Leadership Class Notes, Sessions 1-2

The first two sessions of the Leadership class are now over. Coming back to teaching is a very satisfying experience, especially if the class is enthusiastic.

Session 1's emphasis was on defining the qualities of a leader as opposed to that of a manager. Business courses define management as POLC (planning, organizing, leading and controlling), but the actual instruction usually focus only on the POC aspects.

That's because these are the easiest topics to teach. There are tools and techniques for POC. But leadership -- how do you teach people to be good leaders? And so leadership is quickly glossed over, hoping that if everyone new how to plan, organize and control, then they could lead.

But this is like a four-legged chair with one weak leg. Without good leadership, a business may survive. But the company will not necessarily be a great one and it may even end up crashing.

The best take-home I got from my leadership mentor (Prof. Lino Rivera) were two books. He required us to read Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman and Heroic Leadership by Cris Lowney. Goleman's book, I was already familiar with. So reading this was easy. It lay the groundwork for the qualities of a good leader, based on the framework of emotional intelligence (more on this, in upcoming entries).

Heroic Leadership was different. At first, I was suspicious of Lowney's book, having been written by a Jesuit. I was surprised and pleased to find out that Lowney wrote an excellent guidebook on how to develop good leaders, with almost no attempt to insert religion in the discussions. (In doing this, Lowney rightly surmised that his book gained more credence for the general public).

Lowney and Goleman agree that in these fast-changing times, knowledge and quick decisions have become valuable. All employees must now have these abilities. Skills that used to be the sole realm of managers (initiative, autonomy, risk-taking, quick decisions) were not vital skills for all employees. In fact, the old abilities (eg, cautious action, clearing decisions with the managers) would be detrimental to the company.

Lowney also asserts that a great company can only happen if everyone in it are good leaders or potentially good leaders. (This ties up with Jim Collins's observations in the book Good to Great, by the way, where Collins asserts that managers of great companies are open enough to train their successors).

Lowney points out that 450 years of Jesuit expansion even in harsh environments should be proof enough of the soundness of the Jesuit style for developing leaders. All its members were made to go through a stringent and long training process (or what outsiders might call indoctrination and even brain-washing).

The church astronomer who advised Pope Gregory to fix the inaccurate medieval calendar was a Jesuit. The first Catholic order to successfully penetrate the xenophobic Chinese empire was also a Jesuit. They built and expanded an empire of schools all over the world when none of its founders even knew how to start and maintain schools.

Indeed, Lowney argues that Jesuits at the core are all good leaders. Even if they do not have real followers, the major point in the early chapters of Heroic Leadership is that a good leader must first be able to lead one's self. And this can only happen if one is self-aware. So the start of leadership is self-awareness. To know one's self means to know their own strengths and limitations, so that they can avoid pitfalls or supplement weaknesses when needed.

I would like to point out here that Lowney, Goleman and a whole lot of other Western experts have many common points with Eastern philosophy like Buddhism. But I'll be discussing more on this in the succeeding sessions. Meanwhile, I feel blessed with a class full of enthusiastic students. Even the foreign students are participating (when I was a student, most of the foreign students sat quietly). This makes me eagerly await the next class.

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Note: I have finally resumed teaching -- an activity I sorely missed. This time, I am teaching an MBA class on Leadership at Ateneo (in Rockwell).