I saw this and thought it would be a useful resource in local vicug's.
There is a great bibliography at the end.

Kelly


How to Be a Leader in Your Field: A Guide for Students in
Professional Schools

Phil Agre
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/

Version of 15 September 2001. 3000 words.

Copyright 2001 by Phil Agre. You are welcome to forward this article
in electronic form to anyone for any noncommercial purpose. Please
do not post it on any Web sites; instead, link to it here:

http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/leader.html

A profession is more than a job -- it is a community and a culture.
Professions serve society by pooling knowledge among their members,
and by creating incentives to synthesize new knowledge. They also
help their members to build networks, find jobs, recruit staff,
start collaborative projects, and organize around the issues that
affect them. In a world without change or innovation, professions
would not be necessary. But in a world where change and innovation
are ever more intense, every occupation needs more of the
institutions and culture of traditional professions such as law,
medicine, engineering, education, librarianship, business, and
architecture.

Every profession has leaders. In a formal sense, the elected
officers of a professional society are the leaders of that
profession. Because a profession is fundamentally about knowledge,
however, the true leaders of a profession are the thought leaders:
the individuals who synthesize the thinking of the profession's
members and articulate directions for the future. Sometimes a
profession will elect its thought leaders to official positions. But
often the thought leaders prefer to lead through writing and
speaking, cutting-edge projects, and dialogue. Leadership means not
just talking but listening, and not just vision but consensus. A
leader builds a web of relationships within the profession and
articulates the themes that are emerging in the thinking of the
profession as a whole.

In a knowledge-intensive world of ceaseless innovation and change,
every professional must be a leader. This is not a universally
popular idea. Some people say, "leadership is fine for others, but I
just want a job". I want to argue that it doesn't work that way. The
skills that the leader exercises in building a critical mass of
opinion around emerging issues are the same skills that every
professional needs to stay employed at all. In the old days the
leadership-averse could hide out in bureaucracies. But as
institutions are turned inside out by technology, globalization, and
rising public and client expectations of every sort, the refuges are
disappearing. Every professional's job is now the front lines, and
the skills of leadership must become central to everyone's
conception of themselves as a professional.

But how? It is well-known that simply declaring yourself a leader
will not cause anyone to follow you. The process of becoming a
leader doesn't happen overnight, but it is perfectly methodical.
Here is a six-step recipe. Things aren't really this rigid in
practice, but you'll have no trouble varying the recipe once you get
used to it.

(1) Pick an issue. You need an issue that the profession as a whole
is not really thinking about, but which is going to be the center of
attention in five years. The issue could be technical, strategic,
managerial, policy-related, or all of the above. It could be a
problem or an opportunity or both. It could be a new method or a
whole new area of practice. It should be fairly specific, though,
and should directly address the day-to-day work of people in some
segment of the profession. "Technology" is too big. You can find an
issue in four ways:

(a) Talk to a large number of dynamic practitioners and notice a
pattern in what they are saying.

(b) Talk to people at your school. One purpose of a professional
school is to be the early-warning system for the profession -- the
surveillance center where emerging issues are articulated,
researched, and taught. Many issues that you take for granted as
lecture and paper topics in your classes actually represent the
farthest horizon so far as most practitioners are concerned.

(c) Talk to people in other professions to find issues that are
going to be important for your profession.

(d) Draw on your own experience and values to articulate an issue
that nobody else is talking about. Maybe you are simply anticipating
concerns that everybody else will be discovering independently in a
few years, or maybe you are building something new that wouldn't
have happened without you. In either case, if the issue is going to
be important to your profession in five years, you'll be doing a
public service by getting out in front of it.

In short, feel free to identify an issue that you care about and put
yourself in charge of raising the profession's awareness of it. If
putting yourself in charge feels arrogant, that's just because
you're not used to it. Focus on the issue and you'll be fine.

(2) Having chosen your issue, start a project to study it. You might
do this in context of a term paper or an independent study, or you
might organize it through the local student chapter of a
professional association. Or you might simply do it on your own
time. It's hard work, yes, but it's an investment. See if a local
faculty member will sign on as an advisor to the project, and if you
can use the faculty member's name in talking to people.

(3) Do your library work so you know any conventional wisdom that's
out there. Then talk to some working professionals who are facing
the issue, especially if they have spoken publicly about an aspect
of it. You can find these people by asking the faculty in your
school; it's their job to know everyone. If the faculty are reticent
at first to unleash you on their contacts, then work your own
contacts, for example through your fellow students or the
professional society. You can also find relevant people by reading
professional publications, attending conferences, and searching Web
sites. Tell them that your project is pulling together the
profession's experience with the issue, and ask if you can interview
them. Have a good, focused talk, make serious notes, ask if they
want to keep anything confidential, give them your card, and promise
to keep in touch. Why are they willing to talk to you? Because
you're working on an important issue, and because you're associated
with a professional school, which is a center of thinking and
networking for the field. Use the symbolic power of the university
while you're still associated with it.

(4) Pull together what you've heard. Nobody is expecting you to
solve the problems. The emphasis is more on questions than answers.
You will contribute simply by defining the whole scope of the
problems that people are facing. Make a taxonomy and give examples.
Talk about what people are doing to address the problems. Focus on
practice: the actual decisions that working professionals will have
to make, and the full range of considerations that they will have to
take into account. Most of these considerations will seem obvious
taken in isolation, but many people will be grateful to have a
complete list in front of them. Remember that professionals, no
matter how creative and intuitive they are, have to justify their
decisions in a rational way, giving reasons why they have made one
choice rather than another. You'll do a service just by laying out
the choices and reasons. Talk about the consequences people see for
the future. Just impose some order. Faculty in your school can
probably help you with this. Write clearly and concisely, and get
someone who can write well to copyedit your work.

(5) Circulate the result. Send copies to the people who helped you.
Call it a draft or interim report if you want. Give credit to the
people whose ideas you've written down. Then follow up. Get further
comments. Now write some short columns for professional
publications. Describe your project and summarize the issue. Explain
why the issue is becoming important. Concisely present the dangers
and opportunities for the profession. Your goal is to lead: to
present the profession with a valid issue that calls for action.
Again, you don't need to specify what the right action is. You only
need to give form to the issue. Make sure your published columns
provide a permanent e-mail address where people can reach you, and
ideally the URL for a Web page where you've collected materials
related to the issue.

(6) Get invited to speak at meetings. Correspond with people who
have contacted you after reading your work. Meet more people who
appreciate the significance of the issue. If you hear about someone
who is working on a similar issue, make friends. Show them that
you've read their work, give them due credit, and explore how your
projects complement one another. Expand your network to include your
profession's clients and peers. As you take in everyone's
perspectives, let your understanding of the issue grow and evolve.
Come up with many different honest ways of explaining the issue and
clear answers to the standard questions you get asked. Don't try to
convert people who don't get it. You may be a voice in the
wilderness for a while, but keep building networks and synthesizing
ideas. Your energetic and responsible approach will make you a
magnet for intelligent people. As interest in the issue accelerates,
build institutions around it. See if the people in your network want
to start a moderated mailing list. Organize a panel discussion about
it at a professional meeting. And so on. Keep going until the issue
either matures or disappears. Then find another issue and start
over.

That's the procedure. You should always have at least one issue that
you are developing in this way. In doing so, you are helping the
profession to think out loud about its problems and potentials, and
you are also helping to knit the profession together by establishing
connections among the people who are thinking about the issues on
the horizon. You are also making yourself a strong job candidate.
You are building knowledge, and you are building networks. One
purpose of a professional school is to build such networks, and by
helping you the school helps itself.

If you've spent your whole life going to school and toiling at
normal jobs, then you might find the prospect of leadership
nerve-wracking. Most schools and jobs are afraid of you, so they
encourage a dependent attitude where you wait around for other
people to give you things. Of course they don't entirely succeed; no
institution can completely extinguish your human agency. Even so,
few schools or jobs actively train people to take the initiative by
organizing people around emerging issues. Yet successful people have
exercised leadership in this way for all of recorded history. The
methods of leadership that I have described are not widely
publicized, and many courses that supposedly teach leadership skills
omit them entirely. But they are out there, roaring at full throttle
just below the surface, and you can learn them by watching any
successful person in action. I'm just hoping that by reading this
you'll learn them a little faster.

As you advance in your profession, you will be organizing people in
more sophisticated ways around more sophisticated issues. As such,
it will be important to cultivate your intellectual life. Leadership
is such a rare skill that it doesn't matter whether you are a genius
in your own right. Leadership is process, and the whole point is
that you're not figuring out all the answers yourself. Accordingly,
you will need to develop a brain trust -- smart and knowledgeable
people that you can turn to when you need expert judgements. This is
one reason to stay in touch with the faculty at your school, and
with the smart people who pass through the school while you are
there. One good way to start a brain trust is to organize a speaker
series. Fearlessly assess your intellectual strengths and
weaknesses, and then make professional friends whose intellectual
strengths complement your own. Your contribution is to facilitate a
large-scale movement within the profession, and that's what makes
the difference in the long run.

As you become a leader, you will also face ethical issues.
Leadership has a bad name; people associate it with dishonesty,
manipulation, and "politics". That's because so many "leaders"
prefer to surf on issues, extracting the social energy around them
for their own benefit, rather than being a positive and constructive
force in the community. Once you've built a network and evolved some
rhetoric, you can get a way with a lot of selfishness. People will
probably even praise you for it. You can settle down to a life of
mutual back-scratching with your similarly-networked cronies, going
through the motions and never giving a serious thought to the
community again. But that's no good. Your job is to model positive
leadership. You have no doubt heard it explained that true
leadership is "selfless". I haven't emphasized that theme so far,
for the simple reason that it's useless to demand that people be
selfless leaders until they understand the six-step process that
makes them leaders at all. Now that you do understand the process,
and especially once you become accustomed to actually doing it, it's
time to put some content into it. Use your connections to help
people who deserve help. Promote all ideas that you find valuable,
whether they reinforce your issues or not. Keep trying to understand
your issues more deeply, and ask yourself whether the world is
changing. Don't be an ego freak. And write down what you learn along
the way.

Why do I argue that the modern world requires all professionals to
engage in leadership? Before the Internet, professionals had to be
generalists. Problems would arise, and you had to solve them. Now,
however, the institutions and infrastructures of your profession
easily bring professional knowledge to bear wherever it is needed.
To succeed in your career, you need more than the skills that you
got in school -- you need to be the world expert in something.
Knowledge is global, it's growing exponentially, and nobody can pack
all of the necessary knowledge into their heads. So everyone's going
to specialize. Specialization doesn't mean narrowness: it means
reaching out in many directions, talking to many kinds of people,
and weaving together the threads that make your issue matter.
"Leadership" used to mean something unique: the army had one leader
and everyone else followed. Today, however, knowledge is multiplying
so fast that we need more leaders than we can possibly produce.
Every leader can feel important, and genuinely be important, and
everyone is a leader, including you.

Here are some books and articles that might be useful.

Networking on the Network. This is a much longer article that I
wrote about professional networking for students in PhD programs.
Although most of the detailed instructions are specific to the
research world, the underlying philosophy will carry over into the
professional world. On the Web at <
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/network.html>.

Peter Block, Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise
Used, Austin: Learning Concepts, 1981. Though written for management
consultants, this book has valuable things to say about the feelings
that come up in any kind of professional work, and how to use them
honestly for everyone's benefit.

Donna Fisher and Sandy Vilas, Power Networking, Austin: Mountain
Harbour, 1992. This is the best all-around book on the subject of
professional neworking. It abstracts a long list of guidelines that
apply pretty widely across professions.

Roger Fisher and William Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotating Agreement
Without Giving In, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. This is the
classic book on negotiating. Its core message is that you should
negotiate on the basis of interests and not on positions, so that
negotiation becomes cooperative problem-solving. If you lead then
you'll need these skills.

Ford Harding, Rain Making: The Professional's Guide to Attracting
New Clients, Holbrook, MA: Bob Adams, 1994. The way to get ahead is
to do something new and tell everyone about it. This is a pretty
good introduction to the process, with a focus on publishing an
article and developing professional networks.

Linda A. Hill, Becoming a Manager: Mastery of a New Identity,
Boston: Harvard Business School, 1992. As a professional you'll have
probably a manager, and soon enough you'll probably be a manager
yourself. Your job is to deal with these relationships in a mutually
beneficial way while also maximizing your own autonomy. This is a
study of new managers getting used to their jobs, and it's a good
source of insight into these issues.

Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988. This is a terrific book about
the ethical issues that will surround you in the organizational
world. Once you understand these issues, you will see trouble coming
much further off, while you can still make your own decisions about
it.

Tom Jackson, Guerrilla Tactics in the New Job Market, second
edition, New York: Bantam, 1991. This is an excellent book about
finding a job; though it is out of print, you can probably find a
used copy online. Sending dozens of resumes to personnel departments
is one approach, but a much better approach is systematic networking
and inside research.

Ronald L. Krannich and Caryl Rae Krannich, The New Network Your Way
to Job and Career Success, Manassas Park, VA: Impact Publications,
1993. Another good book on networking for job-seekers, with a fair
amount of concrete, useful advice.

Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Disclosing
New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation
of Solidarity, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. If you can get past the
cult-like hagiography, this book provides a rather different
analysis of leadership from mine, or at least presents a different
emphasis, starting from the creative discovery that happens in the
actual process of leadership.

end


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html