An Interview with Gary DePaul

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Ed Battistella
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Gary A. DePaul has a Ph.D. and Ed.M. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Educational Organization and Leadership and completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has two decades of experience as a manager and scholar of management, has worked as a manager in fortune 500 companies, and consults with organizations to improve leadership practices. He is a Certified Performance Technologist (CPT) and a CPT application reviewer and presents at such associations as the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), and the Association for Talent Development (ATD).

He recently published Nine Practices of 21st Century Leadership: A Guide for Inspiring Creativity, Innovation, and Engagement.

EB: How did you get interested in leadership? And what motivated to write Nine Practices of 21st Century Leadership?

GD: For most of my academic and professional career, I only had a casual interest in leadership. Even when I studied Situational Leadership® II and Servant Leadership, I hadn’t developed a strong interest. It wasn’t until I listened to James C Hunter’s The Servant Leadership Training Course audiobook that I realized that leadership is something bigger and more important than what I traditionally had been taught. Within a few months of listening to this audiobook, I started discovering new themes in leadership that radically differs from tradition themes. The more I learned, the more passionate I became about the research and discovery of what is involved in serious leadership thinking and practice.

EB: What did you discover in the course of the research?

GD: In the past thirty years, leadership has radically evolved from what we traditionally think of leadership. I contrast the difference by labeling the older way as traditional leadership and the new way as 21st Century Leadership. I identified 13 traditional leadership assumptions that can cause more harm than good. I also identified seven leadership principles, 26 new beliefs, and nine distinct best practices. Here’s some of what’s new:

    • 21st Century Leadership emphasizes interactions between leading and collaboration while de-emphasizing roles such as leader and follower.
    • Management involves accomplishing goals through others. That’s not what leadership is about. Leadership is about helping others mature their mental and moral qualities, capabilities, and behaviors. This is a fancy way to say that leadership is about building character.
    • Leadership is action that focuses on others and not yourself.
    • The practice of leadership is bi-directional. By helping others build character, you inadvertently build your own character.
    • Everyone can practice leadership regardless of role.
    • Sharing your own mistakes builds your credibility and helps others trust you more.
    • Leadership doesn’t reside in one person or one role. Fully evolved teams consist of everyone practicing leadership and collaboration.
    • Teams and organizations that are fully practicing leadership effectively are more productive and work in environments that promote safety, engagement, creativity, and innovation.

EB: What are the implications of this new thinking for large organizations?

GD: Several organizations provide leadership development for managers and executives. Not only do these programs exclude individual contributors, they tend to be more about management and traditional leadership. If organizations want to earnestly develop leadership within their ranks, they need to rethink who should receive leadership training, the training content, and how training is delivered.

In addition, those in charge of diversity initiatives and the strategy portfolio should leverage the principles, beliefs, and practices to improve their outcomes. Just as important, owners of diversity, strategy, and training should harmonize how they leverage leadership. Doing so greatly improves positive results.

EB: You introduce a series of metaphors: being a detective, doctor, guide, and gardener. What was your idea?

GD: At a glance, readers can gain insight into what’s involved in the nine best practices of leadership. At the very least, I want to stimulate curiosity so readers would explore why I chose a particular practice title.

Here’s an example of how I title one of the practices: In Develop Like Scouts, readers discover that this practice involves “scouting” for new ideas and talent. Think of a baseball or football scout. Teams need to search outside their team to find insightful methods, techniques, and resources that promote development and improve productivity. Sometimes, this is achieved by recruiting new talent to the team – talent that brings new ways of thinking about how the team works.

EB: Who is the audience for Nine Practices of 21st Century Leadership?

GD: The audience is anyone who wants to improve their leadership capabilities. Everyone can apply these leadership practices in their role, so the audience isn’t limited to managers and executives.

Another audience are researchers and scholars. In the book, there’s a wealth of sources to support researchers’ valuable work and their achievement in advancing the leadership field. In the book, I have about 80 quotations, more than 150 table notes, more than 400 endnotes, and more than 135 bibliography references, so there’s plenty for researchers and scholars to leverage.

EB: How is leadership different from management?

GD: If you survey 100 leadership experts, they’ll agree that there’s a difference between leadership and management. Ask them to explain the difference, most will have difficulty doing so.

Here’s the short and simple answer (I’ll blog about the long version in the next month or so):

Management serves three functions: Set goals, design, and monitor. This happens at three organizational levels:

    • Organization
    • Process (typically includes project management)
    • People

You could have executives managing the overall organization, process managers, project managers, and people managers. These management roles are formally assigned to employees by human resources (HR).

In contrast, leadership is something that HR cannot assign. Although you might hear some describe senior executives as having leadership roles, that’s inaccurate. Many executives fail to practice leadership regardless of having a leadership label. Everyone can practice leadership (or not) regardless of role or career level.

Leadership involves a set of practices that you apply to any process or action that is assigned to a specific role. For example, CEOs create and maintain the vision statement of a company. That’s a management task. Therefore, creating a vision statement can be accomplished with or without practicing leadership. A CEO not practicing leadership might create a vision statement during a retreat with his or her direct reports. That really isn’t how leadership is practice at the CEO level. However, a CEO that practices leadership might incorporate the input from employees at all organizational levels and leverage employees to refine, improve, and own the vision statement.

Here’s another way to think about this: Managers of people hire, fire, promote, demote, “micromanage,” conduct annual reviews, and increase/decrease pay (just a few managerial tasks). Leadership has to do with how you perform these tasks. How a manager acts when reviewing someone’s performance differs substantially depending if the manager practices leadership or not.

EB: What makes a good leader, or a great one?

GD: People who are good at leadership study leadership principles, beliefs, and practices and then attempt to apply leadership to their role. People great at leadership do the same. However, they also collect feedback (direct and anonymous) about how well they practice leadership. They then create one to two objectives to improve their leadership practices based on their feedback.
Those good at leadership casually and infrequently study leadership. Those great at leadership continuously strive to learn how they can improve and regularly set objectives for improving their leadership practices.

EB: You also talk about continual growth for leaders. Why is that important?

GD: Here are three reasons why continual growth is important:

    1. Arrested development. People tend to develop skills until they are satisfied. Once satisfied, they discontinue to develop. The challenge of leadership is that most people stop developing their leadership capabilities too soon and are, at best, partially successful at practicing leadership. Leadership is so complex, you would need a lifetime to really master the practices. However, mastering a few can substantially make a positive difference. Continue to improve and your impact will be extraordinary!
    2. Old habits. Anyone who studies habit theory knows that old habits never disappear fully. People can easily regress to old habits without realizing it. This includes practicing leadership. Anyone can slip back to using coercion or traditional leadership practices that are easier than practicing 21st Century Leadership.
    3. Evolution. In the past 30 years, the leadership field has radically changed and continues to evolve. I’m excited about the developments in the next couple of decades, and if you’re serious about practicing effective leadership, you’ll want to keep current with what’s developing in the leadership field. Doing so might make a substantial difference in how you effectively serve others.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

GD: Thank you for this opportunity.

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An Interview with Alicia von Stamwitz

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Ed Battistella
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Alicia von Stamwitz is an award-winning freelance author and editor with the religious press. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Sun, America, The United Church Observer, and St. Anthony Messenger. Among others she has interviewed Jean Vanier, Winner of the 2015 Templeton Prize, the Benedictine nun Sister Joan Chittister, Quaker activist Parker Palmer, art historian Sister Wendy Beckett, and essayist Kathleen Norris. In cooperation with the Vatican, she recently she compiled and edited two books of the writing of Pope Francis: THE SPIRIT OF SAINT FRANCIS: Inspiring Words from Pope Francis and THE BLESSING OF FAMILY: Inspiring Words From Pope Francis.

Alicia Von Stamwitz was born in Havana, Cuba, and now lives in Missouri with her family. You can follow her on Twitter at other visit her website to learn more.

EB: Tell us about the first book you worked on with the Vatican Publishing House: THE SPIRIT OF SAINT FRANCIS: Inspiring Words from Pope Francis. How did this project come about?

AVS: As you may know, after his March 2013 election Jorge Bergoglio chose the name “Francis” in honor of one of the most beloved figures in Christendom, Francis of Assisi. Within the first year of his papacy, many books were published on the pope’s life and words, but none focused on the intersection of the pope’s message vis-à-vis his chosen namesake. So one morning I decided to phone the Vatican to pitch the idea. I’d met the Vatican Publishing House editors several times at conferences, but I wasn’t sure if they’d remember me or whether they were the right people to talk to about this proposal. Still, I told them I was working with a Franciscan publisher in the U.S. and that we wanted to publish a compilation of the pope’s words on Franciscan themes like simplicity, joy, love for creation, the poor, peace, and so on. I thought we would have to jump through a million hoops to get permission to do this, but they liked the idea and said yes right away.

EB: It must be daunting to be the editor for Pope Francis, or any pope. Were you at all nervous about this project?

AVS: Not nervous, exactly. I’d say I was anxious to get this word-portrait right. On the micro level, the more closely I looked at the official Vatican texts of his writings and speeches—reviewing something like half a million words—the more often I saw that writers quoting the pope sometimes ignored the context or misinterpreted his words. Often, I could trace the problem to a poor translation. So I checked and rechecked the context of every quote, and I often went back to the original Spanish or Italian texts when the English text appeared to have an omission or error. I was very careful, and it helped to know that Vatican editors would review every word of the final manuscript—that was one of the terms of our agreement. On the macro level, I was anxious to reflect as accurately as possible Pope Francis’ core message and unique spiritual “accent.”

EB: You had to arrange and select the readings. What was your plan? How did you arrange items so that the whole collection would have a larger impact than the parts?

AVS: I began by reading practically everything Pope Francis has said or written since his election, which took me several months. It was overwhelming at first, but it was also fun once I started to recognize patterns and recurring highlights in his speeches and writings. I clipped the most compelling quotes and began arranging them on the floor of my office, color-coding the strips of papers and index cards thematically: blue for quotes on war and peace, orange for quotes on love and forgiveness, green for quotes on the environment, etc. I had no idea when I started if I’d end up with 5 chapters or 15. But as I selected and grouped what I thought were the best quotes—including a lot of his off-the-cuff remarks, which can be particularly revealing—an organic order began to suggest itself. Then I paired these piles with the primary themes associated with the life and legacy of Francis of Assisi. I ended up with 10 chapters that both trace the spiritual path and mirror the pope’s keynote: A real encounter with the Divine (chapters 1-3) leads to personal transformation (4-6) and positive action that makes the world a better place (7-10).

EB: Can you tell us a little bit about the second book, THE BLESSING OF FAMILY: Inspiring Words From Pope Francis?

AVS: This, too, is a compilation. I didn’t pitch this one to the Vatican; they came up with the idea and asked me if I’d like to do it in advance of the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia this September. The process was the same, but it was not as intense because by this time I had a better grasp of the pope’s body of writings and speeches. This book gathers his nuggets on love, marriage, raising children, and caring for elderly parents. He obviously gets the struggles many modern couples and families face, so it’s not all pious stuff. For example, he says, “I always give this advice to newlyweds: ‘Argue as much as you like. If the plates fly, let them! But never end the day without making peace! Never!’ ” He also talks a lot about the importance of cherishing and caring for frail and sick family members, probably because he had first-hand experience with that. His own mother was paralyzed after giving birth to her fifth child, so twelve-year-old Jorge stepped up to help run the household.

EB: How did you settle into a career as a religion writer/editor?

AVS: By default. I tried teaching, twice, and I enjoyed working with kids but as an introvert I found it draining to be “on” all day. Fortunately, a friend recommended me for a bilingual editorial and sales position at a Catholic publishing house, and I knew shortly after taking the job that publishing would be a better fit. My employers, the Redemptorists, a religious order of priests and brothers, were incredibly supportive and generous: they helped me get a full scholarship to return to college and study journalism, and they set me up with a home office when I had my first child. By then, I was writing short articles for the house magazine and learning how to edit book-length works.

EB: Outside of Francis, who are your favorite authors?

AVS: Ach, an impossible question! But here are a handful that spring to mind, old favorites and new: Walker Percy, Graham Greene, Katherine Mansfield, Jim Shepard, Salvatore Scibona, Scott Russell Sanders, Brian Doyle, Bruce Lawrie, Naomi Shihab Nye, Wendell Berry. (I have links to some of my favorite short essays, articles and poems on my website under the “Notebook” tab.)

EB: Thanks for chatting with us.

AVS: Thank you!

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What to watch for in Go Set a Watchman

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Ed Battistella
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Harper Lee’s new (!?) book Go Set a Watchman has got a lot in it—a lot to like, some things to be annoyed about, and plenty to ponder.

What’s to like? Relevance. There’s never a bad time for a conversation about race and class in America (though as my friend Lisa Sandlin posted, it’s too bad this book didn’t come out in 1962). The issues raised seem particularly timely in light of the confederate flag, videotaped police violence and the strange case of Rachel Dolezal, to name just a few. Lee provides insight into the motives and thinking of the polite racists like Atticus, Hank Clinton, Alexandra, and maybe Scout herself. She walks us through a thought piece about the race and class with relevance far beyond the South.

The period writing is still solid and there were some nice ironic touches as well, some of them unintentional, as when Scout is grateful for her Aunt Alexandra for taking care of the aging, arthritic Atticus.

What’s to not like? Atticus, of course. It’s like growing up and discovering that the people you admired as a child are not the men and women you thought they were. But that’s Lee’s point. And I wish there had been more exploration of Henry Clinton, whose membership in the Citizen’s Council seems driven by his own tenuous social status.

Also to not like: as the novel progresses there was too much didactic exposition wrapped in too many dramatic confrontations—with just about everyone: Calpurnia, Alexandra, Hank, Atticus, Uncle Jack (who is a bit of a contrivance).

What else is to not like: the lack of context. Someone–Lee, her lawyer, the publisher, some literature professor somewhere should have been asked to provide an epilogue to the book with the backstory of its publishing and discussing the choices made by Lee and her editors. This is all the more necessary given the questions about the book’s provenance and whether it was a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird or a sequel or a bit of both. (I’m leaning to the view that it was a sequel, because our knowledge of the characters–especially the now-dead Jem and missing Dill–seem to be too much taken for granted. But that could be editing. Which is why we need some notes! What was Lee doing for all those years?)

What’s to ponder? Everything. Why does Atticus sometimes wear two watches? What’s the symbolism of young Scout’s misplaced falsies? The train versus the plane? What’s the role of nostalgia (ours, Lee’s, the characters’) in all of this? Was Atticus’s racism already present in To Kill a Mockingbird? (I think so.) What are Calpurnia’s company manners—why does she “drop her verbs in the presence of guests”? And why do the Cunninghams and Coninghams worry about their names so?

What an exciting time, I would think, to be a high school English teacher. And a good time to reread To Kill a Mockingbird.

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Reading in the summer after college

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Ed Battistella
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You’ve graduated from college with an English major. The summer is ahead of you. What do you read now that your are in charge of the reading list. I asked some 2015 Southern Oregon University grads what they are reading this summer:

Tim Molony is reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris (philosophy) and Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller (Fiction).

Shiloh Harrelson is listening to The Paper Moon by Andrea Camilleri and narrated by Grover Gardner and is reading 100 Years of Solitude and the manuscript for After This: When Life is Over Where Do We Go? by Claire Bidwell Smith.

River Marie Hardy is reading The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman, The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman and Me Before You by Jojo Moyes.

Jason Trujillo is reading To Kill a Mockingbird, Before They are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie, and The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum and listening to Jurassic Park on audio book.

Alyssa McPartland is going to read The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier, Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson, and The Secret History by Donna Tartt.

Rio Picollo is reading Fiction: The Handmaid’s Tale, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Foucault’s Pendulum (“cus I’m pretentious”) The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker and Language and Mind by Noam Chomsky and is rereading the The Sandman series by Neil Gainman

Adrienne Baudry is reading The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, Flowers for Algernon, and Great Expectations and some “junk food” fiction.

Aaryn Exparza is reading The Sociology of Education (for the MAT program) and Love: A Misadventure by Lang Leav.

Angelica Crimmins is reading Important comics by Dina Kelberman, A New Language for Falling Out of Love by Meghan Privitello, Pippi Magazine and this beast:

photo by Angelica Crimmins

Patrick Arthur is reading If How-To’s Were Enough We Would All Be Skinny, Rich, And Happy! by Brian Klemmer (“It’s a goofy title but a good read.”)

Amanda Murphy is reading Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living by Nick Offerman, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester, and Why Sex Matters by Bobbie S. Low.

Colin Cardwell is reading The Count of Monte Cristo.

Alexandria Russell is reading The Rift by Andrea Cremer.

Moses Hardin is reading Ten Great Mysteries of Edgar Allan Poe.

Elizabeth Leydsman is reading A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and rereading Jurassic Park with her husband.

Enjoy your quiz-free summer reading.

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