Teaching Leadership Through Emotional Truths

 by Elmer S. Soriano

We recently ran a workshop teaching university faculty how to teach leadership to social workers. It was quite a challenge because these professors came from different disciplines (nursing, public administration, economics, etc). We started off the workshop asking them why they thought the Bridging Leadership framework was a better course than their current offerings of MBA, or MPA, or any of their regular graduate courses. They said their other courses weren't designed to "touch the heart", or awaken a "sense of purpose", or "transform lives".

Here are a insights from that workshop:

1. Leadership training includes exposing the learners not just to leadership paradigms and frameworks, but also to "emotional truths".

Leadership is requires the practice of diagnosing problems, especially problems that are unnamed, or taboo. Students of leadership benefit from acquiring the ability to recognize and ripen emotional truths in their own lives, and use these emotional truths as lenses in diagnosing adaptive challenges. This video from Adichie describes emotional truths and other concepts on cultural blindspots.

2. Introduce the concept of VUCCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic, Complex, Ambiguous) Systems.

Leaders nowadays have to be highly functional in VUCCA systems, in an age where climate change and supertyphoons are the new normal. Teachers are accustomed to have neat lesson plans, and quiet, orderly classrooms, which poor environments to teach leadership in the context of messy systems.

3. Use Case in Point to simulate the hot seat of leadership.

I think of the Case-in-Point (CIP) method as a rather abstract methodology, and I was surprised when one of the social workers told me that a number of faculty members resisted or did not understand the logic of CIP. She said that it was possibly because social workers often found themselves in the hot seat, being asked questions to which they did not have all the right answers. She said that faculty members, on the other hand, usually taught the "correct answers" and were less accustomed to being asked questions that reframed their mindsets.