BU and MIT Fellows Meet with Barbara Kellerman at Harvard Kennedy School
On November 8th, Dr. Barbara Kellerman, James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, met with BU and MIT Fellows and coordinators to discuss how leadership is conceptualized and taught in the 21st century.
Kellerman began by summarizing her last seven books as a way of conveying how her thinking about leadership has developed since she joined the faculty at Harvard eighteen years ago:
- Bad Leadership stresses the importance of understanding inefficient, corrupt, and evil leadership—topics about which the “leadership industry” (as she calls it) offers little insight.
- Followership grew out of Bad Leadership. As Kellerman explained, “you cannot have a bad leader without at least one bad follower.” Kellerman broadly defines followers as “subordinates who have less power, authority and influence than do their superiors and who therefore, usually but not invariably, fall into line.” In this book, she describes the increasing power of followers and why followership should be studied no less rigorously than leadership.
- Women in Leadership is a volume that Kellerman edited. She did not describe her views on this topic, as she said it would derail our discussion given the limited time we had.
- Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence is an edited volume that grew out of a course Kellerman developed for the Kennedy School—an anthology of what she considers truly great writings on leadership by Confucius, Plato, Marx, Paolo Freire, Hannah Arendt, and others. Kellerman lamented that most books and courses on leadership treat the subject in an embarrassingly superficial way, jumping straight to the “how to” without first building a broad intellectual understanding of power, authority and influence.
- The End of Leadership describes how changes in culture and technology have rendered followers more enlightened and emboldened than ever before in human history.
- Hard Times: Leadership in America, reveals Kellerman’s current thinking and the focus of her Kennedy School course, The Leadership System. Kellerman no longer contemplates leadership on its own, but rather within a systemic relationship involving the leader, the followers, and the context—three elements that exert equal influence over one another. She underscores the importance of context in particular and stresses that there is no cookie-cutter approach to great leadership, as is claimed by many popular books, workshops and courses.
- Professionalizing Leadership (forthcoming 2017) addresses questions of how one actually should learn how to lead, calling for a much more serious approach to leadership development education than is currently practiced.
Following Kellerman’s remarks, representative BU and MIT Fellows summarized the slide presentations that they delivered at the Humphrey Fellowship Program’s Global Leadership Forum (GLF) last week in Washington, DC. The BU Fellows had presented on “Investing in an Inclusive Global Society,” and the MIT Fellows had presented on “Re-imagining Globalization.”
Kellerman asked what action plans the Fellows had following the GLF, and the Fellows expressed that they hoped they could help consolidate and mobilize the Humphrey Program’s global network of 5,600 alumni to collectively bring about positive global change. Kellerman urged the two cohorts to get together more than just occasionally over the course of the Fellowship year, and to see if they could come up with a concrete agenda. She heartily endorsed the idea of forming a study group to build an intellectual understanding about leadership using readings such as those included in book #4 above.
Kellerman also praised Hubert Humphrey and said that it is a credit to Humphrey Fellows that their program has been named after such a great leader.