Illustration:Richard Schneider

Last spring, freshmen in Alma Blount's public-policy class "Civic Participation and Community Leadership" had to demonstrate what they'd learned by preparing to lead class discussions themselves. Four student teams were each assigned broad topics ranging from democracy and the media to grassroots political organizing. Cathy Fisher of Boca Raton, Florida, says the course, part of Duke's Hart Leadership program, showed her that "leadership can't be taught by a text like most Duke courses. It is a process."

Throughout the course, students read the daily op-ed pages of The New York Times and prepared to debate the issues of the day in class, with Blount often playing devil's advocate. By the end of the term, Fisher says, she and her classmates were ready to lead the conversation themselves. "I would define leadership," she says, "as engaging people in what you're doing, learning to involve different points of view, and then being willing to compromise sometimes."

The Leading Edge

Meanwhile, in Gerald Wilson's history seminar "Leadership in American History," students spent the spring semester examining larger-than-life historical and contemporary political figures, along with fictional accounts of leadership gone awry in such classics as All the King's Men and Lord of the Flies. Wilson, senior associate dean for Trinity College, focuses his course on the ethical dilemmas in decision making and the various characteristics that might define a leader, while debunking some myths along the way.

On the graduate level, 2004 marked the kickoff of the Fuqua/Coach K Center of Leadership and Ethics--a brand new enterprise in the business school designed to connect a host of courses, conferences, research projects, and training events on leadership and ethics already under way or being developed. Duke men's basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, author of The New York Times' business best seller Leading with the Heart, will teach at the center during the off-season.

The variety of approaches offered at Duke could be viewed as a microcosm of the way leadership is viewed and taught around the country. The schools of thought on the subject--its true nature and whether it is an innate characteristic or a teachable skill--are legion. A raft of books on the topic has emerged in the last decade and a half, and a burgeoning demand for how-to workshops, seminars, retreats, and immersion programs for both for-profit and nonprofit leaders and would-be leaders has created a veritable leadership industry. The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)--for the last three years, named as the top source for leadership education on the planet by Business Week--is now a $60-million operation with some 500 staff members and offices in La Jolla, Colorado Springs, Brussels, and Singapore, in addition to its headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Nevertheless, the terms of the game remain elusive, and the answers to the question, Can leadership be taught? vary widely, even among experts at Duke and alumni working in the field of leadership training. Recent theorists have come to focus less on the personality characteristics and traits that make a good leader (the leaders-are-born-not-made theory) in deference to a more relationship-based outlook that suggests it is the attention and care leaders bring to their interactions with followers that define effective leadership.

Fisher: Before Hart Leadership Program, "I lived in a bubble"Photo:Les Todd

"Leadership is 90 percent people skills and about 10 percent functional skills," says Barbara Demarest '83, a CCL executive. "A leader must be a learner, and, increasingly, he or she must know what other people in the organization bring to the table and be able to create relationships among them, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Demarest says that CCL does not have a party line on what makes a good leader. "It's more complex than a simple list of characteristics," she says.†"We work out of an adult-education model, focusing on developing the leader and the organization's capacity for leadership.†Most of our work is with people who consider themselves good leaders, and our job is to help them become better."

CCL is probably best known for the series of diagnostic tests, interviews, and feedback tools that it employs to help individual clients and leadership teams assess their strengths and weaknesses. The organization has worked with Fortune 100 companies; federal agencies, including the military and the CIA; large nongovernmental organizations; school systems; and the governments of Canada and Scotland, among others.

Nancy Cardwell '69, who writes books on leadership, also subscribes to the idea that a good leader is someone who takes the time to listen and learn from his or her colleagues. "What leaders do is teach," she says, "and they must be constantly learning at the same time. You can't send in consultants to get the feedback or engage in the dialogue with staff. You have to be there." Cardwell, a former news editor and assistant managing editor at The Wall Street Journal, served as project manager and writer for The Leadership Engine: How Winning Companies Build Leaders at Every Level and The Cycle of Leadership--both books based on the research of Noel Tichy, a professor of organizational behavior and human-resource management at the University of Michigan Business School.

Cardwell argues that the relentless demand for learning and rapid adjustment in contemporary organizations has fundamentally changed our understanding of what leadership is. "The world is moving so much more quickly, particularly with technology. In the past, a company could thrive on a single good idea for fifteen or twenty years. Now any good idea can be copied almost instantly. You can't leave people sitting in place. A leader must have a plan and a way to describe it that keeps people moving."

CCL's Demarest confirms that trends in leadership training have reflected the changing times, along with certain developments in the social sciences. In the 1970s, she says, the emphasis was on improving the individual leader's self-awareness; in the 1980s, a team-building approach took precedence. In the 1990s, many trainers and coaches turned toward helping corporate leaders deal with the challenge of blending organizational cultures following a merger or acquisition, while also helping them to consider the implications of doing business in international markets. Likewise, nonprofit organizations began to take notice of the need to be more inclusive of diverse groups in their leadership teams, in an effort to be more representative of the populations they serve. "Now we are looking at the connectivity among all these factors to build a leader's capacity," Demarest says.

At Duke's Fuqua School of Business, connecting the dots among the many factors that shape a successful leader has always been a schoolwide concern, but, until recently, the effort lacked focus and cohesion. "At Duke we found that we were teaching management under the guise of leadership, but we really didn't know enough about how to teach leadership," says Sim Sitkin, an associate professor of business administration. Part of the challenge, Sitkin explains, has been the lack of scholarship on the topic. "Lots of the leadership literature out there is sexy but not very well grounded in research, while the research that is careful is largely irrelevant."

Enter Coach K, who, in his book Leading with the Heart reveals some simple leadership principles: truth-telling, trust, risk-taking, accountability, and discipline--elements that he says have served as the ethical grounding for his successful teams at Duke. Ready with basketball as operative metaphor and his phenomenal record as empirical proof, Coach K and the athletics department approached Fuqua with the idea of an annual conference on ethics and leadership. The first conference, in 2002, left students, alumni, administrators, and the school's corporate clients clamoring for more. Fuqua dean Douglas Breeden pressed for more courses on leadership, more visiting scholars to speak on the topic, and additional leadership training opportunities for M.B.A., doctoral, and post-doctoral students.

In response, Sitkin and his colleagues agreed that the best way to approach leadership would be in the context of ethics. "Ethics without leadership has no legs, and leadership without ethics has no heart," he says.

While simultaneously working to ramp up research and develop a curriculum of specialized, skill-based courses on such topics as group facilitation, coaching, and improvisational leadership, Sitkin and Allan Lind--now co-directors of the Fuqua/Coach K Center of Leadership and Ethics--have also devised an elegant, integrative model of leadership along six dimensions that serves as the basis for their teaching and for a book in progress. Sitkin believes that leadership is eminently teachable.

"It doesn't mean that personal attributes don't count," he says. "But leadership is a behavior, and behaviors can be learned." The model that he and Lind have developed not only defines the most useful behaviors for a leader to exhibit, but also considers the function and impact of the behaviors on the organization and individuals being led. According to Sitkin and Lind, a successful leader will:communicate his or her vision and values and come across as authentic; demonstrate genuine concern and understanding for others in the organization; foster a sense of coherence and community in the midst of complexity and constant change; create confidence and enthusiasm so that individuals will want to do what's difficult; give people what they need to succeed, including criticism and support, while also encouraging them to exercise their own best judgment; and, accept the mantle of leadership, recognizing that advancing the organization, not the leader, is fundamental.