Grant Hill throws the pass, Christian Laettner makes The Shot against Kentucky, and Duke basketball is changed forever. An amazing play, right?
Yes, but so much more. It “was an incredible lesson in leadership,” says Hill. “Coach really was the foundation for our success in that moment.” Hill was talking of course about coach Mike Krzyzewski, who has famously said, “I don’t look at myself as a basketball coach. I look at myself as a leader who happens to coach basketball.”
To understand the Duke approach to teaching leadership, start there. In the 1992 NCAA eastern regionals game between the Blue Devils and the Kentucky Wildcats, Kentucky made a shot to take the lead with seconds to go. “The [Duke players] probably were thinking we’re going to lose,” says Krzyzewski. So when he called timeout, he didn’t wait at the bench; he walked out to meet the players. “As a leader, I wanted to not have that thought in their minds, and the sooner the better.” He reminded them over and over: “We are going to win.”
Then, buy-in. He didn’t tell Hill to pass or Laettner to shoot. He asked: Can you do this? “A lot of times, when you do that, the person has a better chance of doing it,” Krzyzewski says, “because he’s verbalized it.” True in this case.
“A lot of good leadership is not done just in the moment,” Krzyzewski says. “Leadership is part of setting up a culture that prepares you to do those things in those moments. The relationships, the trust, the camaraderie, everything that’s built. You’re able to take advantage of that and turn a very tense moment into a very glorious moment.”
Turning tension into glory may be the definition of leadership.
So how do you teach it?
The Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics
Sim Sitkin, the Michael W. Krzyzewski University Professor of Leadership at the Fuqua School of Business, sits on a couch in the JB Duke hotel lobby waiting to see who will show up for a drink before dinner. He’s been teaching a weeklong course for executives in the Duke Leadership Program, part of the Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics (COLE), for which he is faculty director. He’s waiting for attendees to show up for the graduation dinner.
He says teaching a softer skill such as leadership is not counterintuitive. Surely some people are naturally better leaders, he says, “but the way I think about leadership is that it’s behavioral” – leadership is a practice, not a trait. He reframes the question: Can you teach people to have more effective influence on others? “I think the answer is more obviously yes.”
With his colleague Allan Lind, the James L. Vincent Professor Emeritus of Leadership, Sitkin developed a model of six domains a leader must occupy; they arrange them in a pyramid with personal, relational, and contextual leadership at the bottom, inspirational and supportive leadership in the middle, and ethical leadership at the top. Relational leadership is part of the foundation because it’s about trust: “If you know I care about you, I understand you, and I will treat you fairly.” Each domain of leadership has its own characteristics: Personal leadership is demonstrating and projecting your capacities as leader; supportive leadership gives feedback, not blame.
He says one of the most important roles of leadership in our complex world is “contextual leadership – helping people see the thread through the fabric, helping them see the pattern in the complexity.” He calls it the “sense-making function” of leadership, and says that despite its importance his research shows it to be “the one [leaders] do the least well.”
The good news is COLE can help. For business students, it offers leadership fellowships that allow second-year Fuqua students to mentor first-years, maintaining the school’s culture. For businesspeople, COLE runs programs such as the one Sitkin just finished teaching.
Which, Sitkin says, doesn’t mean their own leadership experience isn’t valuable. The program had recently taught 116 South African women leaders. Says Sitkin: “The way I try to frame this for them is I say what we’re doing with them is not a substitute for their experience. It’s trying to help them leverage their experience better.” Sitkin always comes back to influence. The flow goes from the leader to those led. “It’s all about them,” he says. “It’s not about the leader.
“Your purpose as a leader should be to maximally empower others.”
The Feagin Leadership Program
In much the same way Sitkin’s leadership pyramid focuses on a series of competencies to teach leaders to focus ultimately on empowering others, Joseph Doty, executive director of the Feagin Leadership Program of the School of Medicine, says his program focuses on “the ability to influence others for the benefit of patients and patient populations.” Included are regular meetings, a leadership project, and five special sessions over the course of the year. The program’s core principals are emotional intelligence, teamwork, critical thinking, integrity, and service.
That patient focus is the point. “We’re not teaching people to just be deans of med schools and CEOs of health care organizations,” Doty says. “We’re teaching them to be leaders within their communities, whether they’re big or small. So the ability to influence others for the benefit of patients and patient populations.”
A senior person simply telling a junior person what to do is certainly an aspect of leadership, “a subset of the ability to influence others,” he says. “But a med school student can influence a patient, a peer. A nurse can influence an attending physician.” Doty emphasizes that the Feagin program is not a weekend lecture series or a two-day conference. “Formal, longitudinal leadership development curriculum is not historically part of medical education,” he says. He quotes a department chair who told him, “I found out two things too late in my career: One, that leadership development is not a weekend seminar, and two, the importance of emotional intelligence.”
One exercise Doty cites to develop that emotional intelligence is having fellows (who are commonly third-year medical students) listen to a peer – without speaking – for two minutes. “You think it’s easy,” he says. “It’s not.” And it’s part of physician leadership, which means being a better listener, a better thinker, a better team member. “We’re teaching them,” Doty says, “to be physician leaders. We’re teaching them to be better human beings.”
American Grand Strategy
Peter Feaver considers his program in American Grand Strategy to be a leadership program. Grand strategy describes a nation’s attempt to use the tools at its disposal to advance its interests – to, as Sitkin might say, influence others. The program tries to create understanding of how leaders make their decisions. “The theory is, if they understand better, they will be better leaders themselves,” he says.
The program does this two ways. First, it invites political leaders of all stripes in to have frank – and forceful – conversations with students. The program started when Feaver left his position at Duke to work in the administration of President George W. Bush and found that the national players were nothing like the caricatures he heard about them on campus. “One of the defects in our contemporary political era is a lack of cognitive empathy,” he says. If you can turn your opponent into an absurdity, you can avoid deep thinking. When he returned in 2007, he began to invite leaders to speak.
It’s easy to criticize the Iraq War in class, he says. “It’s quite another thing to debate [former Secretary of State] Condi Rice directly.” Once you understand how that level of leadership works, “You can still conclude they called it wrong, but you will be doing so from the basis of more understanding.” More, “If you ever become a leader yourself, you will be in a situation where you are trying to do the right thing, but you have incomplete information and you’re constrained by all these forces. That’s what leadership in the national security domain looks like most of the time.”
The program adds on to those discussions with “staff rides” during which students and leaders retrace the steps of famous battles – Gettysburg, for example – and not only discuss decisions each leader made but actually play the roles of different decision-makers. Ultimately, he says, students can say, “OK, now I understand how this could happen.” And with all those high-powered leaders around, the program pushes students into addressing leadership soft skills like breaking in on a conversation to meet someone important or using small talk to make connections. Finally, you want leadership? Fever has his students do group projects. The students ceaselessly complain, but graduates uniformly thank him.
“Every single alum comes back and says, man, that is exactly what I’ve been doing. The national security policymaking community is one big group project.”
Engineering for Life: Leadership, Networking and Career Success
Many people think of engineering as a problem-solving practice and not a leadership practice, says COLE founding Executive Director Sanyin Siang. “If you ask five people what leadership means, you probably get five different answers,” she says. Title? Power? Influence? Expertise? “Leadership in engineering,” she says, “is really about everyday applications.” As engineers, “we’re building things, we’re thinking through problems,” she says. “But all those things require human-to-human interaction. You don’t build things alone.”
So engineers need to learn the softer leadership skills of connection and collaboration. Siang has an appointment to the Pratt School of Engineering, where she and Dean Jerome Lynch are planning to teach a course on leadership in engineering and business.
“The piece that people gravitate toward is wonder,” Siang says. She’s speaking of three habits the course urges students to cultivate. The first two are “giving and asking for help” and “regular reflection” (to be aware of small but consistent change). “And the third,” Siang says, “is retaining a sense of wonder.” She cites research showing that a sense of awe not only brings physiological benefits but is associated with a sense of stewardship and responsibility. “Where I want students to go is this idea of human-to-human, a sense of wonder, to notice the extraordinary in each other.”
The future class will bring in successful leaders for panel discussions and interaction, and the video of those discussions will be converted into material available to alumni. The more widely leadership materials are distributed, she says, the more people they can help. “True power,” she has said, “lies in empowering others to create moments of greatness.”
Duke Committed to Teaching Leadership Early
When Andrew Nurkin says, “We think of leadership as a set of practices that individuals can use to empower groups to move as one,” he sounds like someone who learned leadership at Duke.
He is. Nurkin ’03 is not only the director of the Hart Leadership Program, the first endowed leadership program for undergraduates in the United States; he also studied there, with founding director Bruce Payne.
“I took a class called Leadership Policy and Change, and that really shifted my understanding of what my purpose might be,” Nurkin says. “What the purpose of my education might be, how I thought about myself in relationship to the world around me and to history.”
Now that’s a leadership class.
From its 1986 founding, the Hart program has approached leadership education as experiential rather than academic, says Nurkin. And program leaders views themselves “primarily as facilitators of that learning, rather than instructors.” Hart participants take leadership classes that are available to anyone at Duke, but they also participate in Hart programs and internships with community groups: “Students are typically engaged in work alongside and at the direction of people who have been leading in the community for a long time,” Nurkin says. “We’re not saying, ‘Here’s the leadership textbook, read it, there’ll be a quiz on Wednesday.’ We put experience at the heart of all that we do.”
Leadership is work, Nurkin says, and “we create the spaces for our students to do deep reflection for themselves, in community with other people, to get out into the world and put their theories into practice, and to prepare themselves at the ethical and personal and academic level for that work.”
Nurkin’s path has led him through divinity school, and he’s also a poet, which fits perfectly with the Hart ethos – the liberal arts are central to Hart leadership. “We read history in the context of leadership because you do learn a lot from the way things have been in the past.” And not just history. “Shakespeare is a leadership writer,” Nurkin says. “Greek tragedy is about the nature of power and ethics and the relationship between the polis and the ruler. These are the questions we’re dealing with now.”
And for Nurkin, the central element of leadership is the same as it is for most other leadership teachers. “The two fundamental skills I encourage in my students and help them learn are how to listen and how to ask better questions. “The leader’s first act is to listen.”