by Jeremy LaCasse, Executive Director, gcLi; Teacher of History, Taft School in Watertown, CT
The gcLi defines leadership as, “entailing a person being aware of whatever is happening around them and choosing behaviors, from a place of empathy and courage, that help the group to achieve its goals.” This definition begins with an idea about where the nexus of control is for a leader – their awareness, understanding of the situation, and choice of behavior that influences the group and situation. When teaching leadership, we start with control because everything else about real leadership – helping a group to solve adaptive or novel problems that the group does not yet know how to solve – requires a leader and a group to function in a space of uncomfortable uncertainty, a space of learning.
As the leader, or the developing leader, engages with leading, if they are self and situationally aware the next question is what do they do. Linda Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback’s work on collective genius does not provide a formula – something students of leadership often want – to success, and it does provide helpful guidance for a leader to analyze and assess and then engage in ways that help a group call upon the aggregated skills and insights of the group, increasing the likelihood of success and, as important, helping each member of the group feel critical to something greater than themselves.
Hill notes that each member of a group needs “to feel like citizens of a cohesive, collaborative community.” Community is the essential element to shared purpose, connection, meaning, and ultimately, successfully solving the group’s problem. The group’s need to evolve, based on circumstance, means the leader needs to be perpetually gathering feedback and employing that feedback to determine what actions will best help the group retain the sense of shared purpose, collaboration, and community. For teachers of leadership, the same is true.
Ron Heifetz talks of the holding environment or container as being both safe enough and challenging enough for the individuals and the group to learn. The ideas of collaborative genius build on this concept, defining six innovation paradoxes:
- Affirming the individual and the group
- Supporting and confronting
- Fostering experimentation/learning and performance
- Promoting improvisation and structure
- Showing patience and urgency
- Encouraging bottom-up initiative and intervening top-down
The leader and the teacher of leadership need to consider where the group is on each of the continuums and how to help the group adjust on each one to learn and function successfully. Of course, the group is in constant flux, which is a frustration for leaders and particularly for emerging leaders.
With these elements in mind, the leader and the teacher helps the group or the students develop the willingness and ability – two key parts necessary to the innovation central to solving novel problems – the goal of leadership. Ultimately, the confidence of the individuals in the group to engage in this work hinges on the relational imperative of any group – that each person feels they belong and are able to contribute to the shared work of solving the problem. The leader and the teacher need to focus on understanding where the group is at a given moment and choosing actions that help the group to achieve its goals. This is an inherently uncertain undertaking, fraught with peril and promise.
In the Parable of the Trapeze, Danaan Perry describes the liminal space of the trapeze, when the performer must let go of one bar, finding themselves in space and time between the certainty of the released bar and the promise of the catching bar. People and groups often would like to be able to retain one hand on the starting bar while catching the other bar. While this is certainly more comfortable, the reality of growth, learning, and leading is that true leadership is helping the group release the metaphoric old bar and to reach the potential of the new bar.
Our work of teaching leadership begins in connecting with and understanding our students and then helping them – individually and as groups – reach into the liminal space between the certainty of knowing and the promise of a new understanding. Understanding how to support groups and individuals doing this is central to both teaching and learning how to lead.
As Ted Lasso notes in his final Richmond game, “I’m just so gosh darn proud to be part of this team and I love you guys. Now regarding this second half, I don’t know what is going to happen. . . We don’t want to know the future, we want to be here right now.” That sense of letting go of the trapeze together and reaching out into that uncertain future requires leadership that helps us all know that we aren’t alone and together stand the best chance of reaching that goal.
Teachers of leadership are both masterful at understanding the needs and state of the groups they aim to help learn to lead and at choosing behaviors that help their students learn to lead.
Links:
Hill, Linda A., Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback. Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014.
Hill, Linda A., Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback. “Collective Genius.” Harvard Business Review 92, no. 6 (June 2014): 94–102. https://hbr.org/2014/06/collective-genius.
Parry, Danaan. “The Parable of the Trapeze.” The Earthstewards Network. Accessed October 19, 2025. http://www.earthstewards.org/ESN-Trapeze.asp.
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Jeremy LaCasse, Executive Director of The Gardner Carney Leadership Institute, is currently Assistant Head of School at the Taft School. LaCasse held the Shotwell Chair for Leadership and Character Development at Berkshire School. He also directed the Ritt Kellogg Mountain Program; served as Dean of the sixth and fourth forms; taught European history and Medieval history; and coached the ski and crew programs. Following his time at Berkshire, he served as the Dean of Students at Fountain Valley School of Colorado, and following FVS, he was the Head of senior school at Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh, PA; the Head of Kents Hill School in Kents Hill, ME; and the Assistant Head of School at Cheshire Academy, in Cheshire, CT. He graduated with a B.A. in History from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and earned an M.A. in private school leadership from the Klingenstein Center, Teachers College at Columbia University.