Teaching Leadership through Emotional Truths

by Elmer S. Soriano

We recently ran a workshop where we taught university faculty how to teach leadership to social workers. Coming from different disciplines (nursing, public administration, economics, etc) and different universities, we had to design a learning experience that tapped into the collective wisdom that was assembled in our classroom. This training was supposed to prepare them to teach 1,600 social workers across 1,000+ municipalities how to lead.

We started off the workshop asking them why they thought the Bridging Leadership framework was a better course than their current offerings of MBA, or MPA, or any of their regular graduate courses. They said their other courses weren't designed to "touch the heart", or awaken a "sense of purpose", or "transform lives" in ways that their other courses did not deliver.

We introduced the CYNEFIN Framework to help them wrap their heads around how Bridging Leadership addresses complex systems in ways that traditional MBA and MPA tools don't do as effectively.

Here are a few insights from that workshop:

1. Leadership training includes exposing the learners not just to leadership paradigms and frameworks, but also to "emotional truths".

Leadership is requires the practice of diagnosing problems, especially problems that are unnamed, taboo, or in a culture's blind spot. Students of leadership benefit from acquiring the ability to recognize and ripen emotional truths in their own lives, and use these emotional truths as lenses in diagnosing adaptive challenges. This video from Adichie describes emotional truths and other concepts on cultural blindspots.

2. Introduce the concept of VUCCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic, Complex, Ambiguous) Systems.

Leaders nowadays have to be highly functional in VUCCA systems, in this age where climate change and super-typhoons are the new normal. Traditional teachers are accustomed to have neat lesson plans, and quiet, orderly classrooms, which poor environments to teach leadership in the context of messy systems. This video describes how education is being disrupted by new ways of learning complex systems.

3. Use Case in Point to simulate the hot seat of leadership.

I think of the Case-in-Point (CIP) method as a rather abstract methodology, and I was surprised when one of the social workers told me that she observed that a number of faculty members resisted or did not understand the logic of CIP. She said that it was possibly because social workers often found themselves in the hot seat, being asked questions to which they did not have all the right answers. She said that faculty members, on the other hand, usually taught the "correct answers" and were less accustomed to being asked questions that reframed their mindsets.

In retrospect, the experiences at this workshop validate the role of the need for Leadership Teaching and Learning Lab. Adapting from MIT's Teaching and Learning Lab, the function could be:

The mission of the Leadership Teaching and Learning Lab is to jointly partner with leadership educators to create an educational environment where learners are academically challenged, actively engaged, and personally supported.

Our Lab Associates will do this by:

-sharing research-based strategies for lesson, subject, and program design and development.
-educating others about student-centered pedagogies.
-collaborating and consulting with other leadership educators to brainstorm opportunities and solutions for their teaching context.
-collecting data through the evaluation of educational innovations and assessment of student outcomes to provide constructive, practical, and informative feedback to educators.
-continually seeking additional areas where we may be of service to the Institute's continually evolving educational needs and interests.