A Long Hard Look in the Mirror: Assessing our Role in the Leadership Crisis

Kaiser, R.B. (2011, February). A Long Hard Look in the Mirror: Assessing our Role in the Leadership Crisis. Session presented at the APA Division 13 (Society for Consulting Psychology) midwinter conference, Las Vegas, NV.

It is striking that just as the leadership industry grew by leaps and bounds, the quality of leadership in government, non-profit, and corporate sectors has plummeted. This interactive session asks the critical question: have we been complicit in the leadership crisis? What have we done, and not done, that may have contributed to the problem? And what does this mean for what we should do, and should stop doing, to be part of the solution? Leaders of our professional community will first offer their thoughts then the audience will be invited to join the dialogue and offer solutions.

We will begin the session by simply reviewing two telling data trends: first, the leadership industry has seen explosive growth over the last 20 years. Second, in that same period, public confidence in government, non-profit, and corporate leadership has sunk like a rock. For instance, the Harvard Kennedy School’s latest poll of public confidence in leadership found that 69% of American respondents indicated “agree” or “strongly agree” with the statement, “We have a leadership crisis in this country today.” The facts suggest that as our professional services for developing managers into better leaders have been increasingly utilized, but the perceive quality of leadership has decreased. What gives?

It is easy to talk about contextual factors “out there”: increased market fickleness and demand for quarterly profits putting pressure on executives; reward systems that encourage questionable decision-making by emphasizing short-term financial gain over long-term value creation; lax governance and corporate oversight; and so on. But the focus of this session is to consider factors we have, as a professional body, more control over: our own assumptions, implicit and explicit goals, and practice models.

The session is intended to be a provocative and intellectually honest invitation for self-examination to explore the possibility that we may be inadvertently contributing to the problems with modern leadership. First, four senior and respected members of the Society for Consulting Psychology who work in the leadership arena will each offer their own “true confession”—a statement of how they see our field, and even themselves, sometimes being counterproductive in the shared goal of developing better leaders for the greater good. They will model the way in critically examining their own practice, and sharing the key lessons they have learned for improving their practice to better serve larger social interests in developing leadership. The second half of the session will be an invitation to session attendees to join the dialogue—by asking questions of the panelists, by sharing their own stories, and in a small group breakout session to identify needed changes to their own “standard practice.”

Panelists

• Manuelle Charbonneau, Affiliation: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California
• Richard R. Kilburg, Johns Hopkins University
• David B. Peterson, PDI Ninth House
• Vicki V. Vandaveer, The Vandaveer Group, Inc.
• Robert B. Kaiser, Kaplan DeVries Inc. (Chair)

*Note: there are no handouts or downloads for this session (it was a panel discussion).

Filed under: Conference Presentations

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