You can never get enough of what you really don’t need. Having taught at two of the leading English-language universities in Georgia for over a year leaves me more convinced of this fact than ever before.
Change is certainly the mantra of the current era. But popular talk about the necessity for change is somewhat superficial and misleading. For starters, there’s no shortage of change. Quite the opposite in fact. The truth is no one likes to be told what to do—so change can never be commanded. Sure, we can all be manipulated in the short term, but over the long haul, leaders must create trust if they expect to take people beyond the ideology of comfort or the tyranny of custom.
The real challenge for leadership is not so much to plan, command, and control. The challenge is to create vision, purpose, and unity within a fragmented and chaotic environment. Business schools and law schools throughout the world are all pretty good at managing the status quo, but when it comes to intending real changes—they are woefully inadequate and unprepared. Please allow me to prove my point.
A lot of leadership development programs have been created out of a mistaken identity between leadership and management. To begin with, leadership is an influence relationship between leaders and followers, not an authority relationship between so-called superiors and subordinates. Followers do not do “followership”—they are part and parcel of the leadership process itself. Leaders and followers influence each other at different times and in different circumstances. It’s not the same with authority relationships—where managers are full time in-change of their “underlings.”
Leadership is more episodic and democratic than most business administration and legal programs imagine. The idea of constant, full-time authority over others is closer to the concept of management than to leadership.
In truth, the best leadership programs for the twenty-first century will be born of psychology, philosophy, and history rather than finance, accounting, and the law. A newer model of leadership development will be based on personal growth and a combination of teamwork, caring, and community involvement. After all, most of the world’s work is not done by “bosses” or “big gorillas,” but rather by confluent teams of individuals and organizations each contributing to the completion of shared tasks and meaningful goals. When market or political interests dominate universities such as they do today in Georgia, their role as public agencies for the good of the nation as a whole significantly diminishes.
Developing higher education in support of a democratic leadership culture means that we all take part in decisions that affect us. Leadership is not simply a matter of memorizing financial facts and legal precedents, mastering routine skills, adopting strategies of the past, and simply repeating the steps. There are no cookbooks on the invention of leadership for the future—despite what university PR departments would like us all to think.
Leadership occurs when leaders and followers collaborate and influence each other in pursuit of common purposes. Contrast this with ordinary management. The organizational structures may be perfect. The methods well decided. The conditions ideal. But without that extra spark that only individual and collective acts of leadership can provide, nothing in the way of significant change ever happens. One of the many benefits in understanding the true nature of leadership as shared purposes, and community service (versus private interests) is that it allows each participant to see themselves engaged in leadership activities regardless of their hierarchical status within any organization—public or private.
Developing tomorrow’s leadership begs the question: what kind of leadership will the future demand? And if the business and law schools are not up to the task, then where can such leadership be discovered and developed for the future of Georgian society? The answers may surprise you.
Higher education has, quite literally, come a long way in recent years. Online education has moved from the periphery to the mainstream—especially in North America. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education report estimated that one in five adults over the age of 25 are currently taking their entire university degree online. No longer do we have to quit our jobs, mortgage the house, move away, or live in a dorm to attain a higher education. Learning now comes to us.
Advancements in online technology have changed the way we study, and online courses in organizational leadership are now more readily available, more efficient, and more valued than ever before. While in the past online certifications did not carry the same weight as traditional programs, many scholars now believe that online education is not only acceptable, but immensely productive. And universities all over the Europe and the United States are making online education more convenient, practical, and accessible.
Online students are not bound to a classroom timetable, but able to study wherever there is a computer and Internet access. This means that your studies can now be scheduled around your work and social life more easily than in traditional educational settings. As well, geographic limitations are not an issue for online education, so students may pursue leadership development from anywhere in the world. Furthermore, with the advent of online programs in leadership, the professor functions as a coach and consultant as well as a teacher in the traditional sense. Here we are less concerned with transmitting intellectual content directly, than we are with inspiring and motivating an active learning process for students to engage themselves and each other.
Students need to be encouraged to move beyond Facebook and MySpace and persuaded to use similar networking technology to connect around academic and other issues of leadership importance. Programs being initiated by such places as Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, Brock University in Ontario, Athabasca University in Alberta, and Royal Roads University in British Columbia are attempting to provide outreach to rural and urban communities all over the world who can benefit from advanced knowledge in leadership.
Such programs as Mansfield University’s Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership are intended to be responsive to the needs of individuals and institutions looking to enhance and promote leadership in education, health care, social services, and a variety of businesses, sports, arts, and so on. What distinguishes and elevates such programs beyond the mere subject matter of business and law schools is collaborative research on leadership for people in organizations, rather than research on people in organizations.
Higher education for people in organizations means augmenting the processes that generate and share knowledge for all involved. The trick to leadership development is learning how to decipher it, pare it down to its essentials, create new connections, and put it all into a new framework others can use to build on. The starting point and foundation for leadership development is the character of individuals working together to establish a culture of inclusion and diversity focused on service to the communities in which they live.
There is no higher wisdom to which we can aspire nor more useful knowledge that we can possess.
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