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Advancing the Art of Leadership: The Leadership Dialogues


Advancing the Art of Leadership: The Leadership Dialogues by Lawrence W. Tyree, Mark David Milliron, and Gerardo de los Santos

Theoretical perspectives are useful in shaping community college leadership. But to truly advance the art of leadership, we need to examine the realities of practice. Read about a new League publication that showcases more than 50 cases of leadership realities, as told by those who lived them, in the July Leadership Abstracts.

** To view the web version of this abstract, in printer friendly layout, go to https://www.league.org/publication/abstracts/leadership/labs0407.htm **

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Advancing the Art of Leadership: The Leadership Dialogues

Lawrence W. Tyree, Mark David Milliron, and Gerardo de los Santos

The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one – my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art.

Eric Fromm (1956, p. 5)

Theory is a vital part of framing decisions, sizing up situations, and analyzing contexts. In the world of leadership theory, we explore the mechanistic, bureaucratic, and humanistic models. Others challenge us to move beyond simple management actions to more nuanced and higher-order leadership strategies. The virtues of mission, vision, and goal setting are extolled and argued to be essential to any effort to lead an organization down the road ahead. Deming and other advocates of continuous quality improvement and re-engineering argue we have to look deeply at the systems
and processes that define our work and target our outcomes – and involve all levels of the organization in that endeavor (Walton & Deming, 1988).

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Dr. Susan Salvador
Office for Student Services
07/27/2004