My friend and colleague Shiree Teng recently sent me a fascinating article on the role of racial assumptions in leadership development.

The article was created by Leadership for a New Era, a collaborative research initiative launched by the Leadership Learning Community, and examines the assumptions behind current approaches to leadership development, principally a focus on individuals.

According to this piece, American society is fully bought into a view of leadership based on the following principles:

• Personal responsibility and individualism: The belief that people control their fates regardless of social position and that individual behaviors and choices determine material outcomes.

• Meritocracy: The belief that resources and opportunities are distributed according to talent and effort and that social components of “merit”—such as access to inside information of powerful social networks, are of lesser importance or do not matter.
• Equal opportunity: The belief that employment, education and wealth accumulation are “level playing fields” and that race is no longer a barrier to progress in these areas.

As a result, we ignore the underlying unfairness of in-crowd status that the majority culture enjoys. Essentially, everyone is expected to work from a level playing field but the field is anything but level. Yet people from other cultures and backgrounds (not Northern European) often do not have access to the networks and information that allow majority culture members to, or example, easily walk into a new work situation and know the “social rules” that will allow them to get ahead.

Where this set of observations is most poignant for me is in its ramifications for leadership development training. Leadership development that focuses on individuals, usually CEOs, assumes that everyone is in the same position relative to using the information gained from the experience. Yet the subtle ways in which dialogue, work processes and even humor in the work place are reinforcing of dominant culture practices does indeed make entry harder for others. An awareness of this dynamic, and efforts to bring together teams and communities for leadership development, could work against this bias.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Leadership, Nonprofit Sector, Recommended Reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.