Brigadier General Tom Kolditz*
Tom Kolditz is the founding executive director of the Ann & John Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University – managing the most comprehensive, university-wide leader development program in the world. He designed the core Leader Development Program at the Yale School of Management, served as chairman of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point, and was the founding director of the West Point Leadership Center. A highly experienced leader, Brigadier General Kolditz has more than 30 years in leader supervisory positions, serving on four continents in 34 years of military service. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal, the Army’s highest award for service. He is a Fellow in the American Psychological Association and is a member of the Academy of Management. He has been named a Thought Leader by the Leader to Leader Institute and as a Top Leader Development Professional by Leadership Excellence. In 2017, he received the Warren Bennis Award for Excellence in Leadership. He holds a BA from Vanderbilt University, three master’s degrees, and a PhD in psychology from the University of Missouri.
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My purpose is to develop leaders. I direct the most comprehensive leader-development program at any university – the Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University in Houston, Texas. The Doerr Institute is changing the world by introducing professional-caliber leader- development strategies in colleges and universities – places where leadership institutes and programs have traditionally been soft, minimally impactful, and weakly assessed. When I look out the window, I see something invisible to others: the future of leader development in providing professional quality development to young leaders early in their lives and careers. This is a somewhat contrarian approach in a field dominated by executive coaching and rarified programs for high-potential employees. Contrarian or not, the view is one I want to share with leaders in all sectors as we seek to promote leadership in our respective spheres.
It seems like [Jim Collins] is saying that in order to be the most successful leader, you have to put the interests of the company before yours, which surprises me. I am also surprised by the emphasis on preparedness and willingness, rather than intelligence…. I tend to think of successful leaders as being more cutthroat, not open to compromise and friendship.
—Precoaching student leader development plan, Rice University
This quotation reveals the challenges we face for leader development in the emerging global workforce. For the majority of young people, leadership is something you do when elevated to a role. Rather than an organizational commitment, leadership is understood to be a self-focused position of advantage and privilege. Leading comes with privileges and the authority to order people around. In both politics and business, some of the worst leadership role models imaginable are prominent in the news. These leaders wield great power and influence, despite lacking important leader qualities, such as personal integrity, responsibility, accountability, loyalty, trustworthiness, respect for others, and a sense of ethics. Before we can do the work of leader development, we must overcome the prevailing idea that leadership is hierarchical, transactional, and for many millennials, not held as an aspiration.
Traditional leader-development programs selectively invest in leaders many years into their careers. A common industry strategy is to focus leader development resources on developing only those identified as high-potential employees. This paradoxical practice causes me to wonder why companies don’t identify the HR people who are hiring the low potentials, fire those HR people, and use the cost savings for broader-based leader development for everyone else in the organization. Focusing leader development on high potentials reinforces an old and debunked leader stereotype, that is, that leadership is equivalent to an elite status.
Alternatively, Frances Hesselbein, founder of the progressive Hesselbein Global Academy for Student Leadership and Civic Engagement at the University of Pittsburgh, has repeatedly made the compelling argument that being a leader is not predicated on an assigned role, but is rather a way of being, an element of character largely focused on serving the organization and the people in it. Similarly, in The Handbook for Teaching Leadership, Harvard editors Scott Snook, Nitin Nohria, and Rakesh Khurana2 point to the former Army doctrine of Be, Know, Do, by subtitling their work, “Knowing, Doing, and Being.”
However, the current delivery of leader-development practice typically targets a handful of high potentials who have reached the executive level – the elites who have been labeled as leaders due to their position. It’s a game of catch-up. Coaching did not blossom in the senior executive space because this is the ideal point at which to develop people as leaders. It blossomed there because of a corporate focus on rationing opportunity to employees with the greatest potential, and because top leaders are ultimately responsible for the allocation of training expenses and resources, to others as well as to themselves. This state of affairs hinders the overall quality of leaders in society. It also presents a transformational opportunity for universities to impact the world by increasing the capacity of their students to lead.
Leader development among college students has the potential for having the highest payoff in terms of enduring capacity to lead. This is borne out by the best science we have. College-aged people show higher plasticity of social and emotional intelligence, memory ability, and processing speed than older adults,4 skills that allow them to learn faster. If learning to speak a foreign language, play a musical instrument, or swing a baseball bat is best learned early in life, then why would learning to lead be postponed for late adulthood? The openness/imagination facet of the Big Five personality traits,5 statistically correlated with higher levels of leadership, increases the most during the college years, followed by stability or slight decline in adulthood.6 Likewise, the social dominance facet of extraversion (connected with assertiveness, independence, and social self-confidence – key aspects of leadership) is also greatest among 18- to 22-year-olds, whereas beyond age 40, no significant increases in this facet of personality appear. Finally, theory and research on identity formation suggest that the college years might be particularly strategic for leadership interventions, because it is during this period (at least in Western countries) when identity is in greatest flux, even more so than during adolescence.7,8 The Doerr Institute consulted Professor Lara Mayeux, a developmental psychologist who teaches at the University of Oklahoma, for verification of this conclusion, and she said, “The consensus at this point is that college is the best time for some type of intervention, because it’s the developmental period when most key elements of identity change.”
Leader development also has time value because of the integration and assimilation of learning. Take the simplest example of a person growing along two leadership competencies, communication and decision making. While each has value independently, over time, being a better communicator will enhance the dialogue around decision making, and improve decision-making outcomes. Now multiply that principle across every competency improved in the developmental journey of a young person: growth as a leader becomes exponential. Leader development increases in value because of the passage of time.
The complex, transformative, and distributed nature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution demands a new type of leadership … about cultivating a shared vision for change … empowering widespread innovation and action based on mutual accountability and collaboration.
—Klaus Schwab, Nicholas Davis, and Thomas Philbeck, 2017 World Economic Forum9
If it makes sense to develop younger leaders, then it’s also important to envision the leader skills that may be most critical for success in their future. The 2017 World Economic Forum (WEF) articulated and addressed the advent of changes related to technology as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (or 4IR). From the proceedings of the WEF’s 2017 Annual Meeting of New Champions,10 there is a shift in competencies that new leaders will need to master to adapt to the powerful social and economic trends in the next 10–20 years:
Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power, but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those who are led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.
—Mary Parker Follett
The Doerr Institute for New Leaders was designed from the outset to be a comprehensive, top-quality leader-development architecture and a model for top-tier universities. Our mission is to “elevate the leadership capacity of Rice students across the university,” in order to support the university’s mission to “cultivate a diverse community of learning and discovery that produces leaders across the spectrum of human endeavor.” Our imperative is to better prepare graduates to lead in a world where massive change will be driven by technology shifts in artificial intelligence, big data, rapid computing, global threats, and rapid shifts in markets. Our work at Rice has application outside the context of academe, from corporate program design to self-directed leader development. The following five Doerr Institute design considerations are shared here to help readers look out through our window, see what we see, and apply a new strategy in their organizations and their personal and professional lives:
Personalized and direct development in the university environment can change the trajectory of an individual for 50 years or longer. Early intervention with young leaders will reap dividends not only for the leaders themselves, but for the countless colleagues, direct reports, and organizations that they will work with over the course of their lifetimes. I invite you to consider the words of two Rice University students who were coached this past academic year:
I predict that in 10 years, all top-tier colleges and universities will be more serious about leader development. The rest of us can be serious right now. Lessons in cutting-edge development from the Doerr Institute are practical in their application to corporate and personal development strategies: develop only those who want to lead, develop one-on-one, ruthlessly measure outcomes, develop as whole persons, don’t waste resources, don’t give in to distractions. The Doerr Institute invites you to look out the window with us and join us in our mission to develop the next generation of leaders.