Barbara Kellerman: Leadership Profiles: Leadership Profiles: Leadership Insights: Tobias Leadership Center: Indiana University

Barbara Kellerman

Early in her career she held academic and administrative positions at Fordham University, Tufts University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and George Washington University.

Featured Leadership Topics

Understand Leadership

“My definition of leadership is if person A can get person B to do what A wants them to do, whether or not B wants to do it, whether or not B shares A’s values, whatever, whatever, if A can get B to do what A wants B to do, then A is leading.”

Inspire Followership

“Consider the context. Consider the situation. Consider who’s around you. Consider the players. Consider the task that you are being asked to undertake. Consider the history of your interaction and then make a decision as to what you should do and when and how.”

Influences and Impacts

“ [I]f Hitler’s part of your conversation and among your earliest memories, along with Roosevelt and Churchill and eventually Mao and Stalin, you get – this is a world that’s not just about good leadership, it’s a world about bad leadership. You get those complexities. So do I think those early years had a profound influence on what I ended up doing? 100%.”

About Barbara Kellerman

Barbara Kellerman was Founding Executive Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School; the Kennedy’s School’s James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Leadership; and a member of the Harvard faculty for over twenty years. She is currently a Fellow at the Center. Kellerman has held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Fairleigh Dickinson, George Washington, Uppsala, and Christopher Newport Universities, as well as at Dartmouth, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She also served as Director of Graduate Studies at Fairleigh Dickinson, and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the University of Maryland.

Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. At Uppsala (1996-97), she held the Fulbright Chair in American Studies; and she currently serves on the board of the CT Fulbright Alumni Chapter. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is author and editor of many books including The Political Presidency; Bad Leadership; Followership; Leadership: Essential Selections; The End of Leadership; Hard Times: Leadership in America, Professionalizing Leadership, and The Enablers. Kellerman has appeared on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, Reuters, and BBC, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review.

She has spoken to audiences all over the world including in Berlin, Moscow, Melbourne, Sao Paolo, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Toronto, Kyoto, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Sydney, and Seoul. She received the Wilbur M. McFeeley Award from the National Management Association for her pioneering work on leadership and followership, as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association. From 2015 to 2024 she has been ranked by Global Gurus as among the “World’s Top 30 Management Professionals.” Most recently (2024) she was # 9 on the list. Her next book, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers, is being published in March by Oxford University Press. Kellerman regularly posts blogs at https://barbarakellerman.com/articles/

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Born or Made?

“Most people who teach leadership don’t self-reflect, don’t question, don’t measure very much. They assume what they’re doing is teaching leadership. On the other end, you have a much smaller number who says, no, leadership can’t be taught. And in the middle you have a mix – I suppose I would put myself in the middle -- of people who say that maybe perhaps under certain circumstances, certain things can be taught. But when people ask me that question, I will say, 'Can playing the piano be taught?' Well, yes. Can you be taught certain skills? Even the most unmusical person can be taught over time to play the reasonably good piano. Can they be taught to become a wonderful pianist? Unless they have innate skills, innate musical skills, bloody unlikely. ”

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Leaders Are Readers

“It’s a wonderful book because these are wonderful writings. The last entry in the book is by Vaclav Havel, who of course ended as president of the Czech Republic, but began as a playwright and eventually one of the most prominent dissidents in Eastern Europe before the fall of the wall. And he wrote wonderfully about leadership and all of that stuff. People like Larry Kramer are in there, the AIDS activist. There are women in there – Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The point is, these are classics of the leadership literature. So is there a great leadership literature? Yes. Do I think that every student of leadership should be reading some of these or at least be familiar with these great works of literature? Absolutely, yes.”

Books I Recommend

The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians--and How We Can Survive Them
—by Jean Lipman- Blumen
Politics
The Courageous Follower
—by Ira Chaleff
Sociology

Books I’ve Written

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