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Hi all,

In the spirit of sharing, here's an alternative syllabus for teaching leadership.. for fifteen sessions which I've used well with MBA students.  Feedback from other undergraduate instructors and students however has been very good.  Designing courses is such an individual thing.. perhaps this will give some interesting ideas and/or alternative thoughts about a leadership course.  Clearly, I have a vested interest although I assure you, given publishing structures, it's primarily intellectual not financial.  

Sincerely,

Hi:

I am an AoM member teaching at the Naval War College in Newport, RI.

We just adopted Whetton/Cameron's Developing Management Skills for a new required course to be offered this fall.

It's not customary for this College to use textbooks.  To enhance the legitimacy of its use, I'd like to know of other faculty who use W/C and for what courses.

Tony DiBella

NSDM

Naval War College

Newport, RI

Hi Tony:

I considered the W&C text but did not adopt it.  For my undergrad class in Principles of Mgmt, I use Hitt, Black & Porter's Management.  I prefer a text with more theory and then add experiential exercises, case studies, etc to encourage the students to apply their newly acquired objective knowledge in the development of skills.

Hi:

I am an AoM member teaching at the <st1:placename w:st="on">Naval</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">War</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">College</st1:placetype> in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Newport</st1:city>, <st1:state w:st="on">RI</st1:state></st1:place>.

We just adopted Whetton/Cameron's Developing Management Skills for a new required course to be offered this fall.

It's not customary for this College to use textbooks.  To enhance the legitimacy of its use, I'd like to know of other faculty who use W/C and for what courses.

Tony DiBella

NSDM

Naval <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">War</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">College</st1:placetype></st1:place>

<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Newport</st1:city>, <st1:state w:st="on">RI</st1:state></st1:place>

Dear Colleagues,

I noted with interest Ted Rosen's comment about skills and leadership.  There are so many models out there... Dave and Kim take a skills approach.  Their/our colleague with a similar background, Bob Quinn and colleagues, take a competing values approach.  Blanchard and others take a contingency approach-which assumes that people can and will change significantly for the moment.  I agree with Ted's comment that leadership is about a voluntary approach.  Power, I say, is the ability to get people to do what you want them to do.  Only if you get a voluntary response, I believe, can you call it leadership, (already published in Level Three Leadership.)  The MIT group includes coercion in their model, so obviously many would disagree.  I borrow my perspective from Ed Schein (ironically from MIT) and his work on cultures and apply it as he did to leadershp:  visible behavior (Level One) is one thing... but what's happening at the conscious thought level (Level Two), and what's happening at the semi-conscious, pre-conscious level of core values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations (VABEs at Level Three) level?  Clearly people can be forced to do what you want them to do at Level One.  

So for me the challenge is not either this text book or that...it's how do we integrate a skills perspective, a values perspective, a hierarchical perspective in a way that gets participants and students to re-examine their underlying VABEs about what leadership is.  Unless that happens, I fear, no change will occur.  Then, if you ask more than a hundred groups world wide (as I have) how much of human behavior at Level One, Two and Three is habitual? ...the common answers regardless of country you'll get are 75%, 85% and 95% or more.  What does this suggest about a contingency approach?  Csikszentmihalyi's book, The Evolving Self, asks what seems to me to be THE central question in life and self leadership:  will you ever be anything more than a vessel transmitting the genes and memes of previous generations on to the next?  That's a question in my experience that really grabs students and executives worldwide.  And it begs a willingness to explore one's self at Level Three-some of what one finds might be competing, some might not be, and some are outside the four to eight values included there....

For me all of this highlights the challenge we face-how can we really have an impact on students/participants... and particularly on the way they lead or will try to lead?  Most of our university attempts focus on Level Two... remember and repeat.  I wonder how much settles down into Level Three and then bubbles up into Level One (skills level??) later on.   And one of the majorly important skills, I think, is the language of leadership.  How does one communicate?  Albert Ellis' work on e-prime language has been very powerful for me in this regard... what can we say with certainty?  And how/what skills do we teach our students not by our content, rather by how we communicate as an exemplar to them?  Can we / do we practice what we teach?  If not, there's a certain authenticity gap that probably confuses our students....  What ever text book one chooses then, the real question is what is the instructor's model?  And are we behaving consistently in our choices and classrooms with those things we teach from textbooks?  If not, what's the message???? So the real question for me is not does this or that textbook work, rather it's is this textbook consistent with my beliefs about how one leads in organizations?  If I have to refer constantly to the textbook, whatever it is, I haven't made it mine yet...

I've enjoyed this discussion about textbooks, how we teach, what we teach, etc. very much since it reveals in each message an underlying set of VABEs about all of those things.  It's fascinating.  I hope my long winded comment this morning while waiting for a client in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Costa Rica</st1:place></st1:country-region> hasn't offended anyone...

Cheers,