Leadership in the Eye of the Beholder

Abstract

Teaching leadership presents a challenge as students come into the topic with underlying assumptions of what makes for a good or bad leader. The experiential exercise described here brings together the worlds of leadership and art to elicit the students’ implicit leadership theories. We have students look at works of art and relate them to their perception of leadership. This produces a rich discussion, and as an additional benefit, it improves students’ observational abilities which will allow them to better capture the complexities of the workplace. We discuss debriefing ideas and further assignments. The exercise has been successfully run in a face-to-face leadership class but it lends itself easily to online classes. We share the images we have collected.