Tag Archives: Richard Boyatzis

Going around in circles

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I spent a day last month marking essays that were part of the assessment for a postgraduate module I have been teaching about engineering leadership. I use Boyatzis’s theory of self-directed learning to talk about how students can develop their leadership competences. Then, we ask the students to reflect on the leadership and ethical issues associated with one or two incidents they had experienced or observed vicariously. Most of the time we teach engineering students to make rational technical decisions based on data; so, they find it difficult to reflect on their feelings and emotions when faced with ethical and leadership dilemmas. We show them Gibbs’s cycle for reflective thinking and encourage them to use it to structure their thoughts and as a framework for their essay.  There are obvious and natural similarities between the theories of Boyatzis and Gibbs.  Of course, some students use them and some don’t. However, so far, this is an assignment for which they cannot use an essay mill or a large language model, because we ask them to write about their personal experiences and feelings; and LLMs do not understand anything, let alone feelings.

Goleman D, Boyatzis R & McKee A, The new leaders: transforming the art of leadership into the science of results, London: Sphere, 2002, p.139.

I have written previously on teaching leadership, see for example ‘Inspirational Leadership‘ on March 22nd 2017, ‘Leadership is like shepherding‘ on May 10th 2017, ‘Clueless on leadership style’ on June 14th 2017.

Wading in reflections

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I have written before about Daniel Goleman’s analysis of leadership styles [see ‘Clueless on leadership style‘ on June 14th, 2017]; to implement these styles, he identifies, four competencies you require: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management.  Once again, I am involved in teaching helping people develop these competencies through our Science & Technology Leadership CPD programme for aspiring leaders in Research & Development [R&D].  As part of the module on Science Leadership and Ethics we have asked our delegates to write a short essay reflecting on the ethics of one or two real events and, either from experience or vicariously, on the leadership associated with them.  Our delegates find this challenging, especially the reflective aspect which is designed to induce them to think about their self, their feelings and their reactions to events.  They are technologists who are used to writing objectively in technical reports and the concept of writing about the inner workings of their mind is alien to them.

Apparently, the author Peter Carey compared writing to ‘wading in the flooded basement of my mind’ and, to stretch the analogy, I suspect that our delegates are worried about getting out of their depth or perhaps they haven’t found the stairs to the basement yet.  We try to help by providing a map in the form of the flowchart in the thumbnail together with the references below.  Nevertheless, this assignment remains an exercise that most undertake by standing at the top of the stairs with a weak flashlight and that few both get their feet wet and tell us what they find in the basement.

References:

A short guide to reflective writing, University of Birmingham, Library Services Academic Skills Centre, https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/library/skills/asc/documents/public/Short-Guide-Reflective-Writing.pdf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/intermediate2/english/folio/personal_reflective_essay/revision/1/

Sources:

Image: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/589901251161855637/

Goleman D, Boyatzis R & McKee A, The new leaders: transforming the art of leadership into the science of results, London: Sphere, 2002.

Dickson A, Books do furnish a lie, FT Weekend, 18/19 August 2018.