As an emerging leader, you’re growing your skills and behaviors through learn-by-doing—seizing opportunities for more responsibility, and then using the crucible of experience to keep honing your performance. But you also know that active practice benefits from reflection. With some quiet study, you can assess your own performance, think about what you can learn from other leaders, and continuously better your capabilities.
Executive coaches can help you with that study and reflection. They can hold the mirror up to you, to guide your self-awareness about skills and deficits, and compare/contrast best practice leadership behavior. Coaching can also sharpen your understanding of specific leadership challenges, and teach you how to wrestle with the decision-making trade-offs when you exercise more responsibility. So when the gray-haired sage sent over by HR shows up at your office, don’t be afraid to open the door.
Appealing to Ancient Wisdom
But also, don’t be afraid to engage a more virtual and indeed different kind of coach for your study. So how about the Hellenic philosopher and essayist, Xenophon? Or the ancient Greek poet Homer? Or the second century CE biographer Plutarch? You might just find that reading and thinking about the works of such ancient writers will also sharpen your leadership practice today.
Norman Sandridge, an associate professor of classics at Howard University, wants to refer you to these and other virtual coaches from the liberal arts canon. He’s on a mission to reinvent classical literature and history as another vehicle for your leadership development—whatever your professional field. His enthusiasm jumped out during a recent conversation.
“If you read them in the right way, ancient authors can help any rising leader better anticipate their own experiences, navigate moral dilemmas, and articulate an inspiring vision for their organization,” he says. “For example, in Homer’s Odyssey, you find a detailed and complex depiction of how to mentor someone into a leadership role. Plutarch’s essay on The Virtues of Women challenges us to think about the differences, if any, between the virtues that women bring to a leadership role versus men. Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus offers a meditation on what it truly means for a leader to care about the needs of others.”
Beyond “Flatter-ature”
Sandridge emphasized, however, such “coaching” only works if you make the proper ancient-modern connection. “To make meaning out of these ancient texts you have to bring them into dialogue with contemporary issues of leadership,” he continued. “For example, if we believe that we want everyone to have access to the most important and influential leadership roles, we have to ask ourselves how narratives about ancient leaders might exclude others who have not traditionally been seen as a ‘great leader.’ Ideally, you’ll pursue these kinds of reflections in conversation with others, to get more perspective and see the implications of adapting ancient examples to contemporary problems.
“Unfortunately, many people today have reduced study of ancient leadership to an overly-simplified set of rules or superficial analogies between ‘great’ ancient leaders and the modern CEO. Rather than challenge aspiring leaders to engage in more creative and self-critical processes, they reassure them of their own status as titans in a modern world. It’s an approach I call ‘flatter-ature.'”
Sandridge has brought his vision of leadership development through the liberal arts beyond his Howard classroom. He helped found a humanities-based leadership institute (Kallion.org), with a network of like-minded academics, providing both online resources and courses for the general public. As a fellow at Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies he also helps organize practice-oriented study events for students and diverse leaders in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
Become Your Own Leadership Artist
“My approach begins with leadership as an art and the leader as artist, fashioning themselves to better serve the people in the organization. Just as a serious painter doesn’t ask Leonardo da Vinci for the five basic lessons of portraiture, so, too, the modern executive shouldn’t look to ancient leaders for simple lessons. Instead, she tries to analyze and understand the storied leader in context, and from there initiates a creative and evaluative process, turning herself into something that fits who she is and whom she is trying to serve.”
Sandridge added that the appeal of ancient study is its combination of modern familiarity and remote strangeness—offering students a vital process of compare but contrast.
“Ancient leaders felt emotions recognizable to any contemporary leader: self-doubt, envy for a rival, anxiety over the weight of responsibility, over-confidence, love for fellow human beings,” he says. “They faced familiar moral dilemmas about self-interest versus the good of others. Or using persuasion versus force to get a job done. Or wrestling with self-confidence versus doubt and uncertainty. But these ancient leaders also lived in a world full of superstition and constant mediation with the gods. In ancient times, wealth inequality was extensive, human slavery was central to most economies, and science was a mode of thinking for only a limited few. Ancient leaders sometimes faced challenges hard for us to imagine today.”
Five Steps To Shape Your Leadership From Humanistic Study
Sandridge’s approach to humanistic learning follows a five-step diagnostic for reading and discussing a text:
1. Identify: The first step is simply to identify instances of leadership, “just as an entomologist might collect different kinds of butterflies,” he explains, adding that as you read, you should collect examples of someone “exercising authority, delivering a persuasive speech, articulating a problem, making a decision on behalf of a group. And look beyond roles and titles that are the traditional markers of leadership.”
2. Analyze: Next, break the examples into constituent parts and explore the implications. “Say you come across an ancient leader who will do anything to win, no matter what—the Greek concept of philonikia,” Sandridge notes. “What are the situations where such a tendency would help a community and when might it involve so much risk-taking, self-aggrandizement, squandering of resources, and counter-productive negotiation that it actually destroys a community?”
3. Translate: In this step, Sandridge asks readers to make the connection with meaningful leadership issues today: “The key is to translate your analysis to how you see yourself and what problems you see facing your organization. Do you find the examples of ancient leadership analogous to contemporary ones? If not, what do the differences tell you about your issues today?”
4. Evaluate: In this next step, readers judge leaders’ morality and/or effectiveness in the story. “Once you have an idea about how an ancient example could apply you,” Sandridge says, “ask yourself, ‘Would this be a good or ethical thing to do?’ Would it work for me and my organization?'”
5. Practice: The final step shifts your learning into action for yourself. “Once you’ve developed some ideas of good leadership behavior from ancient examples, practice them in your role as leader—as soon as you can find an opportunity to do so. If you make practice your ultimate goal, you will continue to reap the benefits of your study for self-improvement.”
A Universal Concept For Any Leader?
And is there was one overarching concept of leadership found in ancient literature that is applicable to leaders today?
“Well, if we’re looking for something universal,” Sandridge responds, “I think it’s best captured in Book One of Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus. It’s when Cambyses, the Persian King, extols the glory of ruling as a good leader to his son Cyrus, but also explains why it fundamentally depends on duty and caring for one’s followers: ‘Don’t you see that the most amazing thing is to be able to provide for others so that they have all that they need and become what they need to be?’”
Originally published on Forbes.com