Psychology 1508:

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Psychology 1508 Leadership Cultivation
Insist on yourself never imitate. Your own gift
you can present every moment with the cumulative
force of a whole lifes cultivation but of the
adopted talent of another you have only an
extemporaneous half possession. That which each
can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.
Where is the master who could have instructed
Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton?...
Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot
hope too much or dare too much. Ralph Waldo
Emerson
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Are Leaders Born?

• Leadership is a skill

If you truly believe leaders are born to lead,
you may avoid engaging in situations and
experiences that trigger your full leadership
potential. You may even engage in those
situations and experiences, but fail to derive
the deep meaning from those events that can
enhance your leadership development. Your
beliefs about leadership can become
self-fulfilling and self-limiting. Bruce
Avolio

• Acquired/stable skills (Wood Bandura, 1989)

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Are Leaders Made?

• Engenders passivity

Education is a remarkable thing, but it is well
to remember from time to time that nothing that
is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
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Leaders Make Themselves!
They all agree that leaders are made, not born,
and made more by themselves than by any external
means. Warren Bennis
All of the leaders I talked with agreed that no
one can teach you how to become yourself, to take
charge, to express yourself, except
you. Warren Bennis

• Conditions rather than causes (Hackman, 2001)

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The Leadership Development Field
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The Leadership Development Field
Although studies have shown that real change can
result from training, most of the time the change
doesnt seem to be sustained, which is why it is
often called the honeymoon effect. Considering
that more than 60 billion dollars spent in North
America alone on training, this is a sobering
observation. Goleman et al.
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What Are We Trying to Cultivate?

• Emotional Intelligence

While the precise ratio of EI to cognitive
abilities depends on how each are measured and on
the unique demands of a given organization, our
rule of thumb holds that EI contributes 80 to 90
percent of the competencies that distinguish
outstanding from average leadersand sometimes
more. To be sure, purely cognitive competencies,
such as technical expertise, surface in such
studiesbut often as threshold abilities, the
skills people need simply to do an average job.
Daniel Goleman
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Soft Is Hard

• Limbic vs. neo-cortex change

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Soft Is Hard

• Limbic vs. neo-cortex change

The problem is that most training programs for
enhancing emotional intelligence abilities, such
as leadership, target the neocortex rather than
the limbic brain... The thinking brain can
comprehend something after a single hearing or
reading. The limbic brain, on the other hand, is
a much slower learnerparticularly when the
challenge is to relearn deeply ingrained
habits... Leadership learning, therefore,
requires a different model from what works for
the thinking brain It needs lots of practice and
repetition. Daniel Goleman
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No Five Easy Steps to Leadership
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EI Leadership Skills

• Self-awareness
• Openness to criticism
• Ability to manage emotions
• Motivation
• Self-confidence
• Honesty and integrity
• Ability to develop others
• Courage

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Authenticity
Authority is granted to people who are perceived
as authoring their own words, their own actions,
their own lives. Parker Palmer
To be authentic is literally to be your own
author, to discover your native energies and
desires, and then to find your own way of acting
on them. Warren Bennis
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Know Thyself and Be Thyself
Know thyself. The Oracle of
Delphi This above all To thine own self be
true, And it must follow as night follows day,
Thou canst not then be false to any
man. Shakespeare
Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique
good teaching comes from the identity and
integrity of the teacher Parker
Palmer
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Step 1 Know Thyself
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Know thyself was the inscription over the
Oracle at Delphi. And it is still the most
difficult task any of us faces. But until you
truly know yourself, strengths and weaknesses,
know what you want to do and why you want to do
it, you cannot succeed in any but the most
superficial sense of the word. Warren
Bennis

• Key to well-being (Campbell et al., 1996)

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Knowing Oneself, Knowing Others
If a person is perpetually oblivious to his own
feelings, he will also be tuned out to how others
feel. Daniel Goleman
In going down into the secrets of his own mind
he has descended into the secrets of all
minds. Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must remember that knowledge of ones own
deep nature is also simultaneously knowledge of
human nature in general. Abraham Maslow

• The extrinsic incentives bias (Heath, 1999)

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Getting to Know Ourselves

• Reflection

Managers self-ratings are less accurate than
others ratings when compared to objective
criterion measures.... Generally speaking,
managers appear to have little knowledge of their
own strengths and weaknesses. Beverly
Alimo-Mecalfe
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360 Degrees Feedback (Forward)

• Predicting success (McEvoy Beatty, 1989)
• Finding leverage points

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Step 2 Be Thyself
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Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming
yourself. Its precisely that simple, and its
also that difficult. Warren Bennis

• The One Type of Leader myth
• How can I be a leader let me count the ways
• Overlap between passions and strengths

Excellent team leaders... are aware of their
natural stylesthey know what they like to do,
what they can do easily and well, and what they
can accomplish only with difficulty if at all.
They learn over time how to exploit their special
stregths and preferences, and how to contain or
circumvent their weaknesses. Richard
Hackman
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Strengths
Passions
Zone of Great Leadership
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Strengthening Our Strengths
Were typically over-qualified in naming our
weaknesses and much less savvy about those things
at which we are naturally good. Stavros
Torres
Only when you operate from strengths can you
achieve true excellence... One cannot build
performance on weaknesses.... It takes far more
energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity
than to improve from first-rate performance to
excellence. Peter Drucker
The real tragedy of life is not that each of us
doesnt have enough strengths, its that we fail
to use the ones we have. Buckingham
Clifton
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Success Through Strengths
Confidence is more than empty pep talk. There
was a movement in California to build self-esteem
because somebody had decided schoolchildren did
not have enough self-esteem. You dont build
self-esteem by patting people on the back and
telling them theyre wonderful. Confidence is a
much more complex phenomenon that comes from
experiencing ones strengths in
action. Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Presidents dont do great things by dwelling on
their limitations, but by focusing on their
possibilities. Henry Kissinger
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