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Rebmann, Richard E.

College of Education and Social Services

2005

Ed. D.

Warren Bennis and numerous other leadership theorists and researchers have recognized the importance of self-knowledge in one's becoming and remaining a leader. Still other researchers have suggested that effective leaders both know themselves and search for meaning. Although self-knowledge is sometimes limited to knowing one's strengths and weaknesses, as though a leader could know himself or herself through a personal SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, most leadership theorists have something deeper in mind. They suggest that to become a leader or to improve the quality of their leadership, men and women would do well to look into their past for the raw material that has helped to make them who they are. These theorists note the many benefits that would become available to or be enhanced by a leader who developed this self-knowledge, benefits such as personal growth through coming to better know their own values, purposes, and needs; the inner strength necessary to exercise power absent the approval of others when responsibility demands it; the ability to create mutually satisfying relationships; the capacity to shape organizational culture, build contexts for life in an organization, and consolidate a corporate identity that helps others become and remain productive; the foundation for bringing to consciousness in his or her followers their own values, purposes, and needs and to integrate them with those of the organization; and the ability to fend off the loss of the leader's personal identity to that of his or her professional role. My scholarly personal narrative is an experiment in heeding this advice of leading leadership theorists to better know myself and, in the words of Lombardo, McCall, and Morrison, to "aggressively search for meaning." After examining the epistemological warrant for a self-knowledge based on personal narrative and strategies for locating meaning within the narrativized life, I present and explore the raw material of my past to find within it what it may offer of self-knowledge. From this narrative there emerges a set of reflections that both consider the content of the narrative and develop a search for meaning that derives from the search mode imbedded in my way of constructing reality as demonstrated in the narrative. Thus, the analysis and synthesis attempt to capture and further reveal to me who I am by reflecting my "natural" strategy for comprehending my identity and for integrating it into my search for meaning. By so doing, I can stand back from the text and enter a meta-perspective on my intellectual processes, a perspective that would not be available to me except for the distancing from one's self inherent in personal narrative. The experiment seeks an advance on self-knowledge and the construction of meaning that will be of use to me as an academic administrator in ways suggested by leadership theorists. As part of a larger academic community of administrators and leaders, I engage in the experiment as an example of a process for self-knowing and meaning-making that may be of value to others in positions of leadership.