What does it mean to teach ‘leadership’?
For most of human history, education and leadership formation were essentially the same thing. Only future leaders were formally educated. To educate someone was to form them - morally, civically, intellectually - for the responsibility of leading others. The classical traditions, whether Aristotelian, Stoic, or Confucian, did not aim to develop a leadership skill set, remaining agnostic to its ends. They aimed at wisdom, attempting to form a person who would be able to be a ‘good’ leader.
Then education became universal and at roughly the same moment, the shared moral and philosophical frameworks that had given classical formation its content were fragmenting under the weight of Enlightenment pluralism.
In response, modern leadership development largely abandoned the project of forming the person in favour of helping individuals discover themselves and acquire tools to pursue whatever ends they chose. We exchanged formation for self-discovery, from becoming-before-doing, to becoming-through-doing. We have gained a great deal in that exchange — leadership development became accessible, personal, directly applicable to real dilemmas, and less paternalistic. But did the trade come with costs we don't always name?
One cost may be that we have shifted the psychological burden onto the individual leader and assume they arrive in our classrooms with their own developed moral and ethical codes. This episode explores that tension. We discuss how we got here and what the most sophisticated modern responses to the problem look like – in the case of HEC Paris’s Leadership Signature. We close with a question I find myself increasingly focused on: whether modern leadership development, in its emphasis on personalised insight and emotional resonance, may be optimising for the experience of insight rather than the slower, harder, more humbling work of insight formation — and whether AI is making that question newly urgent rather than answering it.
I cannot think of anyone better to talk about all this than Emmanuel Coblence. Emmanuel is Associate Professor at HEC Paris and Academic Director of the school's Leadership programs in Executive Education — an architect, in other words, of one of the most thoughtful modern answers to the question we are asking. His \"Leadership Signature\" approach refuses the prescriptive recipe: rather than telling executives what kind of leader to be, it gives them a method for discovering and refining a leadership style that is genuinely their own, scaffolded by mentors, mirrors, and sponsors rather than by a fixed doctrine. I have had the pleasure of seeing him in the classroom – a masterclass in the art and science of executive education.
Apart from his academic life, he has been a municipal councillor in Paris since 2014, with a focus on educational policy. This gives him a practitioner's eye on the civic dimensions of formation that pure academics often miss. And he is currently building an AI Leadership Mentor at HEC — which makes him one of the very few people qualified to think honestly about both the promise and the limits of what AI can give us in this domain.
It is always a pleasure to speak to Emmanuel. He is generous, rigorous and is willing to engage with genuinely uncomfortable questions - including questions at the heart of both of our work. I learned a great deal. I hope you do too.
Citations
· Bojovic, N., Sabatier, V., & Coblence, E. (2019). Becoming through doing: How experimental spaces enable organizational identity work. Strategic Organization, 18(1), 147–167.
· Rosa, H. (2016). Resonance: A sociology of our relationship to the world. Polity Press.
· Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. Columbia University Press.
· Sardais, C., Lortie, J., & Coblence, E. (2019). Inside the “Panacousticon”: How orchestra conductors play with discipline to produce art. International Journal of Arts Management, 22.
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