Edited by Julia Hanna; illustrations by Dan Bejar

Tom DeLong’s love affair with teaching began at Hosford Elementary School in Portland, Oregon, with instructors like Mr. Walter Stickel and Mr. Ray Snively: “They always wore nice suits and white shirts, and they smelled as if they had just smoked cigarettes,” DeLong writes in Teaching by Heart: One Professor’s Journey to Inspire. “When Mr. Snively told a story about the Revolutionary War, I remember holding my breath with excitement.”

DeLong unpacks what goes into making that kind of magic happen, taking a long, hard look at how teachers “in their best moments, can lift people up, and in their worst, let them down.” Teaching by Heart isn’t designed to be an academically rigorous analysis of teaching, he adds. It’s personal, based on decades of classroom experience and his observation of other teachers.

“When I was with a teacher who had an impact on me, from elementary school through today, all I can say is that I experienced myself differently,” says DeLong. “Teaching, in other words, is a proxy for leadership: It’s about what happens inside of another human being when they’re with you and the potential that creates.”

As a graduate student at Brigham Young University in 1974, DeLong studied organizational behavior under Stephen Covey (MBA 1957), who would go on to publish The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. “I focused as much on his teaching approach—how he told stories, how he paused, how he lowered his voice, how he asked questions in large lecture halls—as I did on his content,” writes DeLong. “When Covey spoke, I felt this deep connection with myself.”

After a PhD at Purdue and a postdoc at MIT, DeLong joined Brigham Young University’s School of Education as an assistant professor, eventually becoming its dean. Then, in 1991, a chance encounter with Morgan Stanley’s John Mack led to a position on Wall Street as the firm’s chief development officer, responsible for human capital and issues of organizational strategy and change. “Like the best teachers, John was able to compartmentalize and focus on the task at hand,” DeLong writes. “He made you feel like the most important person in the firm, the same way some teachers make each student feel like he or she is the most important one in the classroom.”

Another serendipitous meeting—this one with former HBS Dean Kim Clark—brought DeLong to Harvard in 1997. “Sometimes our students arrive at HBS thinking they are the sum total of their résumés,” says DeLong. “In courses like Authentic Leader Development or the Interpersonal Skills Development Lab, we try to move them away from this stance, from image management to essence management. I wrote this book to articulate the nuts and bolts of what goes into creating an environment for this transformation to occur.” As seen in these excerpts from DeLong’s new book, teaching—whether the milieu is the classroom or a conference room—is a delicate balancing act, requiring equal measures of art and science. “When someone asked Sir Laurence Olivier what makes a great actor,” DeLong writes, “he responded, ‘The humility to prepare and the confidence to pull it off.’ This is the paradox of teaching for me.”

It All Matters

The first five minutes of the course are the most important of the day and of the semester. How you begin will set expectations. The tone, the use of the boards, and the spatial distance between you and the students communicate your intentions. How loud you speak matters. It all matters. It matters because the students have expectations about what the experience is going to be like. From what they’ve heard and read about you—or if they’ve taken courses from you previously—they have expectations of how you facilitate, govern, and teach the class….

I like to begin each class with a story that represents an objective of the course or subtext of the course. By telling a compelling story or parable, I hope to capture the students’ hearts, their attention. I want to pull them into the experience by painting a picture to which they can relate. When I teach a case like “C&S Grocers,” a story about the dramatic growth of a wholesale grocer, I tell them of a 28-year-old son of the owner, who is asked by his father to take over the business. An example:

You are working on the docks as a 28-year-old in Worcester, Massachusetts, and your father asks you to stop work for a moment so he can talk with you. He tells you that the business isn’t doing well, that your older brothers don’t want to work in the business, and that he wants you to take over—not in a year, but next week. He wants you to deal with the unions and the aftermath of a flood that cost millions of dollars of inventory. He wants you to consider moving the business to Vermont. Your father begins to cry, telling you that he feels like a failure. He feels like he has ruined the business his father began in the early 1900s. And he wants you to save the business.

Through the story of Rick Cohen, I have invited the students to join me emotionally and psychologically in this adventure called Organizational Behavior. I have invited them to become co-travelers with me on this journey for the next eighty minutes. I have invited them into my “mad scientist lab.” And I need their focus and interest to be inside the classroom, with me and with the other travelers.

Teachers Lead and Leaders Teach

I’m always surprised that people don’t see the connection between teachers and business leaders, but perhaps that’s because most people haven’t experienced both roles. Because of my experiences at Morgan Stanley and as a teacher—and because I tend to obsess about these types of things—I’ve become aware of the remarkable similarities. Before working at Morgan Stanley, I struggled to find the most effective way to run a class. Afterward, I found that I could draw on my experiences and apply them to teaching. I had an advantage that most teachers lack: I had been a business leader, and I could translate lessons learned at a company to the classroom.

The best leaders and teachers listen deeply, communicate empathically, and motivate adroitly. Command-and-control leaders and strict, punishment-wielding teachers are stereotypes of the past. Today, leaders and teachers need to relate to their audiences, influencing actions rather than dictating them. Both must be brave enough to make themselves vulnerable and admit mistakes.

In addition, teachers lead and leaders teach. Again, this may not be obvious, but think about how teachers model behaviors they want students to adopt, how they motivate by telling stories, how they make decisions that affect all students. Similarly, leaders have become teachers in knowledge-centric environments; they can’t just tell people what to do but must help them acquire ideas, information, and skills so they can be more innovative, agile employees. Like teachers, leaders mentor. This is a role that has gained a lot of importance in recent years.

Finally, the best teachers and leaders build relationships. As organizations have flattened and moved away from the pyramid model, leaders have recognized the value of relationship building. When leaders create meaningful relationships with their people, they also create loyalty and an environment where employees feel secure enough to take chances and suggest innovative and sometimes disruptive ideas….

When I speak of leadership, I’m referring to the process of bringing others together and accomplishing three central tasks. The first role of the leader is to set direction. Humans are born goal directed. They want to move forward. Most become antsy or anxious when they lack direction. Ultimately, if there is no direction over an extended period of time, they can shut down and become isolated. But with direction, ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things. That is the magic of bringing people together and witnessing them accomplishing goals. First, leaders must articulate a direction and involve their people in creating the direction.

Second, leaders must create buy-in or commitment to the direction. This is no small feat. The process of getting humans to commit sounds rather simple, but the reality can be challenging. This is a critical task; if commitment is absent, there is little to no chance to accomplish the task at hand. When this lack of commitment affects hundreds or thousands of employees, entire organizations vanish. The vanishing act cannot be blamed solely on competitive forces. Most organizations that self-destruct experience failure because employees were not committed to the mission and direction of the organization….

Third, leaders must facilitate execution or implementation. By facilitating execution, leaders drive growth and innovation. While some leaders define themselves by how much they accomplish, they don’t always get employees on board when it comes to getting things done. They may be great strategists and come up with terrific ideas, but if they fail to engage their people in implementation tasks, they’ll come up short, as will their people.

All three of these elements are unwritten promises leaders make to their people: I promise to set direction with you, to secure your commitment, and to help you execute. If I do these things, you’ll succeed and so will the company. This is the covenant leaders establish with their employees, and it drives performance far better than salary and perks.

Leaders seal this covenant personally. The kind of person you are matters. The kind of environment you create matters. The kind of relationships you forge matters. In reality, the art and practice of leadership are deeply personal for the leader and those being led. They are deeply personal because molecules are stirred when a leader has an interaction with another person. Energy is transmitted. Something transpires between two humans.

Living with Fear—in Safety

I mention to every class on the first day of class that my goal is to create a safe but uncomfortable environment. I want the students to be sitting on the edge of their seats, engaged in this learning enterprise. However, they must trust that they are safe during the eighty-minute session.

Students don’t want to be embarrassed, surprised, or shamed. They shouldn’t arrive with those emotions engulfing them. I must illustrate that even when one of them is not prepared or wastes class time with comments that don’t further the conversation, I will be there for every student, not just those who are mini-Toms. While it sounds comforting to have ninety reflections of myself all focused on me, I can’t do my work as a teacher if the outcome is a reproduction of me. The class works when each student makes a choice to trust me. Why would the students do that? If they believe I’m interested in the “least of them,” if they know that my intentions are pure in that I want to create the best learning opportunity for every one of them, they will sign on. The students must assume that I am on their side in that I want them to learn the material. Most important, I am there to push each student to illustrate courage in whatever form it manifests itself for each student. For one student it may mean raising his hand at the beginning of the class and not waiting until the end of class. For another it may mean disagreeing with another student in front of ninety other students. For another student, courage may mean to be quiet when you know you have the answer, yet you know that another student needs airtime.

My hope is that all students experience the amygdala hijacking their emotions and thoughts and feelings. I want all the students to learn that they can label their affect and feel like they are ahead of the curve, not fainting in front of their classmates. Understanding and experiencing our fears and our reactions to those emotions and feelings is where a manager lives at some point every day. I don’t want my students to run from those experiences. Rather I want them to know those experiences will come. But when they do, the students can experience all parts of their emotions and come out the other side alive and stronger.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from Teaching by Heart: One Professor’s Journey to Inspire. Copyright 2020 Thomas J. DeLong. All rights reserved.

A Baker Foundation Professor of Management Practice, Professor DeLong is co-chair of the Executive Education program The Reflective Leader, developed specifically for mid-career MBA alumni. Learn more at alumni.hbs.edu/reflectiveleader.

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