A New Technique for Learning Leadership

BY CHRIS BURDETT-PARR

Book Review of Leadership Presence by Belle Linda Halpern and Kathy Lubar, Gotham Books: 280 pp.

What first piqued my interest in this book were the authors' bios; the fact that they are both from backgrounds in the arts came as a pleasant surprise. This fact indicated to me that this may not be just another dry corporate how-to book that would require disciplined application on my part to review - and that may not even make it onto the Support4Change book list.

In fact, it proved anything but, and I found this to be a very interesting and engaging book that expanded on some of my own thought processes and validated the same conclusions I had reached regarding the subject matter.

Basically, what this book manages to do so effectively is to apply the elements of acting and theatre to a business leadership context. This may initially seem incongruous to some, but the parallels are intriguing and well illustrated by the authors who call on the many skills and techniques that actors are trained to use to communicate with their audience. They demonstrate how these techniques can be developed by individuals in workplace leadership roles to increase the effectiveness of their communication, and inspiration of others.

Among the main elements of effective leadership are, according to the authors, authenticity and presence. Presence is described as connecting authentically with others, and it can be developed in leadership roles as this excerpt describes:

The second reason we know presence can be developed is that there exist a whole group of people who work diligently and successfully to develop it. That group of people is actors, and their success, even their livelihood, depends on presence. They must excite us when they step onstage, or they will fail. For the actor and performer, presence is not a happy accident of genetics or upbringing; it's the result of training and practice.

The authors also point out that:

Great leaders, like great actors, must be confident, energetic, empathetic, inspirational, credible, and authentic. That leaders and actors share some skills and characteristics should come as no surprise. Actors and leaders face a common challenge. They must be prepared to play different roles, as the situation requires. They must be prepared to influence and move people everyday.

My own personal interest in acting had always been tempered by the feeling that it wasn't an entirely honest art, and one of the interesting parts of this book for me was the exploration of this concept. There was a time I felt the same as some of the authors' clients when they said:

How can we learn to be more authentic from people who lie professionally? After all, isn't that what acting is really about at the end of the day?

However, some time ago, I had occasion to watch in short succession over a period of approximately a week, interviews with three of the most respected actors alive today - the last one being Sir Ian McKellen on the Actor's Studio program on the Bravo Channel. Watching this marvelous, intelligent man as he described his upbringing, his start in the theatre, his fearful suppression of his sexual orientation to avoid jeopardizing his career, his soul-searching while creating the best representation of the characters he played, I suddenly realized that acting on this level is really an unrelenting search for the truth about the human condition, and therefore actually one of the most honest endeavors one can undertake.

I was therefore gratified that the book validated some of my own conclusions in this, and other, excerpts:

It's a paradox of the theatre that, in order to pretend, the actor must be real. That need requires the actor to delve inside himself, because the only way an emotion can be authentic is if it comes from within the actor. Actors, consequently, are probably more aware of authenticity than anyone else, because they've studied it, and themselves, so carefully.

Each chapter of this excellent book is completed by clear, effective and well-formatted practices and exercises. Besides this being a very interesting book for me personally, I believe it will be of great help to those visitors to Support4Change who want to explore an interesting method of further developing their leadership skills.