The Common Shared Leadership Experience

Quick answer: What is a shared leadership experience?

John's term for experiential learning on historic ground. Standing where leaders like George Washington or Joshua Chamberlain made their choices lets participants ask how they would have acted, and apply the answers to their own lives and careers.

After three decades in uniform, John spends much of his time traveling through the past, and he finds that the stories he studies keep mixing with the present. Imagine, he writes, standing at Concord's North Bridge, where the shot heard round the world began the Revolution. Or walking Little Round Top at Gettysburg, where Colonel Joshua Chamberlain's 20th Maine, out of ammunition, fixed bayonets and charged, not far from where Abraham Lincoln later gave his address. On the banks of the Delaware River, the natural question is how George Washington turned the tables on the British, and what it would take to keep people going when everything looks lost. At low tide on Omaha Beach, you ask how you would carry the responsibility those men carried. These places, John argues, are classrooms. Immersing people in them, through what he calls Applied Leadership Experiences, lets them absorb principles and choices that stuck because real people paid for them.

Why it matters for leaders: Leadership lessons stick when people stand where the choices were made and ask what they would have done.

Q: What happened at Little Round Top?

A: On July 2, 1863, Col. Joshua Chamberlain's 20th Maine, nearly out of ammunition, launched a bayonet charge that held the Union left flank.

Q: Why the Delaware River?

A: George Washington's crossing on December 25-26, 1776, led to the victory at Trenton when the Revolution's prospects looked bleakest.

Read the full article on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/common-shared-leadership-experience-john-fenzel

By John Fenzel, founder and CEO of Heroes' Path Foundation