportunity to become aware of and deal with their personal obstacles. This allows them to remove, or at least relax, those obstacles and access their natural capacity for leadership.

The promise of this course:
➢ You will leave this course being a leader and exercising leadership effectively as your natural self-expression.

While you will not necessarily have all of the experience and knowledge you need to be a truly extraordinary leader, you will have experienced whatever personal transformation is required for you to leave the course being who you need to be to be a leader, and with what it takes to exercise leadership effectively.

Our desire is to make the course available to any faculty in higher education to teach it, to communicate it and to extend it. This material is not fully complete nor is it polished to our standards. We are releasing the material so that we can benefit from the comments, criticisms and suggestions of others in higher education 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 those faculty members who wish to teach versions of the course in any university or college setting.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 95

Keywords: Leadership, Ontology, worldview, frames of reference, ontological constraints, functional constraints, perceptual constraints

working papers series