How to Develop Public Leaders

by Todd L. Pittinsky

ANYONE WHO has responsibility for the professional development of others knows that leadership is notoriously difficult to define and operationalize. Attempts to describe it often suffer from what I call the synecdochal fallacy. As in the Buddhist story of the men of Savatthi, blind from birth, who were allowed to touch a different part of an elephant and then asked to describe what an elephant is, many experts and practitioners make the mistake of presuming that one part of leadership represents the whole.

This mistake would be of little consequence if leadership development weren’t such a pressing concern. But, in fact, worries about developing leaders for the next generation are being expressed in virtually all sectors of society. Nearly three-quarters of the respondents in last year’s National Leadership Index believed that the United States will decline as a nation unless its leaders improve.

So if leadership-development interventions regularly make one narrow skill synonymous with the entire set of competencies a leader needs, then precisely what does that broader skill set comprise? To move toward an answer, the Center for Public Leadership (CPL) convened a task force to address this question.

The task force included CPL faculty David Gergen IOP 1984, Barbara Kellerman, Ronald Heifetz MPA 1983, and myself, former Kennedy School Dean Joseph Nye, Harvard psychology professor Richard Hackman, and Ruth Wageman, associate professor of business administration at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a visiting scholar at CPL. Betsy Myers MPA 2000, CPL’s executive director, and I served as cochairs.

The task force’s deliberations, which took place over the course of this past academic year, yielded a model for leadership development in the public sector that comprises seven distinct competencies:

Catalytic: identifying, analyzing, and judging complex collective challenges and opportunities, and mobilizing others to remain focused on addressing them.
Contextual: knowing the cultural, historical, institutional, intellectual, and policy context in which one operates.
Interpersonal: modulating one’s behavior in order to interact effectively in a variety of settings.
Leadership Theory: understanding the fundamental leadership concepts, constructs, and research findings.
Organizational: planning, organizing, coordinating, and executing collective action.
Personal: being self-aware, that is, able to reflect on one’s thinking, feeling, and behavior; knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses, predilections, dominant tendencies, and values.
Social Systems: analyzing dynamic social and political systems.

These seven competencies are shown in the accompanying graphic. The degree people providing leadership will draw on any of these competencies will vary according to the particular challenge or opportunity.

The task force has produced a report for faculty members that explains how the competencies fit together and identifies objectives that should inform any leadership development program, among them: ensuring that the program is amenable to assessment and evaluation. A second version of the report includes a planning guide, which enables students to be more strategic in their choice of leadership-related courses and experiences. Both documents are available at www.ksg.harvard.edu/leadership/model.

In response to the increasingly urgent cry for better public leadership, CPL’s model brings a disciplined and analytical approach to the leadership development challenges at the heart of the Kennedy School’s aspirations.

Todd L. Pittinsky is assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School and research director at the Center for Public Leadership.