Former Psychiatrist Teaching Leadership To Leaders

"I have a roommate who is obsessed with it," says Fred D. Kaufman, a first-year Kennedy School of Government student. "It lives up to its advance, it is very interesting and very unusual," adds Andy Hiller, political reporter for a Boston television station and another mid-career student at the graduate school.

Kaufman and Hiller are discussing the first meeting of their 120-member class where they were split up into groups of 10 and met, unwarned, without benefit of a professor or section head. A follow-up lecture began with 20 minutes of silence before a student demanded and received an explanation.

The unusual course, "Leadership and Mobilization of Resources," is taught at the K-School by a psychiatrist-turned-government-professor who is not afraid to teach what he sees as the central skill in government via an admittedly unorthodox form.

The avowed aim of the class, whose students come mostly from the K-School's mid-career program, is to "increase one's awareness of what it means to be a leader and to develop one's capacity to manage the roles of leadership and authority," according to Lecturer in Public Policy Ronald Heifetz. The central question, he says, is how leadership is created. Heifetz believes that leadership--like athletics and music--demands an innate talent, which must in turn be developed through instruction. Heifetz maintains that his method and material are both innovative and important for civic health.

"In music what is proper training has evolved, but basically the pedagogy of training musicians is somewhat understood,...whereas the whole subject matter of leadership is experimental," he says. Heifetz does not think that the essence of leadership necessarily means commanding followers, or even having power, but simply knowing "how to analyze problems, how to get the work done."

"There can be leadership without authority. A person with leadership is anyone capable of helping a social system work," he says.

While the class is, on the face of it, studying leadership, it is also observing leadership in action. Heifetz terms his use of classroom dynamics "an extension of the case method."

The initial, unsupervised groups of 10 were instructed to continue meeting on their own once a week in order to experiment with an instance of failed leadership and to have a class member become a leader by conducting the meeting. During the course's group meetings, each person fills out a graded questionnaire about he session. Among the many question is "What do you think the hidden agenda was at the meeting?" Heifetz also delivers a three-hour lecture each week and leads a "de-briefing session" where the "class leader" and the "case presenter" of each of the 12 sections meet with the professor's four teaching assistants to discuss the unobserved session.

Perhaps the most intense experiences are those of the unofficial section leaders, who tend to approach the problems at hand through markedly different strategies from one another. "Some leaders pass out agendas," while others take a less structured role, says second year K-Schooler Steven Nicholas. "It is a chance for class members to experiment with different roles of a leader."

There are also three special sessions throughout the semester, where members bring in poetry and prose for the group. Singing and music are also used "to provide a language for working with elusive qualities, like harmony, inspiration, timing, conducting, creativity, listening and resolution," according to the course description.

Heifetz is having a definite impact on the K-School. Two hundred people entered a lottery for the 120 spots in the class as a result of Heifetz's popularity as a professor and the fact that his class is one of only three management courses available for mid-career students at the school this term.

In addition to his popularity among students at the K-School, Heifetz's teaching style has been experienced by a majority of the graduate school's faculty through the seminars he has conducted on weekends throughout the year.

Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Jose A. Gomez-Ibanez, who teaches at the K-School and the Graduate School of Design, estimates that one-half of the former's faculty has gone on one of Heifetz's three-day retreats. Gomez-Ibanez says the seminar helped him understand and appreciate his unusual teaching methods. Of the course's strategy, he says "some things can't be told but have to be experienced."

Nichols concedes that many people think that "the class is collectively lying on the couch." But he says it would be simplistic to assume that "we--the class--were always the subject of the experiment, and he the technician."

Meanwhile, Heifetz is mailing questionaires to alumni of his class to judge how effective his graduates have been in improving their ability to get the job done.