(WCS)Learning to Serve : A Guide for Democratic Leaders

Of late there has been a shift in leadership practice from heroic and hierarchical methods to collaborative approaches that involve everyone in leadership. Joe Raelin has referred to this transformation as the creation of "leaderful practice." While attractive to managers in all sectors of our economy because of its full utilization of human resources, leaderful behavior doesn't always show up. It needs to be developed, but in a way consistent with its practice. As Phil DiChiara, managing director of the Boston Consortium for Higher Education, says in his foreword to this volume, "Hierarchical management development is unlikely to produce democratic managerial behavior." In this compendium, Raelin, a noted authority on action learning leadership development, reprises six of his current articles that collectively address how any professional or manager can inaugurate and sustain collaborative leadership using practice-based education and development. Learning to Engage can become a guide to releasing the leadership talent in all of us.

JOE RAELIN holds the Asa S. Knowles Chair of Practice-Oriented Education at Northeaster University where he is also the Director of the Center for Work and Learning. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research has centered on the management of salaried professionals and executive and professional education and development, especially through work-based learning. He is a prolific writer with some one hundred articles appearing in the leading management and professional journals. Among his books are: The clash of Cultures: Managers Managing Professionals, considered now to be a classic in the field of professionals and bureaucracy (Harvard Business School Press, 1991), Work-Based Learning: The New Frontier of Management Development (Prentice-Hall, the "OD Series," 2000), and the recent Creating Leaderful Organizations: How to Bring Out Leadership in Everyone (Berrett-Koehler, 2003). Please reach him at: j.raelin@neu,edu, and be sure to consult our web pages at: www.leaderful.org and www.poe.neu.edu.

Foreword by Phillip DiChiara. Article Annotations. Chapter One. Developmental Action Learning: Toward Collaborative Change. Chapter Two. The Role of Facilitation in Praxis. Chapter Three. Taking the Charisma Out: Teaching as Facilitation. Chapter Four. Developing Managers as Learners and Researchers: Using Action Learning and Action Research. Chapter Five. Finding Meaning in the Organization. Chapter Six. Does Action Learning Promote Collaborative Leadership? About the Author.