Category: Leadership skills

Everyone talks a lot about leadership training, but what is it really.  Fundamentally, leadership skills are those that allow you to work effectively with others in a variety of capacities to cultivate ideas and implement strategies to move an agenda forward.  In the Middlebury School of the Environment, the broad agenda we want to connect students with it environmental health, justice, and restoration.

At the MSoE, there are eight skills that we  believe are essential for effectively addressing this agenda, skills that we emphasize in our curriculum and co-curricular activities.

1. Teaming.  How do teams work best, and how can you best work in a team?
2. Communication styles.  What is your own communication style, and how can you adapt it to promote communication with others?
3. Persuasive public speaking.  What is your message, and how can you persuasively deliver in different settings to different audiences?
4. Networking.  How do you engage with others to make them a part of your extended network of contacts for generating ideas and opportunities?
5. Fundraising.  How do you create opportunities for others to donate money towards initiatives that advance their goals?
6. Empathy.  How do you develop a sincere understanding about how someone else is feeling?
7. Cultural capacity.  How do you overcome your own cultural programming to open the door to understanding how someone from a different culture views their environmental challenges and needs?
8. Interviewing.  How do you elicit information from others to help them reveal the underlying problems and hidden solutions to their environmental challenges.

During the course of the Middlebury School of the Environment, we will engage you in all eight of these skills.  And in the coming months, I will talk more about each of them on The Stream.

We recently spent an afternoon with Mary Hurlie, of LeaderScope, talking about … and experiencing the consequences of … different styles of communication.  Whether someone wants to receive information through direct, to-the-point conversation or wants to use conversation to first develop an interactive relationship is neither right nor wrong.  But recognizing that those styles exist and learning how to flex one’s own style in order to engage comfortably with others is a hallmark of effective communication.

What does this have to do with the environment?  Making a difference in the world, being effective at creating positive change requires effective communication.  And communication is not just about talking at people; it’s also (and importantly) about listening to people.

Over the decades, environmentalists have become much better at messaging.  We reach out to more people in more sophisticated ways with our messages — whether it’s about climate change, socioeconomic inequality, species extinction, and any of the hundreds of other issues before us — than ever before.  But we have not become all that good at listening to others.  Or, at least, not as good as we need to be.

So that’s what we did.  We learned how to become better listeners.

It’s easy if you try … and if you know what to listen for.

 

Every since Daniel Goleman published his seminal work on emotional intelligence (Emotional Intelligence, 1995, Bantam Books), it has been well appreciated that effective leadership requires much more than simple mastery of facts.  Leaders need the capacity to interact effectively with people on a personal, non-cognitive level, which led Goleman to propose that emotional intelligence was at least as important, if not more so, than I.Q.

Viewed now, almost 20 years later, this idea seems obvious.  The concept of “leadership” is only relevant if more than a single person is involved, and as soon as people need to work together, effective interaction requires empathy for emotional states, different communication styles, and non-verbal cues.

So improving one’s emotional intelligence — in particular one’s ability to interpret correctly non-verbal cues and emotional states — is an important leadership skill.  The question then becomes, “How can it be done?”

The most recent contribution to that conversation was recently published on-line by the journal Science, the primary publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  In their October 3rd article titled “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social Research in New York City, write:

Understanding others’ mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies. Yet little research has investigated what fosters this skill, which is known as Theory of Mind (ToM), in adults. We present five experiments showing that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective ToM (experiments 1 to 5) and cognitive ToM (experiments 4 and 5) compared with reading nonfiction (experiments 1), popular fiction (experiments 2 to 5), or nothing at all (experiments 2 and 5). Specifically, these results show that reading literary fiction temporarily enhances ToM.

In simple terms?  Literary fiction is typically character driven, rather than plot driven, as is more typical of popular or genre fiction.  Following a story being advanced by characters requires that the reader engage with the characters themselves, with all the nuance, ambiguity, and subtlety given to them by their creators.  Reading literary fiction therefore trains the reader to interpret nuance, ambiguity, and subtlety.

The authors note that they aren’t (yet) able to demonstrate that this effect lasts over time, primarily because their experiments weren’t designed to look for that.  But like all good science, their results open the door to more questions worth pursuing.

But even these limited results are intriguing.  The connections between the humanities and leadership are even more direct than the simple truism that leaders need to be well-rounded citizens of the world.

To improve your leadership skills … go read a literary book!