Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62215
F oped the perfect shorthand phrase to describe the concept. "Ten years ago, that wouldn't have happened. These days, our years ago, the U.S. Army published a manual on leadership with three words imprinted on the cover: "Be—Know—Do." References to that manual on leadership Web sites brought a flood of calls and e- mails from people who felt the U.S. Army had devel- Leader The professor of management and director of the Center of Change and Leadership at Wharton. Sorensen expects leadership eventually to become as people are hungry for meaning and significance," says Frances Hesselbein, chairman of the board of governors of the Leader to Leader Institute, formerly the Peter Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, New York City. Her own defini- tion of leadership is even simpler: "It's a matter of how to be, not how to do. We may spend much of our lives learning how to do and teaching others how to do it, yet in the end it is the quality and character of the leaders that determine the per- formance, the results." Teaching potential CEOs not only how to do, but how to be, has become the challenge of business schools as they deter- mine how to coax their students into developing the practical and ethical frameworks that will enable them to be leaders. The increasingly urgent focus on leadership has partly been a byproduct of corporate scandals and partly a response to a cry for leadership from the business community. "About 20 years ago, business important as technical skills at b-schools. That's certainly true at Virginia Tech, which has made an emphasis on leadership almost as high a priority as its emphasis on the IT skills that are the school's hallmark. The b-school administrators who share Sorensen's views on the importance of leadership are realizing that their next hurdle is to figure out how to teach the concept in a classroom setting. Business students learn to uncover their leadership potential by studying role models, developing self-awareness, and facing challenging situations inside and outside the classroom. schools became more focused on teaching technical skills, and these hard skills began to crowd out softer skills," says Richard E. Sorensen, dean of the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. "Then businesses started to say, 'Hey, your graduates have great tech skills, but they can't lead different types of task forces.' Some of them also couldn't run a meeting, communicate with people, or get teams to agree to common goals." To create students with those abilities, more and more by Sharon Shinn illustration by Craig Larotonda Leadership Deconstructed For the most part, today's business educators are trying to break leadership skills into a variety of teachable chunks, some of them experiential and some of them observational. "We can't teach people how to lead, but we can provide ideas, justification, and a few devices to help students develop their own leadership styles," says Useem. "We conjure up in the classroom situations where they are put on the line and have to think strategically." Students also study leaders schools have put leadership skills at the heart of a business degree. Since 1992, all MBA students at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in Philadelphia have been required to take a leadership course in their first year. "The underlying premise was that companies that hire our students want them to come out of the program having acquired all the skills that define great leadership," says Michael Useem, 30 BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2003 Bolman, Marion Bloch/Missouri Chair in Leadership at the Bloch School of Business and Public Administration at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Not only must students acquire an understanding of the concepts and strategies that result in good leadership, they must learn about themselves and their own beliefs. "Leadership is a performing art in which self is the vehi- Leadership is taught on multiple levels, says Lee G. who have operated with and without integrity. "Through case analysis, along with an introduc- tion to more conceptual ideas, we provide students with a framework to think about their own character development and integrity," Useem says. cle," says Bolman. "In some ways it's like acting. In knowing who I am, knowing something about how people see me, knowing what I care about, what my goals are, or what's important to me, I can understand who I am as a leader." Therefore, to learn leadership, students undergo a three- part learning process that fairly closely follows the dictate of that old Army manual. They are exposed to case studies so