The question of whether leadership can be learned from a course, or from a lecture-based training program, is an important one. Our guest blogger is Dr. Rich Hughes, who is the lead author of the textbook, Leadership:Enhancing the Lessons of Experience (with coauthors Robert C. Ginnett and Gordon J. Curphy). We are using their text in our Leadership 101 course.
"Before my co-authors and I ever wrote the textbook you're using in this course, we and other colleagues taught an undergraduate course in leadership required of all cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy. While undergraduate courses in leadership are fairly common now, they weren't then (the 1980's). I suspect that for many decades the U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Military Academy were among the relatively few undergraduate schools offering such courses.
Because undergraduate leadership courses were somewhat uncommon then, the idea of an academic course in leadership was also a novel idea to many faculty members from other departments. Some were quite openly skeptical that leadership was an appropriate course for an academic department to offer. It was a fairly common experience for us to be asked, "Do you really think you can teach leadership?" Usually this was asked in a tone of voice that made it clear the questioner took it for granted that leadership couldn't be taught.
Over time, I formulated my own response to this question, and it still reflects a core belief I hold several decades later. Not coincidentally, that belief has been hinted at in the subtitle to every edition of our text: Enhancing the lessons of experience. Let me describe how that idea represented the essence of my answer to those skeptical questioners, and also how reflecting on their questions shaped how I think about one important objective of an academic course in leadership.
The fact of the matter was back then, that I actually agreed substantially with those skeptical questioners: I didn't believe (and still don't) that merely taking a semester-long college-level course in leadership would make one a better leader. At the same time, however, I did believe strongly (and still do) that it could lay an invaluable foundation to becoming a better leader over time.
Here's my reasoning. If you accept that leadership can be learned at all (rather than just "being born with it," or not), and if you also believe that the most powerful lessons about leadership come from one's own experience, then the matter boils down to the process of how we learn from experience. If one important factor in learning from experience pertains to how complex or multi-faceted one's conceptual lenses are for construing experience, then it's no big stretch to claim that becoming familiar with the complex variables that affect leadership give one a greater variety of ways of making sense of the leadership situations you confront in your own life. In that way, completing a college course in leadership may not make you a better leader directly and immediately, but actively mastering the concepts in the course can nonetheless accelerate the rate at which you learn from the natural experiences you have during and subsequent to your course. In any case, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!
By the way, the story doesn't quite end with the answer I developed to my skeptical colleagues and the subtitle to our text. When I left the Air Force Academy in 1995 to work at the Center for Creative Leadership, I was intrigued to learn that the Center's own book describing its groundbreaking research on executive development was itself titled The Lessons of Experience. Small world."
