Abstract
Teaching people about leadership is different from creating leaders. Teaching leadership uses a third-person approach to impart someone else’s knowledge, which grants learners limited direct access to the being and actions of effective leaders. In contrast, creating leaders entails a first-person phenomenological methodology, which provides direct access to what it means to be a leader and what it means to exercise good leadership in real time, with real results. The distinctiveness of the first-person “as-lived/lived-through” approach lies in its capacity to disclose the hidden contexts that shape the ways of being, thinking, and acting that are the source of the leader’s performance. When these contexts become unveiled, it allows for the creation of new contexts that give leaders more space and more degrees of freedom to lead effectively as their natural self-expression. A phenomenological inquiry into leadership does not study the attributes of leaders, but rather the fundamental structures of human “being” that make it possible to be a leader in the first place. Because the phenomenological “facts” of lived experience reside in language, creating for oneself what it is to be a leader entails mastering a special language (that includes terms like intentionality; thrownness; being-in-the-world; clearing-for-action; absorbed coping; hermeneutic; and, break-down) from which leaders can orient their being, thinking, and actions. Learning to be a leader is not first and foremost about the acquisition of knowledge or certain personal attributes. Rather, only when leadership becomes an as-lived/lived-through experience does it grant access to its actual nature and essence.
Highlights
As the magnitude and complexity of global issues, problems, and challenges increase, the need for better leadership from more people is more critical than ever
Because phenomenology employs the first-person “as-lived” perspective, it provides us with direct access to what it means to be a leader and what it is to exercise good leadership
Heidegger was interested in that kind of “analysis by which the meaning of [the] various ways in which we exist can be translated from the vague language of everyday existence into the understandable and explicit language of ontology without destroying the way in which these meanings manifest themselves to us in our everyday lives” (Gelven, 1989)
Summary
As the magnitude and complexity of global issues, problems, and challenges increase, the need for better leadership from more people is more critical than ever. Leadership education today is largely a third-person undertaking, which is focused on teaching the learner someone else’s knowledge This third-person approach provides limited direct access to the being and actions of effective leaders. Educational approaches that encourage learners to seek first-person as-lived experiences, and reflect on them, are often discounted. The natural sciences, notes Richard Tieszen (Tieszen, 2013), provide us with a kind of objectivity that “leaves behind” our feelings, sensations, and first-person experiences. In contrast to the natural sciences, leadership is best studied using a first-person “as-lived” phenomenological inquiry, which uses discourse, deliberation, and reflection to investigate how people experience what they experience and the meaning of that experience, be it a solar eclipse or a leadership challenge. Because phenomenology employs the first-person “as-lived” perspective, it provides us with direct access to what it means to be a leader and what it is to exercise good leadership. Once these constraints are unveiled, new possibilities for leading emerge
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