To lead is to live with danger. Although it may be exciting to think of leadership as a source of inspiration, decisive change, and powerful rewards, leading requires taking risks that can jeopardize your career and personal life. It often requires putting yourself on the line, disturbing the status quo, and working with organizational and political conflicts. Those who choose to lead take risks and sometimes get neutralized, hurt badly, or killed.
To lead through the dangers of change demands diagnostic integrity and skill: the ability to apprehend fraught professional situations and take action. One must have a strong internal commitment to apprehend the situation no matter how challenging it may be, and one must then have the skill to assess it and take action. Many Kennedy School courses strengthen the skills of assessment by teaching the substance of policy and the dynamics of policy making, the analysis of institutions, organizations, and the politics of change, and the history, sociology, and social psychology of the conflicts and injustices facing societies and policymakers around the world.
This course addresses the prerequisite for these skills – diagnostic integrity. We explore how self-knowledge and self-discipline form the foundation for professional leadership. We want students to know how to anchor themselves and cultivate the capacity to work with the plurality of their identifications in the daily diagnostic work of apprehending fraught professional situations and taking action to engage people who themselves represent a complex mix of backgrounds.
The course follows a three-part sequence:
- First, we develop a psychological framework that extends the contextual framework developed in MLD-201 to explore the nature, sources, and impact of how people perceive themselves as shaped by their identifications, life experiences, and fundamental human needs. We analyze these aspects of how one’s mind is formed as both a profound resource and an endangering constraint on the practice of leadership.
- Second, against this backdrop, students investigate their vulnerability to key dangers of leadership and professional life that can generate self-defeating courses of action that can also damage others. We want to strengthen the capacity of students: a) to assess dangerous situations that may play to their weaknesses, and b) to respond with self-awareness and discipline.
- Third, students explore ongoing ways to generate the freedom of mind and heart to engage fully in the diagnostic and action work of professional leadership, and stay alive, not only in their lives, but also in spirit of their work.
The course draws on multiple disciplines and areas of study: economics, sociology, philosophy, biology, psychology, gender studies, religion, literature, as well as organizational and political leadership. Regarding the psychological aspects of this course, it is important to note that while the experience may sometimes feel intensely personal, it is not therapy. This course is not intended to start a new therapeutic practice or substitute for counseling or therapeutic relationships. Additionally, the faculty and teaching team are not trained therapists and do not practice therapy.
Prerequisite
MLD-201-- "Exercising Leadership: The Politics of Change" is a required prerequisite for this course, as is the instructor’s permission in cases in which students have not demonstrated in their MLD-201 class the capacity for self-reflection regarding their behavior and responses to the dynamics in class.
MLD-201 provides the foundational concepts and takes a systemic approach to diagnosis and action, whereas MLD-202 e
