Why I Love School So Much

I was filling out the sheet of the self-assessments for my leadership class, and something struck me. I said to myself that these quizzes are just telling us what we know about ourselves, but the reality is that they do more.  They give a structure and form to what you’re self-aware about.  There are issues with the objectifying a subjective matter, but it can be useful in knowing where you need to work on yourself.

And for me, that is the point of this whole class, and the MBA in broad strokes. It is about self-improvement, and a chance to work with people and think about issues you face every day and be conscious of your actions. The truth is that much of what I read and was lectured on will soon pass out of my mind – how much high school chemistry do you remember? You might improve your career with a certification, but that is secondary. What’s important, as much as the knowledge is this chance. I think it’s a lot like why poets go and get an MFA when there’s no commercial market for poetry; going to school allows you to think around subjects that get lost in the daily grind of life and you have a chance to reflect on the world and better understand it.

All this is good, since I just registered for the fall semester, so now we’re talking about sinking costs into the project as well.

On subjectivity in my studies

When I was an undergraduate, for the first two years I was a declared chemistry major, but I was taking English classes on the side. I liked both of them, but if you pressed me about which I liked better (especially by sophomore year, when I was lost in the crowd in the big organic and physics seminars) it would have been English. As I have long described the joy of English classes, there is no wrong answer. That freedom felt wonderful to someone who had always done well finding the one right answer. It was like giving an artist a blank canvas instead of a coloring book.

Now don’t get me wrong. I still liked chemistry. Lab was a blast. I liked watching what we were learning turn into something you could see up close and personal – even if all you got was either a white crystal or a clear oily liquid for your unknown. But seriously, I don’t know how we are going to solve any STEM crisis when you take 19-year-olds and tell them that they need to know this reaction pathway and then reproduce it. It wasn’t really understanding the physical process, but those damn drawings and the right steps were hard to remember. A PhD candidate friend of mine passed one of his professor’s wisdom to me when I was complaining about the memorization issue: there’s a reason you write it down. I digress though. At the time, I felt too constrained. I also preferred to read novels than to get glass-eyed over a text book.

I eventually swung back and understood why the regimented form was needed from a pedagogical standpoint. There are a number of foundational things you need to know in chemistry to build upon the next step. Chemistry is often taught as a parallel to the process we came into knowledge about the physical world. You start with the basic properties of matter, and then get more granular until you are looking at the development of theories of atomic structure. From the Greek “unbreakable” to a plum-pudding model to the familiar solar system  model to a quantum model where orbitals are about probabilities. Then these atoms combine based off of the individual property of the atom or the ion. It is cool stuff. In English, there is less of this. There are few, if any, foundational texts. The requirements at my undergrad at the time were just early and modern American and British literature, plus a class in Shakespeare. You could take those in any order. You could turn in anything you wanted. You could say you wanted to be a poet and people took you seriously.

 

Funny thing though. I had the chance to teach basic composition classes in grad school. (For some reason liking to read prose and wanting to be a poet qualifies you for a position teaching basic argument). The hardest thing was quantifying the grades. It is easy to tell what piece of writing is better than another, especially when students are all responding to the same assignment, but putting numbers to those subjective comparisons is a futile exercise. It made me think when I was working as a TA for the chemistry department at my undergrad. The students had to turn in their problem sets the professor assigned and I graded. They had to identify their unknown.  There were clear cut answers. From a teaching perspective, this was simpler. It was easier to tell a student just what they needed to work on. Advice for a writing student is much harder, and you feel as if your words are ignored even if the student revises the text.

Right now, I’m studying leadership in the context of a MBA program.

I was hoping that there would be clear-cut answers. “Do these things, and you will be a better leader. Let’s role play leading” Alas, that is not the case. Being a leader is situational, and there is no one thing that you can do. It depends on the leader, the organization, the followers, and the goals. It is a process, but there are goals to work towards. It feels like it is stuck in a weird middle ground between the subjectivity of the arts and the objectivity of science. It is a whole brain process, but just studying it isn’t enough.  I need to take what we’re learning and apply it to my day to day life. I feel it leaking in, if only by the fact of studying leadership am I conscious of my acts and how they are not just what I am doing daily but how I am leading. My only regret is that the class is structured over such a short time – 8 weeks isn’t enough to fully absorb what we’re talking about and then to actualize it in practice. I find my mind going in the day or so after the class and then it fades and I have to re-energize and refocus for the next week’s class. Part of me is looking forward to accounting, but part of me is already missing this class.

A Problem with Self-Reporting

So.  I’m sitting here, taking these self-assessments for class. 

The scale runs from one to seven, from strongly disagree all the way to strongly agree.

I hate self-reporting because I automatically limit a chunk of my options in almost every kind of survey. For me, one and seven are almost out the door as options.  I like to say that I don’t like choosing the extremes because I have an active imagination. Even when I feel strongly about something, I discount it because I can imagine feeling stronger. Someone less charitable would say that I equivocate. Maybe, just maybe, they’re correct.

How can men help "Leaning In"

I am an MBA student, and I have been studying the benefits of diversity in the workplace.  I came across Sheryl Sandberg's TED talk and that led me to start reading her book.  My worry is that "Leaning In" by itself might not be enough. There have been several waves of feminism and the stats aren't moving enough.  There are structural issues at play, but I can't help but wonder, as a future business leader, what can someone like me do to help facilitate women's Leaning In? Is it just accepting blind resumes, or would it go further to imposing hard quotas in the hiring of women to leadership positions?  I want to be an ally, now and going forward, but I don't know what I can do on a micro level. Any advice is appreciated. 

Is Emotional Intelligence a Worthwhile Metric?

I had a student when I was teaching English 101 who wrote a paper about the idea of multiple intelligences. This was ten years ago, but I still remember it because he was an intelligent student and the topic was novel. All I was aware of as a measure of intelligence was the IQ, and having a high IQ myself, I knew that that couldn’t be the end of personal quantification, nor a great indicator of success.

We’ve been talking about Emotional Intelligence in class and in the readings and it sound like a good concept, but if you unpack it a bit it feels troublesome.   

For me, the biggest issue is about self-reporting. On an IQ test, the whole bit is about pattern recognition. There is a right or wrong continuation to the pattern, and you’re timed. These tests are often given and scored by professionals. I was tested once I was a child and theoretically at the time it was a pretty fixed number.  All I was ever told that it was more than two standard deviations beyond average.  At the time I wanted a number, but it was quite obvious I was generally one of the smartest students in the room.  You lose this with self-reporting. First, there is no right answer. Secondly, it is bounded on a spectrum. Thirdly, people lie. The fact of taking a test allows your mind to think of what may be the right answer and what may be the best that will give you the highest score. It’s a Heisenberg thing, I suppose. I can’t give myself a 180 IQ even by guessing against the administrator.

Then there’s this. I took the tests. I was highly emotionally intelligent. I think I am good at naming the feelings I have, and being able to control them in the situations in which they arise. However, if you asked me, in general, how I was at reading people’s emotions and reacting to them, I’d say I was horrible. Specifically I didn’t have a problem with it. Am I less self-aware than I knew, or was I gaming the test on some level. The problem is that there is no right answer when it comes to emotions. It is a highly subjective thing that is given the illusion of exactness by drawing numbers from a spectrum and then averaged and averaged again. I think it might be fair to talk about someone being more or less emotionally intelligent, but the quantification is a bridge too far. 

Finally, the problem with numbering is that emotional intelligence can change within the person on a short time period depending on the subject’s cognitive load. Basically, the less you have going on with your own life can free up your mind for being open to other’s existences and what they have coursing through their limbic system. This brings me to mind of a thought I had in class: what is the EQ of a psychopath? They are able to get by in society by performing the emotions that they feel are supposed to feel, but have none of their own. Therefore their mind is clear and they can read people, but they lack empathy. 

Overall, I like the idea of multiple intelligences, emotional intelligence being one of many axes that we can use to judge ourselves and improve ourselves. However, I would not put too much stock into it until we can solve some of the glaring issues with it.

Quick thought on Charisma

Earlier when we were talking about trait theory, it came up that most traits can be taught to some extent. The exception being charisma.

Now, in readng about the transformational leader in our book, they emphasize the importance of charisma for a transformational leader, even saying that some people overlap the idea of the two things -- you can't be transformational without being chariamatic.
So the questions arises, can someone with charisma be a good leader? Do they become leaders at all, or if they rise to management positions, is their leadership role only based on their senority? That is will they be leaders or just followers?

Quick thought on Followers

 

I know this came up before in our reading, but what is the role of the follower? There will be more in any organization than leaders, but their traits seem absent from the discussion in the book. Leadership, as a relaional, process-based thing is dependent on the followers.
That said, what are the traits of a follower? How can you be a better follower for a leader you have chosen to follow.
Finally, how does the leader/follower dynamic work within the individual? I am both a leader and a follower in my organization (or I hope so), are both of these roles part of an ongoing process that dialectially feeds organically to each other, or are they distinct roles?
I, uh, have no answers for any of these; they are just the things that came to mind when reading.