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

Sharon Daloz Parks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 18, 2005

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 of leadership and experience a corresponding mode of learning called "case in point." Unlike traditional teaching approaches that analyze the experiences of past leaders, case in point uses individuals' own experiences--and the classroom environment itself--as a crucible for learning. This bold approach enables emerging leaders to work actively through the complex demands of today's workplace and build their skills as they discover theory in practice. Through an engaging, you-are-there writing style, Parks outlines essential features of this approach that can be applied across a range of settings. In the process, Leadership Can Be Taught reveals how we can learn, practice, and teach the art of leadership in more skilled, effective, and inspired forms. Sharon Daloz Parks is director of leadership for the New Commons--an initiative of the Whidbey Institute in Clinton, WA. She has held faculty and research positions at the Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Business School, and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sharon Daloz Parks is Director of Leadership for the New Commons--an initiative of the Whidbey Institute in Clinton, WA. She has held faculty and research positions at the Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press; 1 edition (October 18, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591393094
• ISBN-13: 978-1591393092
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,514 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Another GREAT TAKE on Heifetz & Adaptive Leadership July 5, 2006

By M. Pardee

Format:Hardcover

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! Read more ›

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Leadership For The New Commons July 26, 2007

By P. A. Dourado

Format:Hardcover

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. [...] Read more ›

4.0 out of 5 stars Leadership is about empowerment August 9, 2012

By Daniel Im

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Parks' Leadership Can Be Taught is an examination and illumination of Ronald Heifetz's teaching method at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She not only gives the reader an in depth experience of being in Heifetz's classroom, but she also translates his methodology into transferrable principles for leadership and teaching. She does this by dissecting the case-in-point approach that Heifetz uses. She also dismantles the notion that an individual is born a leader, and plots a way to develop presence - "the ability to intervene, to hold steady, inspire a group, and work in both verbal and nonverbal realms" (13). In the second half of the book, Parks addresses the transferability of this approach to a variety of different situations, such as the workplace or different classroom settings. She then places herself in the shoes of a teacher, and examines the principles that teachers need to learn in order to teach with this methodology. The book closes with a critique on our culture's myth of leadership and an evaluation of this method's strengths and limits. In a sense, Leadership Can Be Taught is a hybrid-workbook or pathway to help leaders, teachers, and organizations rethink leadership, teaching, and how to learn.

Parks presents an integrative framework where the theory of leadership and practice of teaching are woven together seamlessly (231). Through this new methodology, the traditional roles of teachers are reimagined, and students now have a different approach to learning. Leadership is less about an individual's talent and exercise of power, and more about empowering a group of individuals to work through, and learn from, their toughest issues.... In this new model, "the teacher is a co-learner and at the same time a model, practicing authority and leadership in public so that others may eavesdrop, watch, contend with, and learn" (232). Consequently, this book has expanded my understanding of teaching and leadership. Not only will I cease to run away from conflict, but I will prayerfully and carefully examine where I need to start conflict in my ministry, in order to bring about beneficial change and learning. In the training seminars I lead, I am now going to strive to use the case-in-point method, and learn how much more beneficial this could be, than the simple case-study method. Read more ›