Interviews With Leaders

Interviews With Leaders– Instructions

Overview:

Based on the interviews you completed in Assessment 2, write a 7 page report that describes your interview experiences, summarizes your

findings, and analyzes your interviewees’ personal characteristics as they align with effective leadership.

The purpose of this assignment is to consolidate your experience interviewing two leaders and to incorporate what you have learned thus far

about the personal characteristics of effective leaders. Your assessment will reflect your insights about integrity, purpose, change,

interpersonal skills, and keeping balance, and will embody a meaningful leadership story at different levels of an organization’s leadership.

• Competency: Reflect on personal leadership skills.
o Analyze interviewees’ personal characteristics and describe alignment to effective leadership.
o Explain the significance of identified leadership characteristics and how they apply to personal career progression.
Competency: Create an effective theory of leadership.
o Summarize interview findings that contribute to effective leadership.

Context:

The resources provided address the implications of new science for leadership.

Much of the traditional literature on organizations has been based in Newtonian images of the world as a mechanical operation where the

manager’s task is to control outcomes, determine truth, and make sure things are right. New science has challenged many of these underlying

assumptions, changing the thinking about organization and the role of leaders. More emphasis is given to the importance of identity and

evolving assumptions, such as the recognition of interconnectedness. The importance of relationship in providing the patterns of order and

integrity is being recognized. Living systems are chaotic and constantly adapting, but out of the chaos a new order is created.

Through dialogue, deep listening, and facilitating, leaders help followers create new knowledge and understanding of system patterns that allow

a value-guided organization to let go of old patterns and reemerge adapted to a new reality. There is more recognition of the “boundary-less”

nature of adaptive systems to their environments and the importance of values, mission, purpose, relationship, and accessibility of leaders to

the survival of their systems. Living systems will naturally respond and adapt to their environments, making the leader’s job much more one of

empowering, encouraging relationship, and facilitating the conversation about adaptation.

Suggested Resources:

Thinking Habits of Mind, Heart, and Imagination
1. Complementary Thinking – The habit of thinking that weaves multiple perspectives into an integrated fabric of understanding.
2. Connected Seeing – The habit of seeing reality as a whole system, which is a seamlessly connected, interactive, and dynamic web-of-

life.
3. Collaborative Teamwork – The habit of collaborating and using teamwork to accomplish common purpose, by integrating personal initiative

and group cooperation.
4. Constructing Meaning – The habit of constructing meaning by acquiring and synthesizing diverse sources of knowledge to enrich

understanding.
5. Conceptual Clarity – The habit of clear conceptual thinking from first principles, to make sense of and to distinguish among the known,

the unknown and the unknowable.
6. Communicating Effectively – The habit of communicating effectively in a teamwork style to collaboratively create new understandings,

new possibilities, and new realities.
7. Courageous Action – The habit of courageously taking action and making meaning in the face of ambiguous experience and uncertainty.
8. Caring Empathy – The habit of caring for, identifying with, and honoring others, as well as understanding how others see the world.
9. Conversational Reflection – The habit of reflecting on the experience of professional practice through learning conversations.
10. Continuous Learning – The habit of seeing every experience as an opportunity for continuous lifetime learning.

• Cashman, K. (2008). Leadership from the inside out: Becoming a leader for life. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
• Wheatley, M. J. (2006). Leadership and the new science: Discovering order in a chaotic world (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-

Koehler.
o Chapters 1 and 2 of this book are particularly applicable.

Instructions:

In Assignment#2, you prepared to interview two leaders in organizations of your choice. You will use the findings from your interviews in this

assessment as well as Assignment #4.

Using your notes from your completed interviews, write a 7 page report that addresses the following elements:
• Thoroughly describe your interview experiences. Write the story of what happened from beginning to middle to end. Integrate into the

story the names of the people you interviewed, their leadership level, and the focus of your interviews.
• Recap your interview questions.
• Summarize your findings from each question including the best stories and quotes in each interviewee’s words and some themes that

seemed to pervade both interviews.
• Analyze your interviewees’ personal characteristics and describe their alignment to effective leadership.
• Explain the significance of the leadership characteristics you identified and how they apply to your own career progression.