Integral Leadership ReviewForeword to Insights on Leadership, Volume 2: Developing Leaders
Richard A. Couto
Antioch University
About a year ago, Russ Volckmann wrote me to explain that some of my work suggested that I was an integral leadership theorist. I greeted this news with as much satisfaction as Moliere’s character, Monsieur Jourdain. Jourdain was delighted to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life. Not that naïve, I knew there were many more than two ways to study leadership, not just prose or verse; some complain that we have too many ways to do so. Still I was pleased to know of yet another theoretical approach and that there was a name for some of what I did from intuition and tacit beliefs. Having learned that I did integral leadership theory, unlike Jourdain, I set out to find out more about what it is.
Russ and I arranged to have an hour long telephone call in which he explained to me the nature of integral leadership theory. I certainly liked what I heard—individual and social human systems and the interrelationship of their development, complexity theory, but most of all the integration of the work of a set of writers about whom I was hoping to learn more. Several students had introduced me already to Ken Wilber, the Shambhala Institute, Presence, and related work and authors. Russ has been an excellent guide introducing me to the work of Don Beck, Christopher Cohen, Clare Graves, and Jenny Wade as well as to people, such as Sara Nora Ross, who introduced me to the work of many others contributing to integral leadership theory. Soon, I began finding integral leadership theory where I had not seen it before and in talking with people, I learned many others had preceded me in the discovery of this interesting set of ideas or related ones. I felt like Monsieur Jourdain again knowing now that I spoke and thought in a language shared by many others. Russ invited me to a portal of an exciting world of big questions and earnest, insightful ways to address them.
This publication offers you a similar invitation. If you are coming to integral leadership theory for the first time, you are in for a genuine treat. If you are already familiar with this work, you already know the quality of Russ’s insightful interviews with thoughtful people, some of whom, like me, did not know they were integral leadership theorists. Russ is building a much needed movement to develop valuable intellectual, teaching, and action networks. He provides a hub to the human spokes in that movement, such as the people in this issue who question the inevitability of the unsatisfactory and inadequate present state of affairs and suggest effective and humane alternatives. You will find in these pages a delightful combination of a scholarship of discovery and of synthesis; insights into the way things work; ideas about how they might work better; and interpretations of the related ideas of other thinkers.
Volume 2 of Insights on Leadership compiles interviews from the Integral Leadership Review with Raine Eisler, Fred Kofman, Susanne Cook-Greuter, Leo Burke, and William R. Torbert. Russ’s interaction with each of them explores central questions of human purpose of individuals and groups—families, communities, organizations, nations, and global society—and their dynamic relationships. I found connections to leadership literature with which I was familiar—James MacGregor Burns, Howard Gardner, Robert Greenleaf, Ronald Heifetz, Jean Lipman-Blumen, and Margaret Wheatley; validation for my own approaches to leadership praxis such as action research and personal competencies; parallels with social scientists whose work puts the study of leadership studies in a much larger context—especially the early and phenomenological work of Karl Marx, the efforts of Emile Durkheim to ground individual actions in the differences among social groups, and Gunnar Myrdal and Kurt Lewin’s forays into field theory; and more insight into the set of thinkers to whom Russ had introduced me. Fred Kofman’s interview offers wonderful insights into Ken Wilber’s work in particular.
While it is clear that integral theory has many contributing streams of thought, it is not merely their confluence. As Russ explains, this volume is “about surfacing ideas and perspectives that will help us build an integral theory of leadership.” As in my case, Russ finds integral thinkers in each of the people interviewed here, even if they are unfamiliar with integral theory. What emerges from the words on these pages is an approach to integrating theories of leadership with awareness that behavior and development have correlates to the interior states of individuals, to culture and to systems.
My manuscript text has marginal notes and underlining throughout suggesting the numerous insights that I gained: dominator and partnership models with their correlates to the forms of power from power over to power within; the utility of archetypes of gender and of heroes in understanding and explaining leadership; the swamp land of fear which undermines efforts to construct hierarchies of actualization; the difference of members and parts of a social system; the different strategies entailed in incorporating people and groups, at different levels of development, in joint efforts whether it is going on a holiday or pursuing lofty values; the importance of horizontal development at any stage and the inherent contradiction of working to “achieve” a higher stage of development; the personal elements of leadership such as compassion and awareness; the skills of leadership such as listening; the many facets of spirituality and their relevance for leadership; empowering as “the exercise of power in an appropriately vulnerable, mutuality-enhancing, transforming way”; and the role of action logic, research, and theatre to create genuine learning organizations and communities.
More than anything else, I left these pages with insights into some wonderful work on leadership and a sense of the importance for me to look into them further. When you leave these pages, I hope you will have gained as many and as good insights as I did. Also, I hope that you will have your own reason for thanking Russ Volckmann for this book and all his other work of which it is a part.
Richard Couto, a founding faculty member of the Antioch PhD program, has a background of practice and scholarship in community development. He directed the Center for Health Services, an outgrowth of the student movement, at Vanderbilt University from 1975 to 1988. The program pioneered in campus and community collaboration and bridged the student movement of the 1960s and the current programs of civic engagement of higher education. He won several national awards for this work. In 1991, he became a founding faculty member of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond; the world's first such undergraduate school. While there he helped start and continue several community-based pedagogical and research programs. He left in 2002, as Modlin Chair in Leadership Studies, to join the Antioch program full-time. His most recent books focus on community leadership, democratic theory and practice and a curriculum of courage for higher education.
His current research efforts include completing an edited book, Reflections on Leadership,commemorating the 25th anniversary of James MacGregor Burns's book, Leadership. He is also meeting with a group, directed by Burns, on a general theory of leadership. He has entered fields of inquiry new to him—terrorism and political leadership, creativity, leadership competencies in the political sector, and sacred texts and leadership.
He maintains a practice in leadership as well. As consultant to colleges and universities, he has helped design programs to demonstrate the role of higher education as an engine and catalyst of regional development. He traveled to Iraq twice in 2003 to help establish sustainable partnerships between US institutions and Iraqi institutions in health care, medical education, elementary and higher education, and Iraq's cultural heritage.
He grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Being a Boston Red Sox fan, since birth, gave him the courage to maintain hope in the face of disappointment. He maintains his belief in democratic values and practices despite his time in higher education.
