Great leaders are happiness teachers

November 2023 Issue

Reece Brown, Assistant Director, Leadership & Happiness Laboratory

In his 2011 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama elevated the role of teachers to “nation builders.”[1] And it is true that teachers have always played a vital role in passing on knowledge and skills that impact future generations of leaders, going back at least to when Aristotle stewarded the education of Alexander the Great, shaping his views on philosophy, statecraft, and more. In this way, great teachers are themselves leaders.

Meanwhile, the best leaders are also teachers: Those with great influence are teachers of the ideas and values they hold. Ideals such as freedom, peace, and happiness serve as criteria for both the quality of their teaching and the measure by which they can evaluate whether they are changing the world for the better.

Teacher-leaders generally fit into one of two categories. The first are classical teachers like professors, philosophers, inventors, and authors – those who work directly with ideas, and may translate those ideas into beneficial outcomes for humanity. The second are teachers who are moral advocates and carry an outsized impact on culture and intellectual thought. People like Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Gandhi represent the kind of people who might use their platform to communicate ideas and invoke social change based on persuasion.

The qualities of teacher-leaders

The most impactful of these teacher-leaders have a special ability to help people and organizations adapt and change in beneficial ways. In his classic 1994 book Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz describe this ability: “Adaptive work consists of the learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face. Adaptive work requires a change in values, beliefs, or behavior.” Heifetz argues that the work of the leader is to overcome conflicts by “mobilizing people to learn in new ways.”[2] In this context, the work of an adaptive leader is to transmit knowledge and skills to others and facilitate learning oriented toward an organization’s values and goals. 

The first hallmark of an adaptive leader is a learning mindset. Several years ago, Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus conducted novel leadership research in which they interviewed ninety CEOs, top executives, and public sector leaders including individuals such as Ray Kroc and Neil Armstrong.[3] When asked what qualities are needed to run their organizations, the top answer from the leaders was learning.  “Learning,” they noted, “is the essential fuel for the leader, the source of high-octane energy that keeps up the momentum by continually sparking new understanding, new ideas, and new challenges.”[4] They suggested leaders should be able to learn individually and within an organization – and under conditions of rapid change and complexity.

In the field of psychology, Carol Dweck contends that individuals with a growth mindset believe their talents can be developed through effort and input from others. Research suggests that those with a growth mindset achieve far more than those with a fixed mindset (when individuals believe their talents cannot be improved).[5] However, achieving a growth mindset does not happen by accident. For many leaders, what sets them apart is their confidence, assertive decision making, and ability to take charge of a group. In many cases, the established model of success is based on leveraging one’s talent and savvy toward winning a zero-sum game against others. But a compelling body of research and traditional wisdom suggests this may not be true.

In March of 2023, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Leadership & Happiness Laboratory hosted an ideas summit in Dharamsala, India, led by social scientist Arthur Brooks alongside Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. During a public interview with the Dalai Lama, His Holiness continually emphasized the unity of all human beings and how it is crucial for leaders to yield their individual dogmas to unity. When asked directly, “What makes a leader great?” The Dalai Lama answered, “The individual always remains a beggar. Totally dedicated to building a peaceful world on the basis that we are all brothers and sisters.”[6] Effective leaders do not position themselves to leverage their power, but to serve others. Furthermore, the most effective way for leaders to invoke positive change, he argued, is to dispel suffering through reason. This means using one’s beliefs and knowledge as a gift, not as a weapon.

His Holiness summed up his view by saying, “Great leaders don’t command, they teach.”

The first implication of this principle is a clear moral imperative for leaders to respect the dignity of every individual they lead. From Alexander the Great’s time to our modern age, leaders throughout history have often made critical errors relying upon coercion and an overuse of force. Leaders should abandon the notion that in order to be successful, they must be despotic commanders. Furthermore, there is a second implication related to management: relying on talent or domain-specific expertise risks what behavioral scientist Erik Dane calls cognitive entrenchment.[7] When leaders repeatedly attempt to solve problems and conflicts on their own, it limits the range of possible solutions and the value they might otherwise draw out from others. Unfortunately, research demonstrates that this limitation extends beyond mental processes to the emotional sphere of the leader.

An extensive study conducted by Chris Argyris and Don Schon in the 1970s showed that when under pressure, 98 percent of management professionals used a unilateral control mindset.[8] This approach “defines leadership as power over others and makes sharing power with others feel like losing power—a bad thing, in that context.”[9] This mindset spreads into behaviors where individuals hoard power, are stingy with information and resources, and are generally defensive and distrusting of others.

This behavior is particularly harmful in the modern world, where the key to organizational success is a free flow of information. Researchers have clarified that the essential task of leadership in the knowledge era is “enabling intellectual assets through distributed intelligence and cellular networks rather than relying on the limited intelligence of a few brains at the top.”[10] Robust research has demonstrated that knowledge sharing has clear positive impacts on individual performance, learning, and creativity, and that it increases the trust and rapport of teams.[11] In contrast to top-down autocratic structures, environments where knowledge is shared freely requires a different approach in leadership. Fortunately, the approach suggested by the Dalai Lama—that leaders should teach rather than command—can be achieved through a simple change in mindset where the leader focuses on giving power away by equipping others with knowledge.

Strategy and leadership scholar Sydney Finkelstein has reinforced this idea in his research. He engaged in a ten-year study of exceptional leaders he dubbed “superbosses.” Across 18 different fields, he found one essential skill these exceptional leaders all shared: the ability to develop talent—that is, teaching.[12]

In an article entitled “The Best Leaders are Teachers,” Finkelstein writes, “the exceptional leaders I studied were teachers through and through. They routinely spent time in the trenches with employees, passing on technical skills, general tactics, business principles, and life lessons.”[13]

There are many examples of this in business. The late Jack Welch, legendary long-time CEO of General Electric, invested tremendous time and resources turning GE into a teaching organization during its meteoric rise to becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Alongside Jack Welch was Professor Noel Tichy of the University of Michigan, who spent decades researching and refining a teaching pedagogy for leaders. Tichy emphasized that the idea that high performing organizations require command-and-control conventions is completely wrong. The secret of what Tichy called “teaching organizations” is that “they have more leaders because they make a conscious effort to teach people to be leaders. And they have better leaders because in order to teach, people must think through their ideas and develop the ability to communicate them, both of which hone their own leadership abilities.”[14]

Five practices

All together, the leadership research shows us that becoming a person who teaches and develops others to become teaching leaders can be achieved through five essential practices:

1. Develop a Teachable Point of View

According to Noel Tichy, the teachable point of view is the platform upon which a leader builds his or her personal pedagogy. Developing a teachable point of view means making one’s implicit knowledge explicit so that others can understand, interact, and build upon it.[15] This includes clear definitions and essential information for the assumptions and beliefs that constitute one’s reason for being. It should include a literal or metaphorical roadmap that describes where one is, where she is going, and how to get there.

2. Communicate Values

It is the leader’s responsibility to ensure that every member of an organization or team understands an organization’s core values. Values are functional criteria that define what a team believes and whether a group measures up against what they want to accomplish. Author Simon Sinek simplifies this process with a simple question: what is your why? As Sinek writes in his 2009 book Start with Why, “Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do what they do. When I say WHY, I don’t mean to make money – that’s a result. By WHY I mean what is your purpose, cause, or belief? WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning?”[16]

The leader should not only articulate the Why?, but embody it. As Brooks argued at the Summit on Leadership & Happiness with the Dalai Lama, “great leaders start by modeling the virtues they want to see in others. If you want other people to show greater morality, the leader should show greater morality. If the leader wants more happiness in others, the leader should start by showing happiness, and faith, and spirituality, and responsibility, and loyalty. The virtues that we seek in others as leaders, start with ourselves and we [should] model these virtues.”[17]

3. Deliver Energy

William Butler Yeats wrote that, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” An essential ingredient to any leader’s teaching repertoire is delivering and creating energy. Both Tichy and Finkelstein note that results (i.e., money and success) are good for a team, but that vision and inspiration are far more important. “Superbossess are supermotivators. They help other people accomplish more than they ever thought possible.”[18]

Some might mistake this dynamic for the leadership style called “pacesetting” by Daniel Goleman, where the leader is working around the clock.[19] Pacesetting can be useful in some cases, but this style makes the pace of the leader the focus, rather than the potential of the team. Dale Carnegie suggested that a tangible way to unlock potential is to “give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.”[20] The leader should not only believe in the mission of the organization, but also affirm belief in the team’s ability to live up to it. A leader who spurs motivation in their team will create more energy and impact – much more than relying on external displays of individual effort.

4. Tell Stories

Just as leadership is adaptive work, organizations evolve and adapt over time. As organizations change, leaders have an opportunity to capture the through-line of an organization by telling its history for those internal and external to the organization. With narrative, leaders can cast vision, inspire action, distill complexity, manage identity, and coalesce understanding around the past-present-future of an organization.[21] Stories help leaders engage in institutional wayfinding and build trust within their organization.[22] Like developing a teachable point of view, selecting and crafting stories requires hard work. Story is a sensemaking mechanism that helps a leader capture abstract concepts and inspire individuals with a strong sense of meaning.

5. Create more Teachers

The final step to becoming an effective adaptive leader is to create more teachers. Just as the most effective way to learn something is to teach it to others, the most effective way to create a teaching organization is to recruit everyone in the work of teaching –especially as a teacher of the organization’s mission, values, and essential practices. This creates a virtuous cycle where everyone gets smarter as a champion of the values and ideas of the organization.[23] Management scientist Amy Edmondson explains that teams stuck in an apathy zone feel psychologically unsafe – and won’t take on responsibility, learn new things, or innovate. If, on the other hand, a team retains psychological safety – where failure is not penalized, and each person’s voice is valued — a team can enter a learning zone of constant learning and collaboration.[24]

Knowledge sharing enhances the kind of collaboration that pushes an organization forward and protects against errors. Sharing the teaching task also helps avoid the creation of knowledge bottlenecks in one individual. On the contrary, encouraging others to become teachers is a tool of empowering leadership. “Empowering leadership can be contrasted with autocratic leadership, and one of the central differences in the outcomes is that autocratic leadership inhibits knowledge sharing by team members (Yukl, 2002).”[25] It is essential to elevate every member of the organization to the role of teacher and thus include them in the shared responsibility of leadership. Creating more teaching leaders increases the effectiveness of what one individual can do alone and creates a natural succession plan where every member of the team is equipped to lead in some way.

The final aim of leadership

Aristotle believed that the end goal which orients all human motivation and behavior is happiness. He argued that it is not only the longing of every human heart, but that happiness is the net positive sum for which society should be designed. In his book If Aristotle Ran General Motors, philosopher Tom Morris explains that individuals in organizations that are pushed for greater and greater productivity – at the expense of their own happiness – wind up feeling nothing but stress and pressure.[26] Instead, our work and institutions should be channels for achieving the basic human good of happiness. Leaders should not only create the conditions by which individuals can use their work in service of their own happiness, but also empower them with the goal of creating more happiness for others.

At the Leadership & Happiness Laboratory’s 2023 Symposium at the Harvard Kennedy School, Dr. Martin Seligman shared recent research from the University of Oxford and Harvard University.[27] The research he shared points to a paradigmatic shift in the study of happiness in organizations. While many studies have demonstrated a strong correlation between high performing teams and wellbeing, the research strongly suggests evidence for causation of higher performance in happier organizations. This supports a strong order of operations for organizations: when happiness comes first, performance follows. According to Aristotle, this is true in life as well. Happiness is a first cause of thriving relationships, families, communities, organizations, and governments. Human excellence at the expense of happiness yields neither. In the realm of leadership, happiness isn’t a secondary pursuit. Effective leaders don’t command, they teach; and based on the evidence, great leaders are not merely instructors, they are happiness teachers.

Contributing editors: Arthur Brooks, Bryce Fuemmeler, Alexis Sargent, Brendan Chan

References

[1] Barack Obama State of the Union 2011, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/25/remarks-president-state-union-address

[2] Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers, 22.

[3 Bennis and Nanus, Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge, 23.

[4] Bennis and Nanus, Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge, 176.

[5] Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S. (2020). What Can Be Learned From Growth Mindset Controversies? The American Psychologist, 75(9), 1269–1284. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000794

[6] The Leadership & Happiness Laboratory. (2023). Summit on Leadership & Happiness: Interview Transcript, Day 2.

[7] Dane, E. (2010). RECONSIDERING THE TRADE-OFF BETWEEN EXPERTISE AND FLEXIBILITY: A COGNITIVE ENTRENCHMENT PERSPECTIVE. The Academy of Management Review, 35(4), 579–603. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMR.2010.53502832

[8] Argyris, C., and D. Schön (1974). Increasing professional effectiveness: A theory of action perspective (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass). Cited in: Schwarz, R. M. (2013). Smart leaders, smarter teams: how you and your team get unstuck to get results (1st ed.). Jossey-Bass, Chapter 1, How Well Does Your Team Really Work?

[9] Schwarz, R. M. (2013). Smart leaders, smarter teams: how you and your team get unstuck to get results (1st ed.). Jossey-Bass, Chapter 2, How You and Your Team Get Unstuck.

[10] Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R., & McKelvey, B. (2007). Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 298–318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.04.002

[11] Ahmad, F., & Karim, M. (2019). Impacts of knowledge sharing: A review and directions for future research. Journal of Workplace Learning, 31(3), 207-230. doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/JWL-07-2018-0096  

[12] Finkelstein, S. (2016). Superbosses: how exceptional leaders master the flow of talent. Portfolio/Penguin.

[13] FINKELSTEIN, S. (2018). The Best Leaders Are Great Teachers. Harvard Business Review, 96(1), 142–145.

[14] Tichy, N. M., & Cardwell, N. (2002). The cycle of leadership: how great leaders teach their companies to win (1st ed.). HarperBusiness, (53).

[15] Tichy, N. M., & Cardwell, N. (2002). The cycle of leadership: how great leaders teach their companies to win (1st ed.). HarperBusiness, (75).

[16] Sinek, S. (2009). Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. Penguin Publishing Group.

[17] The Leadership & Happiness Laboratory. (2023). Summit on Leadership & Happiness: Interview Transcript, Day 1.

[18] Finkelstein, S. (2016). LESSONS OF THE SUPERBOSSES. Leader to Leader, 2016(82), 30–34. https://doi.org/10.1002/ltl.20258

[19] Goleman, D. (2000). Leadership that gets results. In Harvard business review (Vol. 78, Issue 2, p. 78). Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

[20] Carnegie, D. (1982). How to win friends and influence people (Rev. ed.). Pocket Books.

[21] Boal, K. B., & Schultz, P. L. (2007). Storytelling, time, and evolution: The role of strategic leadership in complex adaptive systems. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 411–428. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.04.008

[22] Auvinen, T., Aaltio, I., & Blomqvist, K. (2013). Constructing leadership by storytelling - the meaning of trust and narratives. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 34(6), 496–514. https://doi.org/10.1108/LODJ-10-2011-0102

[23] Allio, R. J. (2003). Interview: Noel M. Tichy explains why the "virtuous teaching cycle" is integral to effective leadership. Strategy & Leadership, 31(5), 20–25. https://doi.org/10.1108/10878570310492023

[24] Edmondson, Amy C. Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy. 1st ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012., , A. (2019). THE ROLE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY. Leader to Leader, 2019(92), 13–19. https://doi.org/10.1002/ltl.20419

[25] Srivastava, A., Bartol, K. M., & Locke, E. A. (2006). Empowering Leadership in Management Teams: Effects on Knowledge Sharing, Efficacy, and Performance. Academy of Management Journal, 49(6), 1239–1251. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMJ.2006.23478718

[26] Laabs, J. J. (1997). Aristotle's advice for business success. Workforce (Costa Mesa, Calif.), 76(10), 75.

[27] De Neve, J.-E., Kaats, M., & Ward, G. (2023). Workplace wellbeing and firm performance. Wellbeing Research Centre.