Leadership

How many of the people in leadership positions over you do you think led well? Think of all the teachers, professors, coaches, Presidents, Congress-members, and so on. I'd bet no more than a few stand out as excellent. If your way to improve your leadership skills---presumably one of your best ways to get promoted, more responsibility, more pay, and so on---is to try to act like leaders you know, you don't have many role models. Learning leadership skills from watching people around you is like learning a sport from neighborhood pick-up games instead of finding an effective coach with a winning team. I think a lot of people learn the leadership equivalent of sandlot ball, never realizing their potential. People with skill, experience, and motivation…

Most leadership books teach high-level principles and so-called "laws." I've read books that tell the reader to create purpose or meaning for their followers, or to engage them, without describing how to do those things. Leadership is experiential. We gain high-level principles from experience, not the other way around. High-level instruction like that doesn't help people learn to lead. It helps the people who need it most least. It's like telling a beginner pianist to play with feeling or to express themselves through the music when they probably haven't learned to play basic scales. Since few people have had explicit and effective leadership training, the equivalent of giving them scales would help more. If you tell someone to pick something up or to fill out…

If you like entrepreneurship and you don't know General Assembly, you should. They teach great courses and have built a great community around teaching relevant skills. On Saturday, August 23, 10am-5pm, I'll lead a seminar with General Assembly on leadership in New York City. Register here, you'll be glad you did. Here is the announcement (they use short descriptions, for a fuller description, see this announcement from an earlier event): Lead the Way: Effective Leadership Techniques Joshua Spodek Adjunct Professor at NYU-Poly About This Workshop You've ascended to a position of leadership, but how can you ensure that the people you are in charge of will be responsive to your leadership style? In this class, you'll learn effective ways to motivate people in the context…

The KQED blog in San Francisco that covered my using inquiry-driven project-based learning teaching entrepreneurship at NYU recently covered something more remarkable: a student-created program in a high-school where the students create and do their projects on their schedule. The article, "This Is What a Student-Designed School Looks Like," speaks for itself, describing how a Massachusetts high school student saw engagement and mastery lacking in his classmates at his high school and proposed a program to use project-based learning to evoke it. I recommend reading it if you are interested in leadership, motivation, education, and how to improve any of them. The article alluded to but didn't spell out a major enduring benefit of that style of learning that I want to point out. It…

If you want to motivate someone, using logic to convince them of what to do often seems like it should work. It rarely does. If the person is already inclined to follow, you don't need it. If they aren't you'll just as likely provoke them to argue back as to follow. Here's a story to illustrate. Context: In college sports (ultimate frisbee), at weekend tournaments we'd play three or four games, leaving us tired, sweaty, dirty, and hungry at the end of the day. After the last game, we'd usually collapse on the sideline of the field where we just played. The problem: We wanted to shower, change, and eat, and the sooner the better. But we rarely did. That would take driving to the…