October, 2005, Volume
10, Number 1
CONTENTS
Leadership Conference: Annual Wharton Leadership Event, June 13, 2006
Rebounding From Adversity: Resonant Leadership
Learning to Lead: A Study of 50 Research and Development Teams
Learn to Be an Executive Coach:
Executive Coaching Workshop, 2006
Leadership Conference:
Annual Wharton Leadership Event, June 13, 2006
The next Annual Wharton Leadership Conference will
be held in Philadelphia on June 13, 2006, and it focused on “Leading
with Resilience: Coming back from Challenge and Adversity." Information for online registration will be forthcoming.
Confirmed speakers include:
Jim
Collins is an independent scholar
based in Boulder, Colorado. He is co-author of Built to Last
(1994) and author of Good to Great (2001). He has served on the
faculty of the Graduate Business School of Stanford University, and he
lectures widely on business leadership and company performance.
Peter
M. Dawkins is Vice Chairman of CitiGroup Private Bank and Former
Chairman/CEO of Primerica Financial Services, Inc. He received the
Heisman Trophy as a halfback for the U.S. Military Academy at West
Point, he was a Rhodes Scholar and White House Fellow, and he rose to
the rank of Brigadier General in the U.S. Army.
Sylvia
M. Montero is Senior Vice
President, Human Resources at Pfizer Inc., and is responsible for the
overall strategy and development of company-wide HR policies, plans and
practices. She also oversees the company’s leadership development,
compensation and benefits and HR services that reach the company’s
120,000 worldwide employees.
David
Pottruck is CEO of Red Eagle
Ventures, a private equity firm based in San Francisco. He is former
CEO of Charles Schwab, and a director of Intel, and a member of the
Wharton School's Leadership Advisory Board.
Rebounding From Adversity:
Resonant Leadership
Richard
Boyatzis and Annie McKee, co-authors with Daniel Goleman of Primal
Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional
Intelligence (2002) have published a new volume,
Resonant Leadership: Renewing Yourself and
Connecting with Others Through Mindfulness, Hope, and Compassion
(2005). They provide guidelines for
recovering from the chronic set-backs, conflicts, and anxieties that
afflict virtually of those who carry leadership responsibilities.
Self-renewal is key,
they suggest, and for this several distinct self-directed initiatives
will help. First, it is important to build a sense of mindfulness, a
broad awareness of oneself, colleagues, and context. Second, it is
critical to reestablish a sense of optimism about achieving one’s
goals. And third, it is vital to appreciate the wants and needs of
others upon whom one’s own leadership depends for success.
All this requires a
disciplined course of change in oneself. “People who think they can be
truly great leaders without personal transformation are fooling
themselves,” argue Boyatzis and McKee. “You cannot inspire others and
create resonant relationships that ignite greatness in your families,
organizations, or communities without feeling inspired yourself, and
working to be the best person you can be.”
Learning to Lead:
A Study of 50 Research and Development Teams
Classroom development of
leadership can be effective but learning leadership from workplace
experience can also be effective. Academic researchers Giles Hirst and
associates studied the leadership of projects among teams engaged in
research and development initiatives, and they focused on five areas of
on-the-job leadership learning:
1) learning how to
manage individuals
2) mastering team management
3) understanding how the organization works
4) dealing with people outside the team
5) acquiring technical knowledge
The researchers forecast
that R&D team managers who improved in these five areas of leadership
would also be better at team facilitation, defined as behavior that
encourages and stimulates teamwork, and also better at team
communication, defined as behavior that fosters the expression of
diverse points of view within the team of how the team should perform
its tasks. The researchers in turn predicted that improved facilitative
leadership and team communication would result in better project
performance.
The research group
studied 50 teams with 313 members at four organizations in Australia
that sponsored R&D projects in the areas of agriculture, information
technology, defense, chemicals, materials, and resources. They asked
the team leaders to rate how much they had learned from their project
work during the past four months in the five areas of leadership
learning. Team leaders and members rated the leaders’ team facilitation
and team communication, and teams and customers rated the teams’
performance and project quality.
The investigators found
as expected that team leaders who said that learned more on the job were
also more highly rated in team facilitation and communication. And
these factors in turn enhanced the teams’ performance and project
quality. Moreover, the researchers discovered that relatively new team
leaders reported that they had learned more about leadership than
relatively experienced team leaders. And they found that the impact of
the leadership learning impact became more evident over time, with
greater impact felt eight to twelve months later. “Work-based
learning,” concluded the researchers, “has a sustained impact on
leadership behavior, and this effect is greatest for new leaders.”
Source:
Giles Hirst, Leon Mann, Paul Bain, Andrew Pirola-Merlo, Andreas
Richver, “Learning to Lead: the Development and Testing of a Model of
Leadership Learning, The Leadership Quarterly, Vol. 15, pp.
311–327.
Learn to Be an Executive Coach:
Executive Coaching Workshop, 2006
Executive coaches help
business leaders develop the competencies required to meet enhanced
organizational responsibilities or shifting business demands. Effective
coaches need not only an understanding of business issues and operations
but also familiarity with the principles of leadership development,
organizational dynamics, and action learning. The Wharton Executive
Coaching Workshop on January 29 to February 3, 2006 provides tools
and frameworks ranging from business issues to action learning for
participants to become more effective executive coach.
Note: The program is described
here.
Copyright 1996-2005, Wharton Center for
Leadership and Change Management
University of Pennsylvania.
