Readers seeking an atypical business book may like Leadership Can Be Taught. Its author, Sharon Daloz Parks, has a conventional enough background: She’s taught at various Harvard graduate schools, including its Divinity School, the Business School, and the School of Government–the book itself comes from Harvard Business School Press–and she now heads a leadership institute in Washington state, just outside Seattle. Parks’ approach to leadership development, though, springs from a decidedly non-traditional philosophy.
Unlike others who lionize strong leaders and decisive, authoritative personalities, Parks looks for her leadership lessons to Ronald Heifetz, a humble, almost meek instructor at Harvard. The book opens with a transcript of Heifetz’s typical class at Harvard, and illustrates his free-flowing banter with students. There’s something of a biblical, storybook-like quality to this narrative, as it shows Heifetz’s Socratic style in drawing out students and leading them to truths. Heifetz’s approach carries over to the book, which has an indirect, oblique style, and shuns the reductionist, simplifying, bullet-point orientation of most business books.
Through the course of the book’s nearly 300 pages, Parks argues that leadership is less magical and yet more important than we usually believe. Drawing on Heifetz’s ideas, she explains her belief that leaders are formed gradually, over time and through deliberate effort–not born with special traits. Four key themes run through the book: first, that true leadership differs from the kind of formal authority typically conferred by organizations; second, that leaders have less of a role solving technical problems than in helping teams of individuals deal with adaptive challenges; third, that conventional power–meaning authority over people and budget–is less important than “presence”; and fourth, that this mysterious quality of “presence” rests less on innate personality than on a style of interacting with others in an organization.
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