LEADERSHIP BY DESIGN

LEADERSHIP BY DESIGN
By Ted Fish, Executive Director, GCLI

I was wondering how to express the idea that leadership can be taught for an hour-long presentation at the Hathaway Brown Innovation Summit, when all of a sudden inspiration hit me. I'll present it in the form of a question: Out of the whole animal kingdom, what animal is most like the human in terms of its relationship to the environment?

Think about it for a moment and allow the answer to form in your mind. Perhaps your thoughts raced to our closest ancestral link, the subject of studies about language and social relationship, Jane Goodall's noble companion, the chimpanzee? Or maybe an image of our joyously smiling and eternally inquisitive maritime friend swam into your consciousness -- the dolphin?

Good guesses, both, but wrong. The animal that is most similar to the human in environmental terms is the beaver. Naturalists have long marveled at the beaver's capacity to not just change, but to utterly transform its surroundings. A beaver may enter a tract of land with a river or stream running through it and with its capacity to fell a tree several inches thick in just a few minutes, can overhaul a landscape in weeks. What was dry becomes saturated. A wetland ecosystem forms because of the lodge, and creatures descend from all parts of the forest. Frogs move in, and toads, and fish, and waterfowl, and all the animals who eat the frogs and toads and fish and waterfowl, and all the animals who then eat them, until the habitat that emerges is scarcely recognizable from how it was when it began. Whole new ecological cycles ensue, all set into motion by the action of one animal. A beaver is a master shaper of its environment.

And I realized, isn't that what a leader does, and who a leader is? A leader is someone who sees the environment not as it is but as it could be, especially if we define environment as the physical world, and the social world, and the cultural world. A leader is someone who notices the poverty of a neglected neighborhood, or the laissez-faire attitude of a team, or the insensitivity of a group of peers and says to oneself, this must change. And things do change, ramifying effects outward and farther outward, until any number of lives are permanently improved.

Isn't leadership seen in this light just the most basic of human drives characteristic of every human being who has the sensitivity to notice what is happening and the agency and confidence to form a vision and act on it? Any three-year old can be seen with the impulse to transform their environment. The only difference between the child moving a pile of blocks and the students we hope to empower is the scope of the vision and the practiced ability through social and emotional intelligence to get others hooked into the same goal.

Each of these three capacities has been associated with a particular system in the brain, and we know from Dr. Deak that all systems of the brain can be developed through strategic practice. Thus, the job of a teacher who seeks to develop the leadership competencies of their students becomes remarkably straightforward and natural. Train three things. Design experiences so that students repeatedly learn, in increasingly subtle and substantial ways the following:

1. To notice what is happening in the environments around them;
2. To envision something better; and
3. To act in such a way that others are motivated to take up the charge. To act in such a way that others are motivated to take up the charge.

Growing leaders is that beaver-simple.