Education

I asked the students from my leadership class for undergraduates at NYU last semester for the three top things they learned, the three things they valued most, and the three things they'd improve. The responses were all anonymous. I collected the information to know what to keep and what to improve for next year. Some parts might not make sense if you weren't in the class, but I thought I'd share them to show the results of how I teach leadership. I'd love to read your impressions. Not all the students responded. Each set of three responses is from a different student. Learned I learned that people aren't necessarily born leaders, that leadership (more importantly, good leadership) can be learned, practiced, and mastered. I learned…

Here is how I closed my last leadership class session a few days ago. It followed talking about Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. We happen to have lived through a semester where the headlines show we haven't realized his dream. You only had to read the headlines for more problems. I'm volunteering for a non-profit that works on incarceration. We have children on Riker's Island in solitary confinement. Children. In our lifetimes sea levels will displace tens or hundreds of millions of people from their homes. I taught you skills. I think practicing those skills leads to values, which I consider the culmination of the course. Understanding your values and those of people around you. Awareness of values emerges from practicing leadership…

Business schools teach a lot of leadership. Other vocational schools do too. I don't know them as well, but I bet the following pattern applies to them. Say someone gets their MBA and gets a job in finance. They don't start at the top of a hierarchy. If they do well they get promoted to manage people like they were. Then they get promoted to manage yet more people. They keep getting promoted, always managing people in their functional area of finance. Eventually they start general management, where they manage people who do things different than anything they have experience in---maybe people from sales, technology, and some other departments. By this point they aren't doing the functional work they did before. And they don't have…