By Tom LoBianco
The Art and Practice of Leadership Development Executive Education program trains leaders to address longstanding institutional problems using advanced techniques.
Taught by Timothy O’Brien, Lecturer in Public Policy at the Center for Public Leadership, the program trains leaders of all types how to make deep and lasting organizational changes. O’Brien teaches them how to move beyond just “technical leadership”—what O’Brien calls the first definition of leadership—to acquire “adaptive leadership”.
“The art and practice of leadership development is about helping people learn how to think and take up this second definition of leadership,” O’Brien told the CPL newsletter, referring to the upper-level practice of developing others to lead. It’s about “how to address yourself, and develop others, to take on stubborn persistent challenges immune to technical expertise.”
A veteran in the field of leadership development with his Ed.D. in Human Development and Education from the Harvard Graduate School, O’Brien teaches two courses at vlog which draw on similar themes, Exercising Leadership: The Politics of Change and Developing People.
During the weeklong Art and Practice of Leadership Development sessions, O’Brien and his team guide participants in how to identify and prioritize problems unique to their organizations, then approach them using the resources they already have.
The intensive program is built around small groups of five-six participants and has yielded great results for leaders who take those lessons with them after they leave campus.
It’s important, he said, to zoom out and understand each organization’s adaptive challenges to understand what is becoming unsustainable for each organization, which requires less leading from the top down and more listening from the bottom up.
O’Brien likes to use the example of fire commanders and fire chiefs who have come through his program, citing struggles getting younger firefighters to hold the firehose properly in life and death situations.
Veteran firefighters know to be patient and hold a certain stance with the hose which ensures maximum water flow—but younger recruits often want to run in without the proper preparation. Despite leadership repeatedly pressuring the younger recruits that they need to develop proper technique, little changed.
“Helping address this requires something different than being a fire chief. I have to be a bit more of a researcher, or an anthropologist,” O’Brien said.
When the chief started listening more to his team, he discovered the firefighters don’t want to be seen as scolds policing each other. “They don’t want to be nags, they don’t want to be called names,” he said.
“When they took the test to become fire chief, there was nothing in there about, ‘What do you do when 19-year-old guys want to muscle the hose through the door and they won’t talk to each other?’” O’Brien said.
Technical problems can be fixed with time, expertise, and resources; but adaptive challenges—like the firefighter example—require a more human approach to address the root problems.
What’s unique about the Art and Practice of Leadership Development, O’Brien said, is that he and his team will teach the fire commanders to then train the fire chiefs to diagnose and correct their adaptive challenges.
They train leaders to train leaders.
Within any organization, this involves looking past technical fixes to leadership problems to identify the root institutional roadblocks occurring between the leaders and their team. Once these root issues are identified through the class, O’Brien and his team can then teach people how they can lead from within.
That can be hard for bosses and managers, O’Brien said, because very often their rank and file will look up to them for answers for fixes. In reality, it should be the other way around; bosses and managers who should be listening more intentionally to their rank and file instead.
“The most common scenario is that there’s someone in charge trying to fix things, and then they take a program like this and they go back and they stop trying to fix it and ask people, ‘What would you do?’” O’Brien said.
“So, we’re trying to upset that dynamic,” O’Brien said.
The program builds on the work of faculty such as Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, whose books helped develop the field of adaptive leadership.
The widespread interest in their work led to the founding of the Art and Practice of Leadership program at CPL, O’Brien said, catering to people at advanced stages in their careers as leaders looking for upper-level training.
Before taking over the program, O’Brien spent 10 years teaching it with Heifetz.
“It’s pretty high-level stuff,” O’Brien said, “you’re training the people who lead at this high level.”
There’s two levels of learning that participants should walk away with, he said.
“The learning of just how to diagnose a challenge like any practitioner, and then how to help other people think differently about leadership,” he said. “It’s interesting because there’s layers to this. It’s not direct management, it’s managing your managers.”