Leadership-Interview-Transkript - Sozialpsychologie - Goethe ...

think most people learn leadership by looking at models, so, past leaders, current leaders, and
emulating that behavior they see. If you think about the domain of leadership, there’s a
knowledge-base of what to do and how to do, and that’s all learnable, right? I go to school, to
learn all different sorts of kinds of knowledge, and leadership would be no different.
Leadership has a set of skills associated with it – influence, for example. Those skills can be
learned. They’re not something you have when you’re young. You get experiences, you test
yourself, you get feedback, you get better at it. So, I think that a lot of the key things that we
look at in terms of leadership are in fact things that you can go out and get experiences.
Rolf van Dick: If it’s so easy, basically, to be a good leader, why does it so often not work?
Why can we see so many managers in organizations, politicians or other people in influential
positions, that obviously are no good? Employees get ill, burn out, etc. Why can’t we just
teach the right people to do the right things and the world would be a better place?
Frederick Morgeson: Yeah, I would say it’s learnable, but I wouldn’t say it’s easy to learn.
And so, these are challenging things to learn. I think oftentimes, you are sort of fighting
against your own in inherent tendencies that you’ve learned from being a child. And so, it’s
learnable, but it takes great effort. Why do we have so many bad leaders? I think, people
haven’t learned the lessons of their own experiences and the experiences of others. And so,
when I think about how one develops these things, if you have to go out and get experiences,
that are the target and what your development needs, you also have to reflect those
experiences and somehow try to extract the lessons from those experiences. And what we
know about most managers, is that they have a lot of experiences, but they don’t take the time
to reflect upon those experiences. And that’s the big problem.
Rolf van Dick: So, it’s maybe a limited time available, but do you also think that probably
people cannot figure it out for themselves, they need a coach or a good mentor or role models
as you say, do you think that helps or is a requirement?
Frederick Morgeson: So I think there’s some sorts of what we call ‘naturals’, right, that are
just really good at it and don’t need a lot of instruction. I think most people do need help. I
think most of the learning that occurs from a leadership standpoint is social learning. So you
learn either by direct instruction or direct feedback, or by simply trying to figure out by
looking at other people, what works and what doesn’t work. And so I think that to the extent
that you can get direct feedback, there’s literature on expert performance and expertise, and a
lot of the rules are as that you have to engage in what they call ‘deliberate practice’. You have
to engage in deliberate practice over an extended period of time. I’ve studied this across a lot
of different group performance domains, and one kind of rule is that you need about 10 years
of deliberate practice to become an expert at something. And I think that would apply for
leadership as well. The thing about deliberate practice is that it’s practice with someone who’s
better at it than you. So you need to get that feedback! So if you don’t systematically go out,
identify mentors, or get coaches, or get some other kind of experiences, this is a big problem.
Rolf van Dick: What about yourself? Did you have a good mentor, or you told me that you
worked as a manager in the family business in the recording industry, did you encounter
people that were really inspiring by the characteristics you described previously?
Frederick Morgeson: Sure, I think about my own sort of style and my own leadership, but I
sort of think that my first leaders were the most influential, this is my mum and dad. They
showed me some key traits that are kind of leadership and character but also just more general
kinds of things that you can leverage as a leader. They demonstrated a strong work ethic. You