An ILA Leadership Perspectives Webinar

Learning-based Leadership – and how it differs from Management

Presenter: Don Dunoon

Date: 6 May 2009

Share:

Can we usefully conceive of leadership as based not only in influence but in learning? How can leadership be meaningfully and usefully differentiated from management – and why does the distinction matter? What tools can productively support learning-based leadership action?

Don Dunoon will look into these and related questions, with practical illustrations of how an approach to leadership centered in learning can help us in gaining traction in with contentious problems those that can be seen from different perspectives.

Don is the author of In the Leadership Mode (Trafford, 2008). The book described as “groundbreaking” in the January 2009 edition of Integral Leadership Review proposes a view of leadership emphasizing interventions, made at points in time, toward change. These “leadership-mode” interventions are distinguished from others in the “management mode.” The book introduces a set of five practices and tools (ARIES—attending, reflecting, inquiring, expressing, and synthesizing) for intervening with contentious problems from a learning-leadership standpoint.

In this webinar, Don draws on a practical case example concerning the efforts of a golf-club treasurer to engage his fellow directors with financial difficulties facing the club to illustrate the differences between leadership and management mode action.

Speaker Information

Don Dunoon has since 1989 been director of New Futures, a leadership development and organizational learning consultancy based in Sydney, Australia. Don specializes in helping clients in diverse settings apply learning-leadership approaches in gaining traction on contentious problems. He has an M Com (Hons) degree from the University of New South Wales, and has contributed to post-graduate teaching at that University. Don gave two well-received presentations at the 2008 ILA Conference (one of them with Iva Wilson and JoAnne O’Brien-Levin. Iva contributed the Foreword to In the Leadership Mode; JoAnne was the book’s editor).