Do Business Schools Create or Merely Provide an Opportunity to Examine Crucibles of Leadership?
Crucibles of leadership are where you find them—or they find you. And business schools rarely create them, at least according to the respondents to the October column.
Perry Miles put it most succinctly when he said, "A business school cannot and should not be designed as a crucible. Crucibles—by design—are boot camps of a sort, where the heat and pressure make or break the participant." Lim Yung Hui commented, "Business schools can only create a context that is fertile for the emergence of leadership." And according to Charlie Cullinane, "It would be very difficult for a school to create the equivalent of a tough childhood, a religious revelation, or a life and death experience."
Setting aside the issue, Shaun Greene even questioned the importance of crucibles of leadership, raising the age-old question of nature versus nurture. As he observed, "The 'crucible' can help someone become better or more effective but the truly great were naturals."
Steffen Nevermann stated the case for the affirmative, but cautioned, "To create crucibles from which leaders may emerge, schools must put their students in a learning mode that challenges them to accept responsibility for their own education and gives them first-hand appreciation of the application of knowledge and skills to practice." Nevertheless, Kathryn Aiken points out that "... studying other crucibles is no substitute for experiencing your own." And in that regard, Aiken feels that women often face a different challenge than men because they are too often "put into staff positions rather than line management jobs in order to 'protect their success,'" which, she adds, "…actually hinders the movement of women and prevents the exposure to crucibles of leadership."
If the majority prevails and one accepts the validity of research on the subject, it leaves us with the question of just what business schools can contribute to the leadership development process. Is it limited, as Miles (a retired Marine) suggests, to "teach[ing] and model[ing] ethical leadership?" Or can it also include the study of management practices that help create crucibles of leadership for others as well as dilemmas that enable one to "practice" for the day that such a crucible may actually come along? What do you think?