Programs Cultivating Leadership and Adult Development
There are not so many training programs to help people elevate their developmental stages. This section introduces three unique educational interventions that have empirically been proved to facilitate adult developmental transformation among participants: the practice of Action Inquiry, the Case-in-Point pedagogy, and the Vedic/Transcendent Mediation method.
Action Inquiry at the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management at Boston College
Boston College drastically restructured its MBA program in 1980. The new curriculum explicitly emphasized the faculty’s commitment to teaching students not only how to think about management but also how to actually manage and lead.
The program formalizes the study-group process by assigning five ethnically diverse students to each group and giving them two semester-long projects, so that the study group could have the similar experience to actual business settings. Various inquiry systems are utilized for the group study projects. Each member is required to assume a specific leadership role; two project leaders, a meeting leader, an evaluation leader, and a process leader. These roles help them to assure systematic evaluation and feedback of individual and group performance. Additionally, a second-year student with special training is assigned as a consultant to each group to offer the members an external perspective on their efficacy as leaders. Several different courses simultaneously require students to reflect on their own actions in the study groups, to evaluate their leadership effectiveness from different theoretical perspectives, and to experiment new actions to realize better effectiveness. Therefore, students are surrounded by organizational systems that encourage inquiry, documentation, feedback and experimentation through the micro-organizational pedagogy.
Bill Torbert conducted a longitudinal research to determine the students’ developmental shifts. The research results demonstrate that no student ever makes more than one developmental transformation during the two years of the program. On the other hand, almost all of the students who move to later developmental perspectives during their two years in the program are those who additionally take an intensive course in developmental theory and consulting practice during the summer between the two school years and serve as consultants during the second year for the first-year project groups. The results indicate that one year of required participation in such an organizational inquiry program is not enough, but two years of highly committed participation in various roles including project-group consultants during their second-year could be enough to promote transformation from one developmental stage to the next one. This study shows that developmental shift of stage is not easy and does not have without some amount of time and commitment.
Case-in-Point Teaching at Harvard Kennedy School
Case-in-Point is an experiential, interactive and learner-centered method for teaching leadership, pioneered by Ronald Heifetz and his colleagues. Sharon Parks describes Case-in-Point as how to illuminate leadership concepts, which interpret the dynamics as they unfold in real time in the classroom (here-and-now). Thus, Case-in-Point emphasizes reflective practice and requires students to do persistent reflection and perspective taking.
Heifetz’s “Exercising Leadership” is a master’s level semester-long course of leadership at Harvard Kennedy School. Whole class events meet for 80 minutes twice a week. The first session deals with the adaptive leadership framework, and the second session focuses on a student’s case study where a student present his/her leadership failure case for the instructor and the other students to diagnose and analyze using the adaptive leadership framework. In addition to the two whole classes, small group of eight students meet once a week for 80 minutes, and exercise an identical case diagnosis and analysis of a member’s leadership failure. Thus, students learn about the exercise of leadership from different group dynamics and roles. Moreover, weekly reflection exercise papers require students to reflect on their experience in both their small group and the large classes. In this way, Case-in-Point methods support students to have more complex perspective by generating an iterative process of encountering different perspectives and reflections.
Tim O’Brien explores the interaction between different developmental stages and the experience of the Case-in-Point pedagogy. He administered Robert Kegan’s Subject Object Interview to 35 participants once at the start and once at the end of the course. The results identify that all participants at either the Imperial Balance or the Interpersonal Balance demonstrate some degree of development, whereas the rest of participants at or above the Institutional Balance show minimal development or no development. O’Brien concludes that the demands of Heifetz’s adaptive leadership framework are most likely met with the Institutional Balance, because the framework demands students to mobilize others to confront a difficult reality, generate disequilibrium, orchestrate conflict, and act in the absence of a formal authority. Such actions may be challenging or almost impossible to those at the Interpersonal Balance. Therefore, they are likely to learn more from the course. The study is the first to empirically examine the relationship between the Case-in-Point pedagogy and leadership development, but the stage shifts of participants within four months are subtle. In order to understand leadership development processes by focusing on constructive-developmental theory as a relevant variable with broad applicability, a more longitudinal research will be necessary.
Vedic/Transcendental Meditation at Maharishi University of Management
Maharishi University of Management (MUM) is a non-denominational educational institution established by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1971. MUM offers undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degree programs in the arts, sciences, humanities, business, engineering, and computer science to students at its Fairfield, Iowa campus and at-a-distance around the world. It aims to prepare students to successfully manage all areas of life – both personal and professional.
At the start of the academic program, students are required to take the introductory course “the Science of Creative Intelligence,” which includes instruction in the Transcendental Meditation technique. It is a 20-minute meditation practice twice a day sitting quietly with eyes closed. MUM students continue their practice of the technique throughout their college career.
Howard Chandler and Charles Alexander conduct a 10-year longitudinal study to compare the developmental shifts of students in MUM with their shifts of students in other three universities, using Jane Loevinger’s Sentence Completion Test of ego development. 34 alumni from each university were selected as experimental participants. They identify that only graduates of MUM show significant positive development beyond Bill Torbert’s Achiever action logic, whereas alumni in the other three universities do not show any significant change in their developmental stage. 94% of MUM alumni participating in the study report having practiced the Transcendental Meditation technique or a more advanced program daily for most or all of the 10-year intervention period. This longitudinal survey is persuasive enough to evaluate the developmental shift and the results support that the Transcendental Meditation technique would promote a greater degree of developmental change, relative to control. However, there are a few critiques about the results. One is the small scale of its sample size (only 34 alumni from each university), and another is a potential bias about a selection process of them. It is also difficult to conclude that the Vedic/Transcendental Meditation is the only contributor for the samples’ developmental shifts in MUM. It is possible that the other part of curriculum at MUM made a contribution to their shifts. Therefore, the more large-scale longitudinal research is awaited to conclude the relationship between the Vedic/Transcendental Meditation and the participants’ developmental shifts.
Conclusion
As we see here, there are only a few pieces of literature to introduce case studies to help students transform into the later stages of adult development. Mahesh introduces the ancient Vedic knowledge of India (Transcendental Meditation) for the transition. Baron and Cayer support the value of mindfulness meditation. They also claim that the practice of Bohm Dialogue will enhance the developmental shift. However, they admit that these two practices are far from quick fixes and thus have been little used in leadership and management development programs yet.
Despite the scarcity of empirical evidence, adult development theory definitely adds a new axis for leadership development, in addition to traits, behaviors, and contingencies. It also has the potential to provide a more integrative view of leadership development.
References
Baron, C., & Cayer, M. (2010). Fostering post-conventional consciousness in leaders: why and how? Journal of Management Development, 30(4), 344-365.
Chandler, H. M., & Alexander, C. N. (2005). The transcendental meditation program and postconventional self-development: A 10-year longitudinal study. Consciousness-Based Education, 381.
Guilleux, F. (2010). A developmental perspective on leadership education of aspiring principals: University of Pittsburgh.
Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers (Vol. 465): Harvard University Press.
Heifetz, R. A., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world: Harvard Business Press.
Heifetz, R. A., & Laurie, D. L. (1997). The work of leadership. Harvard Business Review, 75, 124-134.
Heifetz, R. A., & Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the line: Staying alive through the dangers of leading (Vol. 465): Harvard Business Press.
O'Brien, T. J. (2016). Looking for Development in Leadership Development: Impacts of Experiential and Constructivist Methods on Graduate Students and Graduate Schools.
Parks, S. D. (2005). Leadership can be taught: A bold approach for a complex world: Harvard Business Review Press.
Schmidt-Wilk, J., Heaton, D. P., & Steingard, D. (2000). Higher education for higher consciousness: Maharishi University of Management as a model for spirituality in management education. Journal of Management Education, 24(5), 580-611.
Torbert, W. R. (1987). Management education for the twenty-first century. Selections, 3(3), 31-36.
Torbert, W. R. (1994). Cultivating postformal adult development: Higher stages and contrasting interventions. Transcendence and mature thought in adulthood: The further reaches of adult development, 181-203.
Torbert, W. R. (2004). Action inquiry: The secret of timely and transforming leadership: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Wildermuth, C. d.-M.-e.-S., Smith-Bright, E., Noll-Wilson, S., & Fink, A. (2015). Walking the Razor’s Edge: Risks and Rewards for Students and Faculty adopting Case in Point Teaching and Learning Approaches. Journal of Leadership Education, 14(2).