Leading With C.A.I.R.

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Short Description

According to Ronald Heifetz, leadership requires a deeper understanding of the more interactive, adaptive, and reflective processes through which we solve problems, add value, and thrive together. This highly interactive workshop is based on the Leading with C.A.I.R. approach to social change, a model designed to help leaders go deeper. Using C.A.I.R’s four pillars — Choice, Action, Impact, and Reflection — participants will learn how to transform from a focus on leadership positions and processes to a focus on leadership lifestyles. Specific insights, activities, and tools will be provided to enable participants to develop a deeper understanding of leadership moments and become more mindful, engaged, and impactful humans.

Detailed Abstract

One of the biggest challenges for leadership education is separating it from developing specific leader capacities. Although being a leader requires the capacity to solve problems, communicate, and influence, leadership requires the practical art of being human together. Therefore, simply teaching individual capacities does not guarantee the social experience of leadership, since leadership requires the combined and coordinated actions of social beings navigating problematic social contexts in a manner that constructs a future in which human beings can act interdependently and make sense of themselves, others, and social structures in ways that optimize the coordination and productivity of their interactions, and constitutes a world sensitive to and considerate of all stakeholders. Leadership, then, is not something we do a priori, or before the fact, but something we experience through more interactive, iterative, and reflective processes.

To develop leadership, then, means that we must teach students/participants how to enact interactive, adaptive, socially reflective processes together, and help them better understand the impacts, intended and unintended, that interdependent social actions have on the worlds in which we live.

To this end, this session explores a model that develops leadership capacity while also teaching students how to Lead with CAIR in an increasingly uncertain, complex and interdependent world. Participants will use the four pillars of CAIR—Choice, Action, Impact, Reflection--to better understand how to help students become more engaged, impactful citizens in their local, national, and international communities.

Choice: All leaders must choose how to make sense of increasingly uncertain, unbounded social situations. As our world becomes increasingly interdependent and diverse, traditional or default ways of thinking can no longer be our only choice of how to make sense of complex problems. Accordingly, complex problem solving is essential for today’s leaders, who must learn how to not just think outside the box, but to think as if the box does not exist.

Action: Although making sense of increasingly complex social situations is important, leaders must eventually act into those situations in a manner that allows them to advance productively and appropriately. All problem solving requires interaction and two paradoxical interactive contexts are explored: 1. Collaboration, which requires today’s leaders to navigate the inherent human dilemma of being social and individual at the same time. Now, more than ever, leaders must cooperate with diverse stakeholders while maintaining and protecting their competitive edge; and 2. Advocacy, which requires today’s leaders to choose particular ways of thinking and make decisions about particular ways of being, while remaining open to diverse ways of thinking and different ways of being. In other words, leaders must have voice while, at the same time, give voice to those who disagree.

Impact: Today’s leaders must understand that all decisions to act have social impact, an “afterlife” that will become part of the social structures in which we all must live together. Whether intended or unintended, human actions influence social structures, including the identities, roles, privileges, rights, responsibilities, etc. that become negotiated within those structures. Today’s leaders, therefore, must develop a capacity to understand how self and others become social beings in increasingly open, mediated social systems.

Reflection: Today’s leaders must develop the personal capacity to become critically self-reflective. Leaders must not only question the actions they take and the impacts they have, but how they choose to make sense of and think about the worlds in which they live. Critical self-reflection moves leadership beyond the ability to simply solve problems to a state in which our socially constructed ways of being continue to become questioned and re-imagined.

Program Format: The program is highly interactive and involves a variety of activities to promote dialogue among academics and practitioners of leadership education.

Learning Objectives: At the end of this session participants should:
• Have a greater appreciation for the leadership challenges and opportunities that exist in an increasingly interdependent, turbulent social world
• Have a greater understanding of the complex interactive dynamics that influence social contexts and the fulfillment of leadership moments
• Have an increased repertoire of tools, approaches and insights to explore more deeply-rooted ways of thinking and being together

Sub Unit

• Leadership Education

Presenters

• Thomas J. Yannuzzi, Kennesaw State University

• Nyasha M. GuramatunhuCooper, Kennesaw State University