The American Lawyer

By Deborah Rhode
Flying
Blind
Lawyers fill leadership positions
throughout American society—
but law schools do precious little
to prepare them.

I backed into the field of leadership inadvertently and with considerable skepticism.
Like many lawyers, I had dismissed the field as a backwater of vacuous rhetoric and slick
marketing—a refuge for retired CEOs peddling complacent memoirs. But the more I

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learned about the subject, the more I’d wished I had learned earlier, before I had stumbled into leadership positions.

My preconceptions about the field are not atypical. Most lawyers never receive any formal education in leadership. Nor do they generally perceive that to be a problem, which is itself problematic. The most crucial challenges for our society and our profession involve issues of leadership; the need for leaders with vision, integrity, and wisdom has never been greater. Yet our system of legal education does little to produce them.

That inadequacy is striking, given that no oc-
cupation accounts for such a large proportion of
leaders. The legal profession has supplied a major-
ity of American presidents, and in recent decades,
almost half of Congress, 10 percent of the CEOs
of S&P 500 companies, and innumerable heads of
government and nonprofit organizations. Public
confidence in many of these leaders is distressingly
low. For example, a 2009 Harris poll found that
only 11 percent of the public has “a great deal of
confidence . . . in people in charge of running law
firms”; almost a third have “hardly any.”
Yet few lawyers attribute any part of the problem
to inadequate education. The assumption is that
leaders are born, not made. But leaders who have
been the most successful have mastered the capac-
ity for learning, and have drawn appropriate lessons
from their own and others’ experiences. As Mark
Twain famously observed, a cat that sits on a hot
stove will not sit on a hot stove again, but it won’t
sit on a cold one either. What is needed is reflection
on experience: an ability to learn from mistakes and
to situate them in the context of broader knowledge
about effective leadership. This is a skill that can be
acquired, aided by the recent exponential growth
in relevant research in such disciplines as manage-
ment, psychology, organizational culture, social
movements, policy studies, and related disciplines.