Thought Leadership for Building New Leaders | Tom Kolditz | 318

Our guest is Tom Kolditz, the author of Leadership Reckoning and Director of The Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University.  The Institute's two-fold mission is to create a powerful and widely available leader development experience and improve the quality of leader development in higher education everywhere.

Tom shares how many universities include the development of leaders in their mission statement.  However, he explains that few have any focused programs to bring about that mission.  Many focus on what Tom calls “leadertainment” which has no lasting benefit.

We discuss Tom’s book Leadership Reckoning, which outlines the failure of higher education.  In addition Tom defines leadertainment and reveals how to measure outcomes and design programs to improve leadership development.

Tom informs us about the upcoming classification system from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that is compelling Universities to listen to the problems being presented.  Afterwards, he gives insight into how it will aid them in moving towards better programs for leadership development.

If you want to understand how Universities can develop better leaders and why they are currently struggling to achieve that, you’ll want to listen to this episode!

Three Key Takeaways:

• Thought leadership needs to include methods of measuring outcomes. In addition, you should be tracking goals in order to truly understand its effectiveness.
• Thought Leaders often have big ideas, but you have to cultivate the right conditions for the ideas to take root and grow.
• Your thought leadership should include a system of checks to ensure that a client is progressing.  These checks should also account for movement backward.