[If you don't want terrorists running your life, I hope you will take a moment and forward the enclosed article on intellectual leadership to everybody you know who is associated with a professional school (i.e., law, medicine, engineering, education, librarianship, business, architecture, etc). I would like to get it into as many students' hands as possible, both because our professions need all the positive leaders they can get and because nobody is born knowing the skills of professional success. Thanks very much.] =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" option. For information about RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= How to Be a Leader in Your Field: A Guide for Students in Professional Schools Phil Agre http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/ Version of 15 September 2001. 3000 words. Copyright 2001 by Phil Agre. You are welcome to forward this article in electronic form to anyone for any noncommercial purpose. Please do not post it on any Web sites; instead, link to it here: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/leader.html A profession is more than a job -- it is a community and a culture. Professions serve society by pooling knowledge among their members, and by creating incentives to synthesize new knowledge. They also help their members to build networks, find jobs, recruit staff, start collaborative projects, and organize around the issues that affect them. In a world without change or innovation, professions would not be necessary. But in a world where change and innovation are ever more intense, every occupation needs more of the institutions and culture of traditional professions such as law, medicine, engineering, education, librarianship, business, and architecture. Every profession has leaders. In a formal sense, the elected officers of a professional society are the leaders of that profession. Because a profession is fundamentally about knowledge, however, the true leaders of a profession are the thought leaders: the individuals who synthesize the thinking of the profession's members and articulate directions for the future. Sometimes a profession will elect its thought leaders to official positions. But often the thought leaders prefer to lead through writing and speaking, cutting-edge projects, and dialogue. Leadership means not just talking but listening, and not just vision but consensus. A leader builds a web of relationships within the profession and articulates the themes that are emerging in the thinking of the profession as a whole. In a knowledge-intensive world of ceaseless innovation and change, every professional must be a leader. This is not a universally popular idea. Some people say, "leadership is fine for others, but I just want a job". I want to argue that it doesn't work that way. The skills that the leader exercises in building a critical mass of opinion around emerging issues are the same skills that every professional needs to stay employed at all. In the old days the leadership-averse could hide out in bureaucracies. But as institutions are turned inside out by technology, globalization, and rising public and client expectations of every sort, the refuges are disappearing. Every professional's job is now the front lines, and the skills of leadership must become central to everyone's conception of themselves as a professional. But how? It is well-known that simply declaring yourself a leader will not cause anyone to follow you. The process of becoming a leader doesn't happen overnight, but it is perfectly methodical. Here is a six-step recipe. Things aren't really this rigid in practice, but you'll have no trouble varying the recipe once you get used to it. (1) Pick an issue. You need an issue that the profession as a whole is not really thinking about, but which is going to be the center of attention in five years. The issue could be technical, strategic, managerial, policy-related, or all of the above. It could be a problem or an opportunity or both. It could be a new method or a whole new area of practice. It should be fairly specific, though, and should directly address the day-to-day work of people in some segment of the profession. "Technology" is too big. You can find an issue in four ways: (a) Talk to a large number of dynamic practitioners and notice a pattern in what they are saying. (b) Talk to people at your school. One purpose of a professional school is to be the early-warning system for the profession -- the surveillance center where emerging issues are articulated, researched, and taught. Many issues that you take for granted as lecture and paper topics in your classes actually represent the farthest horizon so far as most practitioners are concerned. (c) Talk to people in other professions to find issues that are going to be important for your profession. (d) Draw on your own experience and values to articulate an issue that nobody else is talking about. Maybe you are simply anticipating concerns that everybody else will be discovering independently in a few years, or maybe you are building something new that wouldn't have happened without you. In either case, if the issue is going to be important to your profession in five years, you'll be doing a public service by getting out in front of it. In short, feel free to identify an issue that you care about and put yourself in charge of raising the profession's awareness of it. If putting yourself in charge feels arrogant, that's just because you're not used to it. Focus on the issue and you'll be fine. (2) Having chosen your issue, start a project to study it. You might do this in context of a term paper or an independent study, or you might organize it through the local student chapter of a professional association. Or you might simply do it on your own time. It's hard work, yes, but it's an investment. See if a local faculty member will sign on as an advisor to the project, and if you can use the faculty member's name in talking to people. (3) Do your library work so you know any conventional wisdom that's out there. Then talk to some working professionals who are facing the issue, especially if they have spoken publicly about an aspect of it. You can find these people by asking the faculty in your school; it's their job to know everyone. If the faculty are reticent at first to unleash you on their contacts, then work your own contacts, for example through your fellow students or the professional society. You can also find relevant people by reading professional publications, attending conferences, and searching Web sites. Tell them that your project is pulling together the profession's experience with the issue, and ask if you can interview them. Have a good, focused talk, make serious notes, ask if they want to keep anything confidential, give them your card, and promise to keep in touch. Why are they willing to talk to you? Because you're working on an important issue, and because you're associated with a professional school, which is a center of thinking and networking for the field. Use the symbolic power of the university while you're still associated with it. (4) Pull together what you've heard. Nobody is expecting you to solve the problems. The emphasis is more on questions than answers. You will contribute simply by defining the whole scope of the problems that people are facing. Make a taxonomy and give examples. Talk about what people are doing to address the problems. Focus on practice: the actual decisions that working professionals will have to make, and the full range of considerations that they will have to take into account. Most of these considerations will seem obvious taken in isolation, but many people will be grateful to have a complete list in front of them. Remember that professionals, no matter how creative and intuitive they are, have to justify their decisions in a rational way, giving reasons why they have made one choice rather than another. You'll do a service just by laying out the choices and reasons. Talk about the consequences people see for the future. Just impose some order. Faculty in your school can probably help you with this. Write clearly and concisely, and get someone who can write well to copyedit your work. (5) Circulate the result. Send copies to the people who helped you. Call it a draft or interim report if you want. Give credit to the people whose ideas you've written down. Then follow up. Get further comments. Now write some short columns for professional publications. Describe your project and summarize the issue. Explain why the issue is becoming important. Concisely present the dangers and opportunities for the profession. Your goal is to lead: to present the profession with a valid issue that calls for action. Again, you don't need to specify what the right action is. You only need to give form to the issue. Make sure your published columns provide a permanent e-mail address where people can reach you, and ideally the URL for a Web page where you've collected materials related to the issue. (6) Get invited to speak at meetings. Correspond with people who have contacted you after reading your work. Meet more people who appreciate the significance of the issue. If you hear about someone who is working on a similar issue, make friends. Show them that you've read their work, give them due credit, and explore how your projects complement one another. Expand your network to include your profession's clients and peers. As you take in everyone's perspectives, let your understanding of the issue grow and evolve. Come up with many different honest ways of explaining the issue and clear answers to the standard questions you get asked. Don't try to convert people who don't get it. You may be a voice in the wilderness for a while, but keep building networks and synthesizing ideas. Your energetic and responsible approach will make you a magnet for intelligent people. As interest in the issue accelerates, build institutions around it. See if the people in your network want to start a moderated mailing list. Organize a panel discussion about it at a professional meeting. And so on. Keep going until the issue either matures or disappears. Then find another issue and start over. That's the procedure. You should always have at least one issue that you are developing in this way. In doing so, you are helping the profession to think out loud about its problems and potentials, and you are also helping to knit the profession together by establishing connections among the people who are thinking about the issues on the horizon. You are also making yourself a strong job candidate. You are building knowledge, and you are building networks. One purpose of a professional school is to build such networks, and by helping you the school helps itself. If you've spent your whole life going to school and toiling at normal jobs, then you might find the prospect of leadership nerve-wracking. Most schools and jobs are afraid of you, so they encourage a dependent attitude where you wait around for other people to give you things. Of course they don't entirely succeed; no institution can completely extinguish your human agency. Even so, few schools or jobs actively train people to take the initiative by organizing people around emerging issues. Yet successful people have exercised leadership in this way for all of recorded history. The methods of leadership that I have described are not widely publicized, and many courses that supposedly teach leadership skills omit them entirely. But they are out there, roaring at full throttle just below the surface, and you can learn them by watching any successful person in action. I'm just hoping that by reading this you'll learn them a little faster. As you advance in your profession, you will be organizing people in more sophisticated ways around more sophisticated issues. As such, it will be important to cultivate your intellectual life. Leadership is such a rare skill that it doesn't matter whether you are a genius in your own right. Leadership is process, and the whole point is that you're not figuring out all the answers yourself. Accordingly, you will need to develop a brain trust -- smart and knowledgeable people that you can turn to when you need expert judgements. This is one reason to stay in touch with the faculty at your school, and with the smart people who pass through the school while you are there. One good way to start a brain trust is to organize a speaker series. Fearlessly assess your intellectual strengths and weaknesses, and then make professional friends whose intellectual strengths complement your own. Your contribution is to facilitate a large-scale movement within the profession, and that's what makes the difference in the long run. As you become a leader, you will also face ethical issues. Leadership has a bad name; people associate it with dishonesty, manipulation, and "politics". That's because so many "leaders" prefer to surf on issues, extracting the social energy around them for their own benefit, rather than being a positive and constructive force in the community. Once you've built a network and evolved some rhetoric, you can get a way with a lot of selfishness. People will probably even praise you for it. You can settle down to a life of mutual back-scratching with your similarly-networked cronies, going through the motions and never giving a serious thought to the community again. But that's no good. Your job is to model positive leadership. You have no doubt heard it explained that true leadership is "selfless". I haven't emphasized that theme so far, for the simple reason that it's useless to demand that people be selfless leaders until they understand the six-step process that makes them leaders at all. Now that you do understand the process, and especially once you become accustomed to actually doing it, it's time to put some content into it. Use your connections to help people who deserve help. Promote all ideas that you find valuable, whether they reinforce your issues or not. Keep trying to understand your issues more deeply, and ask yourself whether the world is changing. Don't be an ego freak. And write down what you learn along the way. Why do I argue that the modern world requires all professionals to engage in leadership? Before the Internet, professionals had to be generalists. Problems would arise, and you had to solve them. Now, however, the institutions and infrastructures of your profession easily bring professional knowledge to bear wherever it is needed. To succeed in your career, you need more than the skills that you got in school -- you need to be the world expert in something. Knowledge is global, it's growing exponentially, and nobody can pack all of the necessary knowledge into their heads. So everyone's going to specialize. Specialization doesn't mean narrowness: it means reaching out in many directions, talking to many kinds of people, and weaving together the threads that make your issue matter. "Leadership" used to mean something unique: the army had one leader and everyone else followed. Today, however, knowledge is multiplying so fast that we need more leaders than we can possibly produce. Every leader can feel important, and genuinely be important, and everyone is a leader, including you. Here are some books and articles that might be useful. Networking on the Network. This is a much longer article that I wrote about professional networking for students in PhD programs. Although most of the detailed instructions are specific to the research world, the underlying philosophy will carry over into the professional world. On the Web at <http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/network.html>. Peter Block, Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, Austin: Learning Concepts, 1981. Though written for management consultants, this book has valuable things to say about the feelings that come up in any kind of professional work, and how to use them honestly for everyone's benefit. Donna Fisher and Sandy Vilas, Power Networking, Austin: Mountain Harbour, 1992. This is the best all-around book on the subject of professional neworking. It abstracts a long list of guidelines that apply pretty widely across professions. Roger Fisher and William Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotating Agreement Without Giving In, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. This is the classic book on negotiating. Its core message is that you should negotiate on the basis of interests and not on positions, so that negotiation becomes cooperative problem-solving. If you lead then you'll need these skills. Ford Harding, Rain Making: The Professional's Guide to Attracting New Clients, Holbrook, MA: Bob Adams, 1994. The way to get ahead is to do something new and tell everyone about it. This is a pretty good introduction to the process, with a focus on publishing an article and developing professional networks. Linda A. Hill, Becoming a Manager: Mastery of a New Identity, Boston: Harvard Business School, 1992. As a professional you'll have probably a manager, and soon enough you'll probably be a manager yourself. Your job is to deal with these relationships in a mutually beneficial way while also maximizing your own autonomy. This is a study of new managers getting used to their jobs, and it's a good source of insight into these issues. Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. This is a terrific book about the ethical issues that will surround you in the organizational world. Once you understand these issues, you will see trouble coming much further off, while you can still make your own decisions about it. Tom Jackson, Guerrilla Tactics in the New Job Market, second edition, New York: Bantam, 1991. This is an excellent book about finding a job; though it is out of print, you can probably find a used copy online. Sending dozens of resumes to personnel departments is one approach, but a much better approach is systematic networking and inside research. Ronald L. Krannich and Caryl Rae Krannich, The New Network Your Way to Job and Career Success, Manassas Park, VA: Impact Publications, 1993. Another good book on networking for job-seekers, with a fair amount of concrete, useful advice. Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. If you can get past the cult-like hagiography, this book provides a rather different analysis of leadership from mine, or at least presents a different emphasis, starting from the creative discovery that happens in the actual process of leadership. end
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