日本財団 図書館


SYLFF Administrators Meeting
December 8-14, 2002
Session X
Ferdinando Fava
 
Leadership Education: Access to Personal Originality
 
Introduction
Before starting this presentation, I would first like to thank the Scholarship Division for the kind invitation to speak here. The question addressed in session X relates to a thought process engaged with colleagues from Deusto University on leadership education that originated at the San Diego conference in 2000. Our goal is to build an innovative program among SYLFF-institutions with the knowledge we already possess in order to bring together excellence in research, innovative leadership education and training, and effective social transformations to fulfill the needs of local, regional and global communities. If you are inspired by the following account, please feel welcome to join our reflection1.
Within the short time that has been allotted to me, I would like to share some thoughts on leadership education, starting with what we are in the process of realizing and that which we hope to develop with other partners. I anticipate: our education wishes to facilitate authorship as access to personal originality. This idea is at the core of our understanding of leadership. We wish to accomplish that education through internal articulation of the constitutional elements of its didactic device.
This presentation links two episodes. First, I will single out our notion of leadership by differentiating it from the ways mainstream leadership is understood today. This allows us to understand the implications in developing a course on leadership formation.2 Second, I will discuss briefly the didactic device in order to show you how this course is established by assuming the notion of leadership as authorship from within, that is from the articulation of its didactic development, its process.
 
1 I would like to give you some background information: this presentation reflects the multiple milieus which have nourished me. I am a "product" of the Greek and Jewish-Christian traditions; I have also been influenced in my personal development by different systems of higher education in different national contexts (Italian, French, and North-American), through different affiliations (confessional and secular) at undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate levels. Finally, I bring my experience as a teacher of social anthropology engaged in reflections concerning teaching practices for some years.
2 I have chosen to use the French term, "formation" as opposed to the normal English translation, which would be "training". This is because "formation" contains the word "form", as in to mold, to develop. The personal aspect of this education which I will emphasize later suggests that this is not "training" that is identical for each participant involving a "know-how" but rather one that takes into account the individuality and personality of the said participant. Rather than "know-how", an emphasis is placed on "know-being".
 
The secret of leadership
Let us consider what mainstream leadership scholars agree upon: leaders are supposed to motivate followers to accomplish organizational goals. It is exactly this idea of leadership that has slipped into media representations and which orients many training programs3.
Leadership is defined by the goals of the organization, and the action of the leader is expressed in terms of his influence over others in order to achieve a goal. Personal qualities (those which are closely connected with own personality - beliefs, values, ethics - or those related to acquired expertise - knowledge and skills) become the means to accomplish this role4. As Smyth comments: "all leadership theories have a structuralist-functionalist frame of reference in the hierarchical, linear, pragmatic, Newtonian assumptions of what makes the world go around"5.
Within this perspective it is correct to speak of leadership training: the future leaders (and those "on duty") must acquire skills that they do not have or have not yet developed. These abilities must be related to the empirical practices that organization and management sciences have found to be pertinent to their development6.
This is important, but it is not sufficient. These theories deal with management and not leadership, the nature of which is eclipsed. We believe that there is a broader horizon in which to situate and reread this perspective of leadership. This horizon is provided to us by the notion of authority and its corresponding notion of author, which is a legacy of Indo-European society (but I believe it is also relevant to other traditions and societies). Let me explain the way we understand authority. Benveniste shows us the way:
 
"In its oldest uses augeo denotes not the increase in something which already exists but the act of producing from within itself; a creative act which causes something to arise from a nutrient medium and which is the privilege of the gods or the great natural forces, but not of men. (...) Much of the same sense is evident in the uses of the agent noun auctor. The term auctor is applied to the person who in all walks of life 'promotes', takes an initiative, who is the first to start some activity, who founds, who guarantees, and finally who is the 'author. (...) Every word pronounced with authority determines a change in the world, it creates something. This mysterious quality is what augeo expresses, the power which causes plants to grow and brings a law into existence. (...) Obscure and potent values reside in this auctoritas, this gift which is reserved to a handful of men who can cause something into being and literally 'to bring into existence'."7
 
Authority thus signifies to allow to come forth from within oneself, to bring into existence. This (acts, positions etc.) carries the imprint of a unique singularity, the access to originality. Authority is authorship. Bringing into existence thus means acceding to one's own (personal) originality8. If the author is the one who engenders, the secret of authority is to engender authors. The leader is the one who recognize himself as an author and who both encourages and allows others to become authors as well. We can say he authorizes them. The singularity, the unique creation of the leader is the authorship of the followers.
From this it follows that the leader is first and foremost committed to people rather than to the goals or the functioning of an organization. Secondly, from the leader's point of view, what is important are the ways in which authorship is exercised, above and beyond the content it mediatizes. This commitment, which facilitates access of others to their own personal originality, takes place through direct face-to-face encounters between people, and builds from within a dialogical exchange. The result is that the transition to speech act, in which listening is central, and the way in which this transition occurs, become the central elements to its creation. Leadership, if we can continue to call it thus, results from a process in which the leader is the catalyst and verifier. The leader does not seek above all to control but rather provides freedom of being. Leadership is structurally open to innovation and change by staying anchored in it true motor, that is people and their desires. Leadership stands for open progression and not identical repetition.
Is it possible to educate to this kind of leadership? We believe it is, if we rethink thoroughly what formation entails by putting the access to personal originality at the center of this process. The formation must create the conditions by which people recognize themselves principally as authors. It is from this unique experience that they learn to become in turn "authority" for others; it is from this originality that they also learn the integrative pathways of skills (and related training) that the different positions of leaders require. This access when it happens, resembles an event, a perpetual springing forth that carries relish and happiness, a very personal sensation of aliveness and awareness of one's own existence. The formation that wishes to measure itself relative to this anthropological idea of authority needs to take into account from within the access to personal originality, the dialogical exchange, and the critical reflexive attitude to ways of doing, namely the "processual" dimensions of its occurrence. If access to personal originality arises from ways of doing and of their articulation, education for this kind of leadership must question its ways of doing and the educational practices that facilitate this "processual" articulation. From within thus refers to the internal articulation of the elements that constitute the formation's didactic architecture as the very environment in which this experience progressively unfolds, takes shape, and thus realizes itself.
How can all this be done? By building a didactic device, which has the access to personal originality as the focal point of its learning process. The student learns to be the author of his own formational itinerary within a context of dialogical and public interrelationships which integrate his existential and ethical commitment with his intellectual adventure. The student molds himself to exercise this leadership by implicating himself within a didactic device that inscribes this notion within the process of its development rather than via its content. It is thus more appropriate to speak of formation or education rather than training for this kind of leadership. Or, said in another way, prior to learning a know-how, the training, the formation to this kind of leadership is a personal unfolding of a know-being, therefore an education.
 
3 For example, take this definition you can find, on the internet "Leadership is a complex process by which a person influences others to accomplish a mission, task, or objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent. A person carries out this process by applying her leadership attributes (beliefs, values, ethics, character, knowledge and skills)" http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leadcon.html. Cf. also the answers to Question a. I of Questionnaire Summary.
4 This is not the place to develop the academic milieus and related theoretical and epistemological frameworks (management studies and social psychology both behavior-oriented) cf. Joseph C. Rost, Leadership for the Twenty-First Century Praeger: London. 1991, p. 29)
5 cf. J. Smyth (Ed), Critical perspectives on educational leadership, Falmer: London, 1989.
6 I will recall some: making decisions, allocating resources, giving direction in completing tasks, motivating through energizing and invigorating, providing support/encouragement, providing a sense of mission, instilling values and beliefs, assigning goals, representing the group outsider, exchanging information with external parties, planning tasks, providing structure for group, reinforcing procedures, and so on... See J.P. Andrews and R.H.G. Field, "Regrounding the concept of leadership" in Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 19/3, 1998, 128-136.
7 Emile Benveniste, (1973), Indo-European language and society, London: Faber & Faber, pp.421-423.
8 Gaston Fessard, a French Hegelian philosopher of the 20th century, shows well how this notion of authority that aims at personal originality consists in the way in which social links are made: "Under the different meanings of the word 'authority', the etymology thus reveal a dynamism that produces, increases, and perfects the relations that unite beings. So we could already, in a first approximation, define the essence of authority thus: the generating force of social links, spreading from oneself to increase until its accomplishment." cf. Gaston Fessard, Autorite et bien commun, Paris: Aubier, 1944, p. 13.







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