I've worked with people in the upper echelons of business, academia, government, coaching, community organizing, and more. Of them all, I consider Chris Lehmann the most effective and accomplished leader. He happens to be a long time friend and former teammate I competed at Nationals with in the 90s, but that's not why I consider him so effective and accomplished. He is the founding Principal of the Science Leadership Academy public high school in Philadelphia and a major organizer of the community where I learned about inquiry-driven project-based learning, which has become a major part of my practice. He co-founded…

If we taught piano like we teach leadership, here are a few options of how we'd do it. Method 1 Put twenty or more people who wanted to learn piano in a room Lecture about music theory for a few lessons Talk about the lives of historical famous piano players Point them to a piano on a stage with an audience full of people who will evaluate them and tell them to play Tell them it's okay to make mistakes, everybody does Wish them luck and have them play Method 2 Put them in a room with other piano players…

How many of the people in leadership positions over you do you think led well? Think of all the teachers, professors, coaches, Presidents, Congress-members, and so on. I'd bet no more than a few stand out as excellent. If your way to improve your leadership skills---presumably one of your best ways to get promoted, more responsibility, more pay, and so on---is to try to act like leaders you know, you don't have many role models. Learning leadership skills from watching people around you is like learning a sport from neighborhood pick-up games instead of finding an effective coach with a…

Most leadership books teach high-level principles and so-called "laws." I've read books that tell the reader to create purpose or meaning for their followers, or to engage them, without describing how to do those things. Leadership is experiential. We gain high-level principles from experience, not the other way around. High-level instruction like that doesn't help people learn to lead. It helps the people who need it most least. It's like telling a beginner pianist to play with feeling or to express themselves through the music when they probably haven't learned to play basic scales. Since few people have had explicit…

If you like entrepreneurship and you don't know General Assembly, you should. They teach great courses and have built a great community around teaching relevant skills. On Saturday, August 23, 10am-5pm, I'll lead a seminar with General Assembly on leadership in New York City. Register here, you'll be glad you did. Here is the announcement (they use short descriptions, for a fuller description, see this announcement from an earlier event): Lead the Way: Effective Leadership Techniques Joshua Spodek Adjunct Professor at NYU-Poly About This Workshop You’ve ascended to a position of leadership, but how can you ensure that the people…

The KQED blog in San Francisco that covered my using inquiry-driven project-based learning teaching entrepreneurship at NYU recently covered something more remarkable: a student-created program in a high-school where the students create and do their projects on their schedule. The article, "This Is What a Student-Designed School Looks Like," speaks for itself, describing how a Massachusetts high school student saw engagement and mastery lacking in his classmates at his high school and proposed a program to use project-based learning to evoke it. I recommend reading it if you are interested in leadership, motivation, education, and how to improve any of…