Learning leadership from the Bard
Janel Shoun-Smith |
Theater and business team up to teach honors students leadership skills in a liberal arts context
Cutlines: (above) Students attended the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's winter production of King Lear, starring (l to r) Amanda Card, David Landon, Nettie Kraft and Shannon Hoppe as the main characters. Photo by Jeff Frazier.
(thumbnail on home page) Becky Wahlstrom as Fool (left) and David Landon as Lear (right) in the NSF production at Trout Theater. Photo by Rick Malkin.
In a conversation on leadership, Shakespeare is probably not the first fellow to come to mind.
Yet according to Chair of Theater Beki Baker and Chair of Marketing and Management Andy Borchers, Shakespeare says a great deal about leadership today. From King Lear to Macbeth, Shakespeare’s plays are full of examples of how not to lead, and his works such as Julius Caesar and Henry 5 provide spot on examples of today’s leadership styles.
So pairing up Baker and Borchers, and Shakespeare and leadership, this past spring was the perfect plan for an honors section of the required integrated literature course.
“There is hardly a topic he didn’t cover,” Baker said of Shakespeare. She should know. She is the former education director for the Nashville Shakespeare Festival and directed a version of Julius Caesar starring former Nashville Titan Eddie George.
“Shakespeare had a way of putting into words ideas that are sometimes hard for us to quantify,” Baker said at a presentation about the course at the annual Christian Scholars' Conference.
According to Borchers, Shakespeare’s plays involve various business issues such as managing succession in family companies, the dangers of flattery and how to deal with an unreasonable boss, all challenges faced by the characters in King Lear. As part of the class, students attended the Nashville Shakespeare Festival’s production of King Lear this past winter.
At the conference, Baker and Borchers shared various examples of Shakespearean scenes they discussed in the class (a Troilus and Cressida scene about power) and how they related them to modern examples of leadership (Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s handling of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis).
Leadership styles touched on in the class included servant leadership, the contingency approach, the Great Man Theory (that great leaders are born that way) and other theories that personality traits, expertise or charisma are really what makes a leader, Borchers said.
One class assignment for the 12 enrolled students was to re-plot scenes to show how they would have played out differently in a different leadership style, film clips were incorporated and or sometimes students read the scenes out load taking on different characters.
Baker had seen Shakespeare used to spur conversation about leadership during two mission trips to Scotland, where performances of Macbeth were used. She and Honors College Director Paul Prill felt the concept could be applied to a semester-long course.
“Traditionally, integrated courses have paired disciplines which easily fit together: literature and music or art and history or philosophy. This course created an unusual way of thinking about leadership, a concept which spreads across multiple disciplines, while having at its core a strong commitment to the liberal arts,” Prill said. “We hope we can get these two together again to repeat this very successful experience, and we hope to create other inventive learning experiences like it for our students. “
Baker said the course was valuable for students pursuing any career, not just the liberal arts. “To deny Shakespeare’s influence on society is a mistake,” she said. “The course clearly showed how literature relates to our real, everyday lives. Having students from various majors, made that even more clear to the students.”
From a business standpoint, the class showed how business is not divorced from the rest of life and how leadership is not just applicable to business, said Borchers. “All disciplines have leadership involved,” he said.
Students need to start thinking about leadership long before they graduate, Baker noted, and tackling Shakespeare is a rewarding challenge that will make them more confident in their abilities in the future.