Sonia Ospina

SCARPINO:              Today is Thursday, October 12, 2023.  My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI); and Director of Oral History for the Tobias Leadership Center, also at IUPUI. Today I have the privilege to be interviewing Dr. Sonia Ospina at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association, which is taking place in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre Hotel. This interview is a joint undertaking by the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association. In the interest of full disclosure, I note that as part of my background research I talked to two of Dr. Ospina’s professional colleagues: Ellen Schall, Senior Presidential Fellow at New York University and the Martin Cherkasky Professor of Health Policy & Management at NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service; and Mary Uhl-Bien, BNSF Endowed Professor of Leadership, Management and Leadership Department, Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University.

Dr. Ospina’s educational history includes the following:

1989, Ph.D. in Sociology, State University of New York, Stony Brook

1985, M.S. Policy Analysis and Public Management, State University of New York

1978, BA Education and Social Sciences, Faculty of Education, Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia)

She has areas of expertise in Leadership and Management. She is interested in rethinking general leadership theory in a way that makes sense for public management leadership theory and practice. She consults, lectures and publishes in English and Spanish.

Selected employment history includes:

August 2023 to now, she’s retired. You retired in early August, right?

OSPINA:                    Right, 30^th of August, August 30^th.

SCARPINO:              So, 1989 to August 30, 2023, she was on the faculty of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University, where she advanced through the academic ranks from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor.

1978 to 1981, she was Director, Department of Educational Research, Fundación Projuventud (Bogotá, Colombia).

Recent experience includes serving as Principal Investigator, 2018-2022, for Indigenous Women Leaders in Colombia in collaboration with Professor Angela Santamaria, The Intercultural Indigenous Diplomacy School, Rosario University, Bogota, Colombia.

 She has consulted widely in the U.S. and Latin America in English and Spanish. In Latin America, she has worked in numerous countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador. Did I leave any out?

OSPINA:                    Mexico.

SCARPINO:              Mexico...  Significant and impactful publication record. She has a total of 71 publications with just under 4000 citations, according to the Research Gate website. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sonia-Ospina. Includes eight books for which she is author or co-author or co-editor between 1981 and 2021. She is first editor of “Collective Dimensions of Leadership: The Challenges of Connecting Theory and Method,” appeared in Human Relations Special Issue Volume 73 Issue 4, April 2020. She has several dozen refereed articles and book chapters. She has also earned numerous awards and recognitions for her scholarship. A few of these include:

2022 – the Keith Provan Award, given by the Public and Nonprofit Division of the Academy of Management, for distinguished scholars in the field of Public Administration.

 And then CLAD Scientific Council, consulting body of the UN intergovernmental institution devoted to state and public administration reform, from 2015 to 2020.

But the recognition that brings us here today is the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the International Leadership Association.

With all that said, I’m going to ask your permission to do the following: to record this interview; to transcribe the interview; to deposit the recording and transcription with the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, where they may be used by the patrons, including posting of all or part of the recording and transcription to their website, and also to deposit the recording and transcription with the International Leadership Association and the Tobias Center where they may be used by their patrons with the understanding that they may post all or part of the recording or transcription to their websites.

 Can I have your permission to do things?

OSPINA:                    You have my permission.

SCARPINO:              Thank you. I’m going to start by telling you, for your sake and the sake of anybody using this interview, that I am going to start by asking you some basic demographic questions. Then I’m going to talk to you about your education, and then we’re going to talk about leadership. We’ll work our way more or less chronologically through your career, with lots of discussion about leadership. The Tobias Center has some standard leadership questions that help provide some continuity to interviews we’ve been doing for twenty years, and I will work some of those in. But, you know, part of the fun of doing this is I know where we’re going to start, but I don’t always know where we’re going to end, but we’re going to have fun on this journey, so let’s get started. I’m going to come back to the topic of leadership, I promise, but just for starters to make you an interesting person here, when and where were you born?

OSPINA:                    I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States when my father was studying for a Master’s in Engineering at MIT. He and my mom came with two babies, and left three years later with four babies; then they had two more. So, I was born and stayed here for the first three years of my life and then went back to Colombia and lived there.

SCARPINO:              You really grew up in Colombia.

OSPINA:                    I completely grew up there.

SCARPINO:              I assume you don’t have any memories of Boston.

OSPINA:                    Very, very few, and mostly I think they are from stories my parents tell.

SCARPINO:              It’s amazing how memory works, isn’t it? So, you basically grew up in Colombia, and was that in Bogota?

OSPINA:                    My father was in the Navy, so, part in Cartegena, part in Bogota, and back and forth a couple of times, but mostly in Bogota. With my mom’s family being in Cartegena, so I would go a lot to Cartegena.

SCARPINO:              If your dad was in the Navy, obviously that’s Cartegena and not Bogota.

OSPINA:                    Yes, well, he did a lot of work in Bogota because he would be put on loan to the Ministry of Communications, you know, he is like an amazing person. We could spend the entire interview talking about him.

SCARPINO:              I’m going to ask you to tell me about your parents in a bit.

OSPINA:                    Okay.

SCARPINO:              You grew up in Bogota, do you have any brothers or sisters?

OSPINA:                    I have five siblings – two other sisters, and three brothers, one of them is deceased. So, six in total.

SCARPINO:              You learned to speak English in Colombia?

OSPINA:                    I learned to speak English in Colombia, but my parents tell me I was doing English and Spanish because of my connections to other kids who lived in the same household and that kind of stuff when I was three. So, I had a good grounding, and then my parents had the vision of putting us in a bilingual school.

SCARPINO:              Having your children learn to be bilingual is a lot more common in Colombia than it is in the United States. I mean, there are a lot more Colombians that are multilingual than Americans.

OSPINA:                    That’s true.

SCARPINO:              Your parents are Colombian. Your father, you said, was an engineer?

OSPINA:                    He was an engineer. He was a naval engineer at some point, but he really was interested in science and technology, and the development of science and technology as policy in Colombia. So, he worked to introduce the first IBM computer for the equivalent to the IRS in Colombia.

SCARPINO:              Gee...

OSPINA:                    He was in charge of that. He was in charge of developing a university degree for the naval officers. Before him they only got to high school, and he insisted there should be a university there. He was the first manager of what the equivalent is to the National Science Foundation in the United States. And in the process he traveled a lot, he went to a lot of conferences, he taught about it, and he still – he’s 98, going 99 – and still goes to conferences to talk about the need for a culture of science in the population in Colombia.

SCARPINO:              You said the culture of science?

OSPINA:                    Right. To develop a culture of science in the same way that you develop – that people have a culture of sports and people can talk about sports – he believes the normal person in Colombia should be able to speak about science in the same way and with the same literacy that they do about sports. It’s been a push, but he insists. One last thing is he asked his professors from MIT if he could engage them in a project to translate the most innovative way of teaching physics that had just come in the United States at the time that he was here, and if he could take it and translate it in Spanish in Colombia.

SCARPINO:              And he did that?

OSPINA:                    They did it. They had like a three-year project where they did that, and that became the standard text in Colombia, which was like a big push toward the development of science and technology.

SCARPINO:              And your mom was obviously raising children?

OSPINA:                    She was raising children; a very, very bright woman, like a very intuitive intelligence; very supportive of my father’s career and work; and six children that were like one year after the other for about eight years.

SCARPINO:              She had plenty to do.

OSPINA:                    Yes, yes.

SCARPINO:              I found two children to be a challenge. Can you talk about the impact that your parents had on the adult you became.

OSPINA:                    Yes. My mom taught me a lot about family values and the importance of being very committed to the well-being of the family. There were lots of stories about her own family coming from Italy into Colombia. My great-grandfather was an Italian musician who came to Colombia, and it was three musicians who came to do an opera or something like that to the conservatory that stayed in Colombia and married women; a pianist, flautist, and I can’t remember the third one, but the flautist was my great-grandfather. So, he stayed in Colombia, and that’s kind of like our original, you know, legacy there.

SCARPINO:              Do you know where in Italy he came from?

OSPINA:                    The northern part, Milan. There’s this myth that he was in La Scala de Milan, not sure if it’s true or not, but that was kind of like the myth. So, I learned a lot about that from her, that kind of like strong commitment and firm roots in the family. Also, she was incredibly humorous. She had a magnificent humor, and it’s like I feel the most comfortable when I can laugh a lot because it was a very spontaneous way of engaging with her children. I also admired that she ended up doing her high school diploma with six children already, when she decided that she wanted to now do what she hadn’t done when she was younger. She had done up to high school, and so she spent a lot of time doing that, and thought about going to university but then realizing that it was a little too risky with the kids still at a stage where she needed to be with them.

SCARPINO:              Needed raising and supervision.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, so that’s my mom, and they were the same age, which is interesting. My mom is... she’s deceased, she died during Covid, which was quite sad, but not Covid, just out of old age. And my dad is still alive, 98 and going. I think the most thing that I inherited from him is his passion for service, for public service. And here I am, my degree is in Sociology. I could’ve gone in very different directions, but it was clear to me that I wanted to do public service and public stuff, and so, that’s him directly, and his concerns and his passion for making sure that society was going the right direction, that people were getting what they needed to get. He talked about inequality and the need to address those issues. And, obviously, his amazing work habit, work ethic, which I inherited a little bit to the other side. People tell me I’m a workaholic, yeah, so... And also, he was also incredibly loving to the kids. He would sit down and read art books and show us pictures, and we would listen to The Four Seasons from Vivaldi and play around which was the season and that kind of stuff. So, he was very present that way.

SCARPINO:              I’m going to go out on a limb here a little bit. Colombia strikes me as a somewhat more traditional society than the United States. Were there any issues when you began to be interested in a career, and so on and so forth, college, and then off to graduate school, were your parents good with that?

OSPINA:                    My parents were both convinced that the six children should get a full education and go as far as they wanted. So, of the six, two of us PhDs, and the others have their BAs. And there’s one who was enroute to a Master’s degree and at the last moment stopped for personal reasons. So, we’re all pretty educated. All the rooms in my house have books, the entire walls are books, and in the hallways there are books. They would give us encyclopedias and books to read. Just growing up it was like a natural thing. Actually we made jokes that some friends of ours who would pass the year would get, as a gift, a trip to Miami. And we got awards, and it was like, ‘Okay, you’re doing great, thank you very much, keep going.’ But they were like really focused on development of knowledge.

SCARPINO:              As you think about your youth, the time that you grew up in Colombia, can you recall any experiences that had a significant impact on the adult you became?

OSPINA:                    Yes, let’s see, growing up there were lots of things, but I think I’m going to go straight to adolescence where there’s like a formative experience that I remember, late adolescence actually, I was leaving the teens when I went to the... Well, the high school we went to was a really nice high school, but it had this big issue. It was the Marymount, so it was these nuns from the outside, and they were in Colombia, and they saw the poverty and everything. So, they started to be active about trying to help things in poverty and got involved with some left people. At some point, there was this big scandal that these girls from high society were... middle class, were being brainwashed...

SCARPINO:              By the nuns...

OSPINA:                    By the nuns, yeah. Completely off, but the nuns closed the school, you know, like the whole thing went Vatican, and it was like a social scandal based on things that happened. And so, I was in eighth grade, and the entire school was left without a school because the nuns said, ‘We don’t want to deal with that anymore, we’re closing the school.’ So, the parents got together, formed an association, a foundation, and then there was a school. A lot of other parents who like ran away as far as they could from the whole thing; my sister was in the last year of high school so she was very involved in the kinds of activities that the nuns were doing, which were very much about social justice from a very Christian perspective. But it was presented as a narrative about communism entering. And my father got very much into that narrative. So, in one way, that was transformative in the sense that I saw it at home with my sister, and also my own experience thinking that, if that was communism, it was a fantastic experience, because it was all about sensitizing us to the needs of others, and very much in the light of the values that my parents had had all along. Except for them, once they mentioned the word ‘communism,’ they were terrified and closed their eyes and their ears to anything else. But the experience was a beautiful experience of reflection, of understanding how important it was to be responsible for others in society, and I think that we were lucky. We were lucky to have that experience and to have these nuns bring this to the curriculum in a way that was very genuine and authentic, and had nothing to do with converting us into communism. So, that’s really important, and it kind of directed me in a certain path that was different from other possible paths that I would’ve taken, especially like a better understanding of the importance of public sector services, public value, the need to take care of those who couldn’t take care of themselves, the need for social networks. I chose to study education, which was not like the most sophisticated career that somebody… you know, like I could’ve chosen to be a doctor, right? But education was, for me, based on also my parents’ belief where I wanted to go in Universidad Javeriana. And I would say that the second experience I had there - this is a Jesuit university, and, again, there was a group of Jesuits who genuinely interested in social justice issues. And, so, I chose more to be in that part of the educational, you know... the choices that you make, I more naturally gravitated towards that. And there is one memory that I have about that; we were in a retreat outside of town, and we were talking about these issues of poverty and justice and solidarity, and there were these screams from a little kid outside the convent – this was with some nuns also. And the screams were horrendous. And so I asked, ‘What’s going on?’ And the nuns said, ‘This kid has been abandoned by the parents, he’s been abused, we tried to help him, but he’s also very disturbed so ultimately, we just had to give up. And, so, he comes every night and screams like that, and we can’t do anything.’ And I’m like, what is this? This is pure hypocrisy. How can you do that, right? I didn’t say that, I was very polite. But it changed my understanding of how I wanted to deal with that kind of stuff. I just couldn’t believe that we were there sitting and talking about these values and issues, and there was someone out the door suffering, you know, a real person. So, that also made me think, okay, change, we need change, we need change. And, so, from there on, I think I developed a commitment for social change that kind of ranged between beyond just service, the need for a more systemic approach, changes in society... all the way to doing some organizing, to getting involved in like a worker’s education center at night, where I could teach popular education, Paulo Freire. So, things that, for my parents, it was a little too much, but for me it was right. And it was where I wanted to go. So, I learned a lot about the theology of liberation, and popular education, organizing, was very exposed to that. I married someone who had similar values, my first husband. And I was kind of like going in that direction, that’s when I worked in Projuventud, which was also a Jesuit-based foundation. But it was working with educational issues, popular educational issues for youth and for also the parents of the children, the working parents of the children. And we were doing interesting research that was kind of really leading-edge research, which by the way I used 10 to 15 years later in the Leadership for a Changing World project that I got involved. At that point, married with a two-year-old kid, we decided that we wanted to both, my husband and I - he’s a historian by the way at Universidad Nacional – we decided we wanted to do higher education, you know, pursue graduate work. And we chose to come to the United States. And, in a goodbye party at my organization, one colleague said to me, ‘You’re never coming back.’ And I was very offended, because I had a big commitment to staying in Colombia and working, right? But here I am.

SCARPINO:              What year did you leave, do you remember?

OSPINA:                    Sorry?

SCARPINO:              What year did you leave?

OSPINA:                    1981.

SCARPINO:              Colombia went through a period of considerable turmoil and violence.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, 60 years or more.

SCARPINO:              When I was there, six or eight years ago, it was not so bad. But I’m not sure as somebody who looks like an American, I would have been walking the streets by myself in Colombia 30 years ago. So, how did that period of violence impact the world in which you lived?

OSPINA:                    It had a lot of impact, but I think we left right exactly before Pablo Escobar mixed with guerillas and all that stuff. Because it was kind of like a very mixed bag of...

SCARPINO:              So, the guerillas were initially fighting for independence or something, and Escobar was just a criminal.

OSPINA:                    He was just a criminal. But then the whole thing got mixed up in terms of both narratives, but also in terms of financing and all kinds of stuff. It became a mess. The violence had already existed since the 1950s. But in the city of Bogota, you wouldn’t feel it except in the ‘80s when systematically they started bombs in clubs and in malls. So, the ‘80s and the ‘90s were really bad for people in the cities. I didn’t experience that directly because I was here already, but I experienced it indirectly through my family and the fears and the kidnappings. So, it was really a very, very horrible time. And then in the ‘90s some of the left party started to talk about the need for leaving arms and getting involved, like M-19, and they started conversation with the government that lasted 20 years. And in 2016, they signed a peace accord, which you cannot talk about post-violence, you have to talk about post-signing of the peace accord because the violence has continued. Especially for the most vulnerable people, they still feel it a lot. But it’s certainly better than before in the sense that at least there’s a formal agreement with part of the groups that were before terrorizing...

SCARPINO:              And the government stands behind?

OSPINA:                    The government, depending on which government, the government that signed the agreement, yes; the next person, no; the person now, yes. So it goes up and down.

SCARPINO:              M-19 was a terror group?

OSPINA:                    M-19 was an arms group, and they decided after...

SCARPINO:              An arms rebellion kind of group.

OSPINA:                    Arms rebellion, but also very innovative. They were doing things that were less terror-oriented and more about creative ways to show things. For example, they robbed the la espada de Bolivar, Bolivar’s...

SCARPINO:              Sword...

OSPINA:                    Sword... Bolivar’s sword. And that was like a big impact. And so then they talked about why they were taking it and the importance of not returning it until some of the things that needed to happen in Colombia could happen. Nobody died, you know, but it was those kinds of things. And then they ended up blowing it by getting involved in taking the Palace of Justice and the response from the government was horrendous.

SCARPINO:              Yeah, it’s in the plaza there, right?

OSPINA:                    Yes, and so that was like a massacre of big – and, so, they, you know, each side blamed the other side for it. It was a disaster no matter how you look at it, it was very sad.

SCARPINO:              How did that kind of environment shape you as you moved to adulthood?

OSPINA:                    As I’m saying, I think as I moved to adulthood, I was a little protected, because this was happening in the countryside and I was reading about it once I started paying attention to stuff, but I wasn’t experiencing it personally. The experience came from my family who stayed there. In a sense I think that it made me realize the importance of continuing to try to figure out how to develop the change that was needed. And I had a clear sense from the work I had done there before that organizing was an important part of this and, you know, taking (inaudible), hope, the philosophy that it was like you needed the people who were suffering the problem to be the ones who developed the knowledge to understand it, and to make the decisions that were needed to solve the problem. So is was more from local to general. Those ideas at the time were incredibly innovative. Nowadays, it’s kind of like part of what we… it’s like, dah... yes, we understand.

SCARPINO:              You were sort of on the cutting edge of that.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, but not just me, people who were thinking about that. I was part of that movement. I wasn’t a militant in a particular group, left group, but I was in that movement. I would participate. I would read about it. We had study groups. We read Marx. We read Paulo Freire. That was kind of like a consciousness raising kind of thing. My consciousness-raising for women’s issues came in the United States in the ‘80s and ‘90s as I was here and I was...

SCARPINO:              My sense is that the relationship between women and men is not the same in Colombia as it is here.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, well, it’s not the same but...

SCARPINO:              There’s a little bit more machismo, I mean, American men can certainly have all kinds of problems, but...

OSPINA:                    Yeah, but the idea of the patriarchy is still, that’s kind of like a... that’s a constant. The manifestations it has are different and more obvious perhaps in a country like Colombia.

SCARPINO:              Just so you know, if you ever want to know this, M-19, when I was in Colombia, I found out that the Biblioteca San Luis Arango had an unprocessed collection of their records, and I didn’t know those guys kept records, but that was my students’ project. They organized all of that material and did a finding aid, obviously, in Spanish, which wasn’t going to do most people here any good. But those records now are available thanks to my students.

OSPINA:                    Really, and where are they?

SCARPINO:              Well, did I say that right? Biblioteca San Luis Arango, a library in Colombia?

OSPINA:                    Luis Angel Arango... okay, Luis Angel Arango has it?

SCARPINO:              Yes. Now I assume they’re available to the public because the last thing I did before we left is that we met with the senior staff, my students turned over their work, and because my rule was: their country, their language, my problem. They did everything in Spanish and then took me out for coffee afterwards and explained what they did. But we turned over the finding aid over to the senior staff.

OSPINA:                    Did you have a sense of how different their ideology was compared to other...

SCARPINO:              Yeah...

OSPINA:                    They were very different...

SCARPINO:              That’s how I knew what M-19 was. Alright, we talked about events. In addition to your parents, were there any particular adults who had an impact on shaping the adult you became as you were growing up in Colombia?

OSPINA:                    My sister was very committed politically for many years.

SCARPINO:              Older or younger?

OSPINA:                    My older sister. So, I admired her a lot. I would say, not specific people, but I participated in a lot of like taking over of places that were going to be disrupted by development. These were all groups like study groups, so, but I wouldn’t say there was like a particular person from that group. But the entire piece was very formative and we worked with a lot of young Jesuits-to-be, many of whom left. My ex-husband was a Jesuit-to-be who left.

SCARPINO:              They left the church.

OSPINA:                    They left their path toward becoming priests. Some of them didn’t leave the church, others left the church, but kind of like the values, they kept the values, they just dropped the institution. But that was very formative. That group of people who was thinking about these issues. And then I have a lot of… I actually have a list of formative people in the leadership piece so I can keep waiting and talk about that later, but in terms of growing up to who I came to be when I came to the United States, I would say, you know, may someone like Paulo Freire was very…

SCARPINO:              Can you briefly explain who that is?

OSPINA:                    Paulo Freire is the creator of something called ‘Popular Education,’ which is an approach to education for the poor that is worked on the idea of getting the poor to understand that they have the capacity to develop the knowledge that they needed and to figure out and imagine a different way of being in the world and the strategy that they needed to do that. So, it was part of the bigger organizing movement. Later, the organizing movement in the United States and that kind of popular education became very, very close. In fact, I have an article about that in a handbook of politics and power where we show how these were two, like, Alinsky and other groups... these same ideas were emerging here and they were emerging there, and at some point they merge and they have an impact in both places at the same time. Popular education also became really very important in this country, in particular, around schools of education who started looking at it and making applications to their pedagogy in classrooms not just for the poor, but for regular classrooms. So, in the United States, if you talk about popular education and Paulo Freire, most people who know about that are people from an education background. There, it was more in the context of poverty.

SCARPINO:              For the benefit again of somebody who might use, popular education, how are you using that? What does that mean the way you are using that?

OSPINA:                    The way I’m using it now?

SCARPINO:              Yes.

OSPINA:                    It’s a philosophy and approach to capacity development and conscientization, if you want to use the word that he used, to get people who have internalized narratives of oppression to some extent, to get them to realize the power that they have and therefore make decisions about how they want to change their lives and therefore the structures that surround their lives, right? So, it believes very much in the agency of those people who have experienced the social problems that may be contributing to keeping them where they are because of the larger ideology of blaming the poor or blaming...

SCARPINO:              Do you think that part of the challenge is persuading those folks that they have agency?

OSPINA:                    Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s part of the challenge. When I started to do the work on leadership, right, and the work on leadership I started to do was connected to a foundation project that was supporting social-change leaders around the country, I didn’t make up a lot of these ideas. I brought them with me and applied them and worked with the leaders to see what they needed and what they wanted, and to make sure that the research on leadership that we were charged with doing wasn’t something that was done to them or about them, but with them. That’s all Paulo Freire. That’s all a very different understanding of how do you develop knowledge about a particular concept like leadership. At that point, leadership studies was very much still very leader-centered. And if I had followed that approach, I would’ve done a survey of the leaders in those organizations. But that way of thinking about leadership, you know, I was trained as a sociologist, so that didn’t make sense to me, it felt very psychological. Plus, I had all this other experience about how you can do this in a different way and also of respect for their knowledge. And, so, the proposal was, it was participatory action research; like three streams of research with different degrees of participation, and let’s invite these leaders to come and think about their leadership and what it means for them, and how they developed it. And the point is they’ve been doing that for a long time, and they were saying things about that now collective leadership… things that can be used in corporate America and are starting to be used in corporate America. So, my expertise about leadership is really about leadership for social transformation, not just leadership.

SCARPINO:              And that came out of your experiences in Colombia.

OSPINA:                    Very much. Very much. But, obviously, applied and translated.

SCARPINO:              You mentioned somebody twice... Freire?

OSPINA:                    Freire... Paulo Freire.

SCARPINO:              Can you spell that for the transcriber?

OSPINA:                    All right... Paulo, P-A-U-L-O, he’s a Brazilian. Freire is F-R-E-I-R-E – Freire.

SCARPINO:              Thank you. You just did her a huge service. I know because she doesn’t speak the language, it would be very difficult for her to find that and look it up. All right, so, I want to talk about your education. We’re going to spend a lot of time talking about leadership, but you attended high school in Colombia. We talked a little about that. What was the name of your high school?

OSPINA:                    Sorry?

SCARPINO:              The name of your high school?

OSPINA:                    For the high school it was called, Fundacion Nuevo Marymount – New Marymount Foundation – because, remember, there was a rupture. Now, the Marymount in Colombia has made peace with the nuns and they are called, again, just Marymount.

SCARPINO:              This is a Catholic high school.

OSPINA:                    It’s a Catholic high school, yeah, except the Fundacion Nuevo Marymount didn’t have nuns. They were all non-religious teachers but all very Catholic, very Christian, yeah.

SCARPINO:              What year did you graduate from high school?

OSPINA:                    What year?

SCARPINO:              What year did you graduate from high school, do you remember?

OSPINA:                    The year?

SCARPINO:              Yeah.

OSPINA:                    ’73, I think. Or no, wait a minute, can that be?

SCARPINO:              Only you know that.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, it was ’73, yeah, fifty years ago.

SCARPINO:              You went to that particular high school because it was near you or because your parents valued that kind of education? Why that high school?

OSPINA:                    They started the different possibilities and they chose Marymount. And then three years later this happened. And then they decided they had to create their own school, and my father was like a leader in that. He went to the Vatican, he talked with the nuns, he organized the...

SCARPINO:              He went to the Vatican, wow...

OSPINA:                    Yeah, to convince them that they shouldn’t close the school. But the nuns said, ‘We don’t want anything to do with what’s going on there,’ the Vatican nuns. And the other nuns, many were American nuns, they went back to the United States. But so my high school, eighth grade, ninth grade to eleventh and twelfth was Fundacion Nuevo Marymount.

SCARPINO:              When you graduated from high school, 1973, where did you imagine or hope your life was headed?

OSPINA:                    I knew I wanted to have more education. I knew I was going to go to the university. I thought I was going to teach, which I ended up doing, but teaching was like – I’m a teacher by heart. And people tell me I’m incredibly clear in my explanations and in the way I write. So, yeah, I knew that. I didn’t know exactly how that was going to happen. I wasn’t like looking at… I just knew I had to study to get there.

SCARPINO:              Colombia has some very good universities, but you chose to leave.

OSPINA:                    Well, no, I did go to Universidad Javeriana for my education degree, and then I chose to leave. At that point there were not too many master’s or doctoral programs. There are now, many more than there were at that time. I thought I would do a master’s, and then I decided to do the doctoral when I was here.

SCARPINO:              You were born in the U.S., Colombian parents. You may have mentioned this, but why did your parents move back to Colombia?

OSPINA:                    Because my father was on commission from the Navy. They were there because, it wasn’t instrumental, they were there for him to get the education he needed to go back and serve.

SCARPINO:              You mentioned your B.A. in education, social sciences 1978, Universidad Javeriana. Just for the benefit of somebody using this, this was a private university founded a long time ago, I found 1623. Old, traditional, prestigious Catholic university, Jesuit order, main campus in Bogota, satellite campus in Cali. We talked about why you went there, why did you decide on education and social sciences as a field of study?

OSPINA:                    Because I wanted to teach. And while I was doing my education, I taught in a school that was for kids who were middle-lower class who had less opportunities. It was (INAUDIBLE). I also taught at Fundacion Marymount, children, like in elementary school, so I was all the time kind of teaching while I was doing my degree. And then I taught in high school, also at Marymount.

SCARPINO:              You taught at several different levels before you came to the university.

OSPINA:                    Oh, yeah, I’ve done all of them, so primary, high school, and then university.

SCARPINO:              I taught high school for one day as an experiment. I found out it was probably not my cup of tea. All right, so Universidad Javeriana, that’s a Catholic university; did you grow up a practicing Catholic?

OSPINA:                    Yes, yeah, we would go to mass every Sunday. We learned all the basic blessings and, you know, like, before you go to bed you do that; and first communion; retreats every year for the school.

SCARPINO:              I grew up a Catholic too.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, so you know the whole thing. But then in my youth and adult era, I turned to a lot of Catholic people who were doing much more serious work. Even here in the United States, what’s the women in New York... Day? What’s her first name, I forgot. There’s a lot of people whose Catholicism has led them to do things.

SCARPINO:              Social justice?

OSPINA:                    Social justice-oriented stuff.

SCARPINO:              As you look back on it, what kind of an impact do you think being raised in that Catholic tradition had on the adult that you later became?

OSPINA:                    Well, it was a very liberal education. It wasn’t conservative, because there is conservative Catholicism and then there’s more liberal Catholic. The one we got was very liberal. And, so, I think I got a lot of the values of service and social justice and the importance of solidarity, and being there with the others that comes from that tradition. And then there are things there are that I didn’t even have to deal with when I was a kid, but as an adult, for example, not letting women become priests or abortion issues, the way LGBT people are treated, those things are unacceptable. And, so, I think I got the good stuff and I was saved from the bad stuff. Some of my friends, dear friends, I still love them because I grew up with them in high school, are anti-abortion, or are very different. But in my household, my parents were incredibly liberal. My father has become more conservative with age.

SCARPINO:              That tends to happen.

OSPINA:                    I only have positive things to say about the Catholic tradition in the way it was interpreted and I studied and learned it, and applied it to the real world, yeah. Understand there are issues that are unacceptable, yes, and I completely stand against them.

SCARPINO:              As you think about that, you grew up in that Catholic tradition, now that you’ve become more mature, older... you can look at some things that go on, like issues related to abortion and LGBTQ and stuff, as you sort of worked through that, how do you think that affected the way you think about leadership?

OSPINA:                    I think it affected it because always, for me, the most important thing was leadership, for what? I wasn’t interested in leadership for people to make more money, for corporations to be more effective. For me, it was always leadership for the good of society; leadership for organizations that are trying to change what’s going on, the unacceptable things that are happening, right? So, all that I know about leadership is about how effective leadership can be for social transformation, whether it’s at the individual level, whether it’s at an organizational level, whether it is a societal level. Nowadays, the leadership studies and management groups talk about grand challenges and all that stuff, but 50 years ago nobody was talking about that, you know. Twenty years ago, which is when I started to be interested in leadership, because I almost fell into the leadership studies group by chance because there was this opportunity to work with social change leaders and the Ford Foundation kept thinking there’s all these leaders on the ground who are doing terrific things, and there’s this narrative up here that says there’s no leadership in this country because the politicians are horrible. And, so, they were saying, can we create a program that elevates the kind of leadership that is happening on the ground? And, when I was asked to be a part of that agenda, I said, I don’t care if I have to learn about leadership, I don’t really believe in leadership as a sociologist, but let me see and we’ll figure it out. If I can work with those social leaders, social-change leaders who are doing fantastic stuff on the ground and learn from them, we’ll figure out how we think about leadership in that way.

SCARPINO:              But you became a convert.

OSPINA:                    I became a convert. It took me, yeah, I did not enter this field believing that it was a valuable field. I became transformed by it at some level, and pushed to change the things that I didn’t believe in.

SCARPINO:              But you’ve been doing this for a while now.

OSPINA:                    Twenty years.

SCARPINO:              You asked a question too many people don’t ask, which is ‘leadership for what?’ And you talked about society and organizational change. I mean, based upon what you know about the field – leadership, training leadership, and so on – do you think leadership programs are doing that, that they’re asking people to ask that question, ‘leadership for what?’

OSPINA:                    I think some people are, yeah. More now than when I started. When I started, it was a very different field, and it has really opened up. And I think I’m part of a wave of people that helped push in that direction. I didn’t do it by myself. There were lots of people thinking that way and pushing slowly. And then things happened that changed the way we talk about stuff. I would say that in the last five years, with the killing of lots of African-Americans that has been documented, that people see this is happening, a new narrative has been created that supports the importance of a different kind of leadership for social transformation. In the context of corporate leadership, it’s been, again, like, pushes from the outside. So, more complex society, like the society moving to a place where the interdependence becomes too much for the idea of a single leader to be able to deal with that, right? We know that story and that narrative, right? So, depending on the sector, it has kind of like different details, but if the goal is systems transformation, then the type of leadership cannot be the traditional leader-centered heroic leadership. It just can’t.

SCARPINO:              What does this new leadership look like? Or what should it look like, let me put it that way?

OSPINA:                    Formal leaders would understand that the roles that they play are very different from the roles they were expected to play before. And the roles are to open spaces where people can see and understand their own capacity to lead in the spheres of influence that they are, and to participate with a common purpose that’s agreed upon as they are trying to figure out and struggle with the issues that need to be changed. And, so, it’s the creation of, like my colleague John Railing (spelling?) would say, spaces full of leadership. Leader-full organizations, he calls them, or leader-full groups. So, collectives whose members see themselves as having a role in leading the group towards achieving something that they desire and that they value, and that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do by themselves.

SCARPINO:              And how do they come to the understanding that as a group they have that opportunity or obligation?

OSPINA:                    Well, if you think about a sociological concept of what is an organization? An organization is collective action for addressing a particular problem in society, right? So, if there’s a problem out there, a group of people get together, organize, and then it becomes an institution. But it is collective action, right? So, how does it happen there? And in the traditional way it has happened by creating functional capacities, creating silos. There’s a division of labor. You organize each other, right? That collective action capacity is not working for the present, right? So, collective action happens when a group of people get together to address a particular problem, whether they are guided by one person who invites or by a group or an institution that invites, but once everyone is there, now they’re the ones who have to figure this out. And, so, my view comes a lot from the original work that Bill Drath and Chuck Palus were doing in the Center for Creative Leadership where they were talking about leadership as meaning-making in communities of practice. So, a community of practice has a problem, they have to figure out how to address that problem. They get together and they make meaning out of it. And leadership is what happens when they’re able to find the direction that they need to move forward, and where they know what’s their part in moving that direction, and they understand that they need to be committed to doing that. So, the direction alignment commitment that they have, that was very inspiring for me. I never just repeated that. The research I design does not measure direction alignment commitment, but it’s very clear in my mind that leadership is this collective achievement. It’s something that happens when the magic happens, when they group is able to say, okay, here I am. And, for the past, when it was functional and each little piece had purpose, that was magic for that moment and they were like, yeah, this is what I’m doing, right... and then of course it didn’t work after a while. And, so, it’s finding the ways in which it can work that we get to social innovation and the much more flexible and fluid structures that we have in the present.

SCARPINO:              Does that understanding of leadership, review of leadership, does that work in non-free societies, Russia, China?

OSPINA:                    I think it works in the social movements that push those societies. I think in the totalitarian approaches, the top down where there’s an understanding that it’s a vision that’s up there and that needs to be imposed, it’s not even motivated like in liberal societies, it’s imposed. It’s a construction of leadership for that particular society, and it works for those who believe in that way of doing things, but, in that context, leadership for what? It’s leadership for bad stuff, you know. And then there are movements, there are people on the ground saying, no, that’s not going to work. And that’s a reaction where leadership happens in a different way and for different purposes. I actually need to ask you to stop for a moment.

SCARPINO:              Just a minute, let me put these on pause so we’re not recording things that you don’t want recorded.

(PAUSE)

SCARPINO:              I was talking to you about your education. We took a break and now we’re back. You earned your B.A., your bachelor’s degree in Colombia, and then you decided to undertake graduate education in the United States at SUNY Stony Brook. To start with, why SUNY Stony Brook? And why the United States?

OSPINA:                    The United States was because of the English, and it just made sense. And it was two of us, my husband and I were trying to do this together. My English was much better. He had to come for a whole summer and get to that. And why Stony Brook? Because we both applied to several places. I got accepted in the School of Education in Ohio; he got accepted at SUNY at Stony Brook, and they offered him a slot for me, temporary, until I proved myself in the Sociology Department because they didn’t have an education department. But no, they didn’t offer anything to him in Ohio, plus Ohio seemed...

SCARPINO:              It’s definitely not South America.

OSPINA:                    So, it was a very pragmatic decision to come. He would study in the History Department; I would study in the Sociology Department, and guess what I studied? Sociology of Education, that’s where I started, right? And I had a conditional acceptance for the first semester, and a semester later they accepted me with full scholarship because they just needed to make sure that I wasn’t just...

SCARPINO:              That you could do it.

OSPINA:                    That I could do it. Yeah, exactly. So, that’s why SUNY. And I’m really glad that we came to the East Coast and close to New York City because it’s a very progressive state. When I think about if we had been accepted in Texas or any other place where there’s horrible stuff happening, I’m like, oh, no.

SCARPINO:              I lived in Texas twice. You studied Policy Analysis and Public

                                    Management at the W. Averell Harriman School for

                        Management and Policy at SUNY Stony Brook. You got your Master’s in Policy Analysis and Public Management in ’85, and then you went on for a PhD at State University of New York, Stony Brook, which you got in 1989.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, a little correction there is I arrived to sociology thinking about doing a master’s, but decided to get into the doctoral program just to have better access to faculty. And as I was about to start my dissertation, my husband went back to Bogota. I stayed with the responsibility of a child, and I thought to myself, I need to do something more practical with my education. So, I stopped the Sociology, went to do the master’s, got a job offer at the end of the master’s, and was about to take it when I thought to myself, all I have to do is the dissertation, let me finish that too.

SCARPINO:              So, you were actually in the doctoral program...

OSPINA:                    Yes.

SCARPINO:              And took the master’s so you wouldn’t come up empty if something happened.

OSPINA:                    Exactly.

SCARPINO:              You had the child and responsibilities and all of that stuff.

OSPINA:                    Exactly... And then, loved it there, because in addition to education, my other interest is, you know, like government supporting transformation, right, got the right kind of government. So, that was always my father’s public service ethos, that was always in my mind. So, a Policy and Management degree sounded like the right orientation to me. And in sociology I shifted a little bit from sociology of education to larger development issues. Yeah, so it was a little paralleled at some level, but, you know, the master’s was only like one year, M.S.

SCARPINO:              Some places give their doctoral students the master’s after a certain amount of time, and I think that’s in case they don’t finish, they got something.

OSPINA:                    Right. So, that’s a Master of Philosophy, which I already have gotten. You cannot start your dissertation -- it’s when you are going to start your dissertation you get that degree. But this was a separate professional type degree which was more like, okay, if I go how I can be more employable. And I loved what I learned there. And it was very helpful. And I ended up in the School of Public Policy afterwards, you know.

SCARPINO:              You did. That helps, but you wrote a master’s thesis called Transportation Services for the Shelter Program: An Analysis of Meal Delivery for Men's and Women's Shelters in the City of New York. A really long title for a master’s thesis. What attracted you to that topic? How did you do the research for that?

OSPINA:                    It was a little connected to the fact that, to write the master’s thesis, you would take an internship. So, there were a couple of internships. This one sounded interesting because it was working with the vulnerable populations. And, so, my assignment was to develop that took for them, which was kind of like a policy thing I had learned in school, so I developed the tool for them and then I converted that into my master’s. And so, it was a very applied – okay, here's a tool that you can use to support the objectives of serving shelters.

SCARPINO:              That had a public function in addition to giving you the academic credential.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, yeah, yeah. And by the way, my dissertation ended up being the... what I was going to do when they offered me a job, the manager was really fantastic, very open, very liberal, very progressive. I went back to him and I said, ‘Look, I cannot take that job. I’m going to go back. Why don’t I do the job that you’re offering me as my dissertation?’ And he said, ‘Okay.’ So, they paid me for a summer for me to collect the data, and it ended up being about organizational justice.

SCARPINO:              What was the title of your dissertation?

OSPINA:                    Illusions of Opportunity: Employee Expectations and Workplace Inequality. So, back to justice stuff, right? The technical problem was that they had, you know, like the Sanitation Department career was beautiful, had offered compensation and everything to people, and the clerical career and the analyst career were like the second-class citizens, right? So, they needed to figure out how could they make sure that these two careers where people were very unhappy could be happier. So, the work was looking at, are they really that unhappy? So, it was about job satisfaction: How do we make people more satisfied with their job. I was more interested in my dependent variable, which was the organizational inequality that was creating that unhappiness. They were more interested in the happiness component, the job satisfaction as the dependent variable. I really did a lot of work and nuance in operationalizing all of the variables connected to organizational inequality. I looked at the three career ladders. I took the personnel data and did analysis of the data to show that there were in fact differences in rates of promotion, difference in rates of compensation. That’s how I learned about public service in the United States, and civil service, and all that stuff that then was very helpful.

SCARPINO:              Was there a gender variable there? Sanitation workers are mostly male, aren’t they?

OSPINA:                    Teacher?

SCARPINO:              Sanitation.

OSPINA:                    Oh, sanitation... now, now there are more women. But at that point it was mostly men, oh yeah. But it was interesting because there was a confounding effect talking about this issue of intersectionality, so, the gender issue... Many of the variables worked very differently depending on the structural context in which they were located. These were like three different internal labor markets, completely different siloed from one another, right? And as internal labor markets, they had their own rules and regulations that were very favorable for the sanitation people, and very unfavorable or uncertain or unfair in some ways to the other two. I started thinking about this as a very structural problem, and then realized a lot of it is about the constructions that people are doing about themselves in the context where they see others having much better opportunities than they do as opposed – so, it was much more the comparison that mattered, right? So anyway, that’s a whole other story. I have a book that came out of that, and I got royalties for a while on it, actually. It did well in the sociology departments and other places like that. But it was a fascinating story, it was a fascinating story.

SCARPINO:              I could buy a few cases of beer with my royalties and that’s about where it goes.

OSPINA:                    Well, I have to tell you, now I make more royalties than I made with the book from other countries copying my articles from leadership. Yeah, because in other countries, they have to pay royalties to be able to copy the articles. And those royalties, I get them.

SCARPINO:              And they pay you and not the journal?

OSPINA:                    They pay me. I don’t know if they pay something to the journal also, but this is something called the Copyright Center for Rights, something like that, and, yeah, this year I got $800.

SCARPINO:              I published in China, and the only thing I got was they wrote my name in English. Everything else they translated into Chinese. All right, so, you talked about going on for the PhD and why you decided to do that. And I asked you about your dissertation. You earned a PhD in 1989. At that point, when you’re going to get the degree, your husband’s gone back to Colombia...

OSPINA:                    Yeah, about three years ago.

SCARPINO:              And you’ve got some children.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, I have a son.

SCARPINO:              Where did you imagine your life was headed at that point? What did you hope would happen next?

OSPINA:                    I would get a job and have a stable economy. And the reality is I kept thinking, I need to stay in the United States until I feel stronger given my personal circumstances. I never thought, okay, I’m going to stay. For 10 years I’m like looking from the outside in, oh look at this, look at how these gringos do things, right? And about year 10, I told myself, either I go back or I integrate myself. And at that point, I already had a new husband, my son was completely, you know, loved being here and was doing, getting good stuff.

SCARPINO:              He was an American by then.

OSPINA:                    He was an American, obviously. By the way, he was born in Colombia, and at that point I thought why do I need to give him a U.S. citizenship? I’m never going to live in the United States. So, we had to nationalize him. But, anyway, so at that point I started voting, I started - because I had dual citizenship all around, you know, so I could stay here.

SCARPINO:              When did you get the U.S. citizenship?

OSPINA:                    I had a passport when I came back at three years old.

SCARPINO:              Oh, my goodness, that’s right, you were born here. My mistake.

OSPINA:                    And for a long time, I only had an American passport because Colombia didn’t accept dual citizenship. Later on, they accepted dual citizenship, and then I was able to use both, I have two passports.

SCARPINO:              Are you a dual citizen now?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, and very, very bi-cultural; I’m completely bi-cultural right now. I love this country as much as I love Colombia.

SCARPINO:              That’s a good thing, isn’t it?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, it’s very nice.

SCARPINO:              And there aren’t very many people who can get a chance to be that way, I mean really be that way.

OSPINA:                    Yeah. With all the criticisms that I have for both my beloved countries, because none of the two is perfect, there’s a lot of stuff, but the love is there. Yeah.

SCARPINO:              This subject came up indirectly before. But as I read through the material and talked to the people whose names that you gave me and thought about this, in some ways after you earned you PhD, your professional life is a little bit like the tale of two careers, right, when you look at research and publication, which is going to cause me to shift to the subject of leadership here, and I want to talk to you about your scholarship. But, I want to start with a basic question, and that is: How do you define leadership? What is it?

OSPINA:                    Okay. I’m going to repeat myself a little bit from something I said before. So, the first thing is leadership is something that happens; it’s an outcome of a group effort. It’s not something that is only, the only source is not people. There are many other things that contribute to leadership. Leadership emerges in a process. And at the end. If the group is able to move in the directions they want, then leadership is happening. It’s like that. Now, so that’s the first piece. The second piece, and it’s connected to that, is leadership is not an attribute, leadership is not just an activity. Leadership is a kind of work that can only happen in relationship to others. So, of course, in the traditional leadership studies work, the relationship is important, but it’s the relationship between two individuals, it’s a very individual relationship. Here, the relationship is an approach where you are trying to do something in the world and there’s no way you can do it by yourself because it requires work from others, too. Again, the image of organizations as collective-action efforts, you can translate it to here, right? It’s like you cannot do anything by yourself right now. And if you think that the achievement came because of your work only, you’re completely deluded. But that’s kind of like part of what the big leadership ideology leads us to believe. This is an individual effort; I made it all. And at first that’s kind of like people may initiate something, but at some point it's not theirs anymore.

SCARPINO:              Right.

OSPINA:                    So, leadership happens. And leadership is a type of work that, when it’s done well in relationship among different people who end up realizing that they need each other to do the work, move in that direction and achieve what they want to achieve, and in doing so, leadership has happened.

SCARPINO:              Is that kind of leadership a process?

OSPINA:                    Leadership is process, but leadership is an emergent process. And it is based on the way people interact with one another. This is a very sociological construct, because the world happens because of interaction. We construct it as we ... it’s a constructionist way of thinking about leadership.

SCARPINO:              Leadership as a social construction.

OSPINA:                    Leadership is... but it’s careful, right? But leadership is, like many other things in the world, a social construction. It’s a very particular type of social construction. And here I got these conversations especially early on when I was trying to figure out what this meant in practice with people like Boas Shamir and Mary Uhl-Bien. No, but influence is the most important piece in leadership.

SCARPINO:              You said Walt Shamir?

OSPINA:                    Boas Shamir.

SCARPINO:              Okay, Boas Shamir.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, yeah. And they kept insisting, ‘you don’t have the influence component in the way you’re thinking about leadership.’ And I kept thinking, where is the influence? If you think of influence as, I have these and I’m going to make you do something, which is a very top-down approach, no, I don’t believe that that’s leadership. But if you think of influence of what happens when people in interaction transform each other towards the collective purpose and see themselves as part of a group where each of them knows that they have something that they can contribute and they figure out the way to do that, then that’s influence, but it’s a very different kind of influence, right? And it’s not just one person influencing. It is the objects that they use; it is the process that they develop. Like, again, if you think about this sociologically, if you create a strategic plan to do something, that strategic plan takes a life of its own, and it’s a source of leadership that helps people know what they have to do without a person being there all the time saying, ‘you have to do this, you have to do this, and you have to do this,’ which is kind of like the more leader-centered perspective, and it’s something that you have to repeat it over and over and over, the influence process. But if you create the conditions for people to understand their own leadership and what’s their part of that bigger piece, then the process is the objects, the interactions, become sources of leadership.

SCARPINO:              I wrote down something you said when you started talking; you said:   ‘as a kind of work in relation to others,’ and then you explained that in some detail. Then I think about leadership training programs that exist all over the United States and other countries, is that a kind of leadership that can be taught in a leadership training program?

OSPINA:                    It’s good that you asked me that. I’ve been working with people from Teach for All, which is this network of organizations that do Teach for American, Teach for Colombia. And they’ve been trying to figure out how do they develop this idea of collective leadership, which is kind of how I call the approach that I use; it’s collective leadership. But not as ala USSR, like it’s not collective that way, but it’s collective in a sociological sense. It’s about collective efforts. And I’ve seen over the time since I started thinking about this, and now the development of leadership development programs that are fantastic ways of getting people to develop the mind-frame to understand that they can be leaders, but that they being leaders depends on other leaders too, and that it’s together, right? So, the more traditional leadership development programs that focus on capacities for the individual and that focus only on how can I help this person get better in their job or get the skills that they need to get to a leadership position don’t work for what I’m talking about, right? But programs that are... you know, like we talk about kind of like three different things that these programs are doing in this document that I’m helping them write -- and I’ve learned from them and they’re learning from me. I started as an advisor and now I’m co-author -- is networks. So the development as a network approach, which is systemic, which allows people to see where they are in the system and what’s their potential contribution. Those are capacities, capabilities that can be built up. Critical thinking is another capacity that needs to be built up if you’re going to figure out how to do this as a collective problem solving. Then there’s spaces for a lot of dialogue, deliberation, conflict resolution, so spaces where people are making meaning about the stuff that they are interested in and figuring out how to move forward and that they’re doing it in the context, if possible, of an experience where they can reflect on the experience and come back, but not reflect by themselves but reflect with others who are doing similar experiences perhaps in a different contexts. That’s a perfect learning environment to develop those capabilities. And then, programs like those cohorts where what you’re trying to do is develop a group of people from a particular sector, perhaps because the sector doesn’t have enough of that capacity, and they come as a cohort and they’re thinking together about the problems in the sector as a cohort, and then they go back. Those are ways of doing leadership development programs that are incredibly effective to apply this kind of leadership.

SCARPINO:              If somebody wanted to read scholarship on the kind of leadership that you’ve been talking about, can you suggest, I don’t know, three sources that a person could read, only one of which would be written by you? I mean, is there literature out there that a person could turn to?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, there is, let me see if I can think of...

SCARPINO:              I mean, I can ask you this again tomorrow if you want time to think about it.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, yeah, but, yeah, I put together stuff for people and say, ‘Read these three things and then we’ll talk again.’ But, because remember, I had no idea about leadership, or leadership studies, or leadership research when I agreed to do this research on these social change leaders.

SCARPINO:              And that was for the Ford Foundation.

OSPINA:                    For the Ford Foundation. So, I had to start educating myself in the leadership studies field. And the more I read, the more I was, like... and then I bumped into this little piece, whitepaper from the Center for Creative Leadership: Leadership as Meaning-making in Communities of Practice. I thought, oh, social construction of leadership.

SCARPINO:              Leadership, Meaning-making in Communities of Practice...

OSPINA:                    Leadership as Meaning-making in Communities of Practice. So, leadership is meaning making in communities of practice, that was the exact sentence that they used. And I read it and I thought, oh, this is sociology. This is a sociological approach, the first one that I find. Because, by the way, sociologists are not interested in leadership. There’s nothing - very, very little written about leadership in sociology. There is one piece that’s fantastic, it’s about institutional leadership by… I’m blocking his name now, it’s an old piece that’s really good. And then there’s a little bit of leadership in social movements, but there’s very little in sociology. So, this was something I could start pulling. So, I would say that at that point, when I read that piece of paper by them, it was very illuminating. Then Bill Drath wrote his book on the Deep Blue Sea. All these examples were private sector, I was like very disappointed about that. But that was kind of like a direct application of these ideas. And that was the start. Then I read, oh this guy from Harvard, leadership, uh... well, there were pieces that I could find and read, and I could see the nuggets, but it was, what I was trying to do is put together the little insights that I was seeing in most of the other places. From Heifetz, who was like famous...

SCARPINO:              Heifetz...

OSPINA:                    Ronald, Ron Heifetz, right?

SCARPINO:              At Harvard, yeah.

OSPINA:                    At Harvard... he’s the one who said first that leadership is a type of work. But he left it, then he’d go back to, what you have to do as a leader is push people. So, a great idea, but halfway, halfway baked in my view, right? And so, I took the idea of leadership as work and pushed it. So, I would get people to read some of those basic ideas, but then bring my ideas to show how they connect.

SCARPINO:              Leadership...

OSPINA:                    Mary’s work on Complexity Leadership is an approach. It goes in a very different direction, but it’s the same idea, leadership as emergent, as co-constructed, right, yeah.

SCARPINO:              If I ask you to define leadership in three or four sentences, could you do it?

OSPINA:                    Didn’t I just do it?

SCARPINO:              There were a lot of sentences. I mean, I just wondered if you can boil it down.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, in fact, can I bring it tomorrow?

SCARPINO:              Sure, absolutely.

OSPINA:                    Because the work I’ve just done with these colleagues from Teach for All, where we came down with a definition that satisfies their practice need and satisfies my scholarly need. And, by the way, that is something that I want to be in my history, which is that, from the start when I came to this country, I came with an ethos that university knowledge has to be at the service of real work. And in the United States I got the surprise that academia is an industry, and what you want to do is to move those three steps and the only way you can do that is to create these journal articles that have nothing to do with reality, right? I’m characterizing, of course, but...

SCARPINO:              I understand what you’re talking about.

OSPINA:                    You know... and so I, from the very start, have given a lot of emphasis to the issue of practice. And, for me, it was luck, not only luck, but it was great that I landed in an applied school, a school of applied work. But the good thing is that, because I was coming from a very theoretically oriented discipline, I could connect those two pieces. I could connect the theoretical piece with the very applied practice piece. So, throughout my entire career, I’ve been advocating that there has to be conversations between practitioners and academics because, if not, we’re missing half the knowledge that exists in the world. If we only take the knowledge that’s developed through academic research, we’re missing half the knowledge and it’s already there, and we’re trying to invent something that has already been invented.

SCARPINO:              Do you think that your belief in theory and practice going hand-in-hand and being important reinforcing parts grew out of your work in social justice and so on in Colombia? I mean, experience in poverty and community groups?

OSPINA:                    The notion that the people who experience the problem have a type of knowledge that someone who has not experienced the problem doesn’t have comes from that. Yeah, right. So, now, you could talk about this in a very sophisticated way, the systemology, the entology, the methodology... yeah, it’s a flip. It’s a flip, because we believe that evidence-based, and when we say evidence-based we only mean number and data that’s up there that has nothing to do with reality.

SCARPINO:              Academic research.

OSPINA:                    Sorry?

SCARPINO:              Academic research.

OSPINA:                    Academic research at its worst, because there’s also very good academic research, right? But at its worst, very empiricist, very number-crunching oriented, very much like, maybe at the end have a little bit of applications to practice but not too much because then they’re going to accuse you of being an activist, and that’s not good. You need to be neutral. I don’t believe in the neutrality of knowledge. As a good sociologist, I don’t.

SCARPINO:              You talked about leadership. How about management? How do you explain management as opposed to leadership?

OSPINA:                    Management is a much more technically-oriented activity, right? A manager can be a leader, but not all managers are leaders. And not all leaders are managers. So, management is what needs to happen to coordinate work that has been structured in a particular way. And usually in very pyramidal contexts. And notice how in more network-oriented contexts, the network type, for example, that happens now in consultancies. There may be a manager, but the role of that manager is very different from the one who had these different supervision capacities, right? But definitely management and leadership are not the same, although, many times they are used… when you say a manager, you immediately think leader.

SCARPINO:              That’s why I asked that, because, I mean, I think it’s important to realize that there’s a distinction.  

OSPINA:                    Yep.

SCARPINO:              Do you consider yourself to be a leader?

OSPINA:                    Let me say that I have contributed to mobilize groups of people in ways that have produced something that we cared about. For example, in high school I led the yearbook project the year for my class, 1973 yearbook with the pictures and all the stuff. I would carry all the stuff and... but when I think about it with my leadership perspective, I think I was mobilizing people and I was carrying the result of that mobilization towards an end. And by the end when we had the yearbook, everyone felt it was their work, it was their product, it was them. This was them, right? So, I did that. There was a big catastrophe in Guatemala. I said, we need to collect money. So, I initiated projects that then took a life of their own and kind of like had an outcome that was much more collective. And what I notice now in the present is a lot of people have surprised me by saying how much they admire and how my work has changed the way they think about leadership and how much resonates; and, finally, these words resonate with what I wanted to kind of like say. It’s very gratifying, right? So, I guess in that sense I have contributed to change the conversation, but if it was only me it wouldn’t have worked.

SCARPINO:              That’s true.

OSPINA:                    There’s a lot of other people who have contributed equally and it is kind of like the wave, right? We have needed each other to do it. And we have needed those who also criticize this way of thinking. They are also part of the creation because you have to think about how do you respond to those issues, yeah, yeah. There’s something I wanted to say about leadership that I think is very important, and I think it’s an idea that I helped develop with my colleague, Erica Foley, who’s been kind of like my partner in crime.

SCARPINO:              Whose last name is?

OSPINA:                    Erica Foley.

SCARPINO:              Erica... Foley.

OSPINA:                    Which I decided not to suggest as an interviewee because I felt that if I had Ellen, to have two people from NYU was kind of like too much. And I thought Ellen had the starting point of this process. But the one thing I want to say about leadership that I think is important is you have to think about leadership in two ways, about collective leadership in two ways. Collective leadership is something that you can see in the world empirically when more plural forms of leadership have been emerging. So, co-leadership, distributed leadership, those are more plural forms of leadership that exist in the world. And they are collective forms of leadership, much more collective because they are less leader-centered. But, then, also you have to think of collective leadership as a lens that you use to look at any type of leadership. The most unique tarry-type of leadership is a group of people who are making meaning together to do the work that they need to do and who accept and agree on assumptions that are different from, you know -- that are very consistent with whatever form is more dominant. So, you can think of single leaders in organizations, and you put on your collective leadership glasses and then you see that’s agreements that are based on traditional ways of thinking that people follow, they say, ‘Yeah, this is what it is. And, so, I work for it. I contribute to it.’ Or, these more plural forms that represent new ways of organizing that are more consistent with the fourth revolution that we are in, right? Like, industrial, industrial, digital, and now it’s, I don’t know what, there’s a new revolution there, like the virtual I think, I don’t know. Both are important. We developed these very nicely in the special issue about these two ways of thinking about leadership, because part of what happens is there’s so much and there’s so many people using the term collective leadership and relational leadership in so many different ways that it’s very hard for people to learn anything because it's just too confusing. People are using the same terms but they mean different things. And, so, creating a matrix that has those categories and that have the levels of analysis, we were able to kind of like say, okay, this school fits here, this school fits here, you know, so that there’s just a little map that’s very helpful for people to understand the different ways in which people are thinking about collective leadership today.

SCARPINO:              Do you teach leadership to people who are not your students?

OSPINA:                    That are not students?

SCARPINO:              Not your students... I mean, do you do workshops for executives or community groups?

OSPINA:                    Let’s say it hasn’t been my primary activity. Teaching has primarily been to students, except my students are graduate students and many of them work. And they have been the most important challengers of these because they love the idea but then they say, ‘And how do we apply it?’ And then I have to answer something, so they have me thinking very, very hard. And I invite them from the beginning of the class; if you don’t get something or if you think it doesn’t work, tell me and we’ll work it out. So, I’ve learned a lot of things from those challenges. But now that I’m retiring, I’m starting to work more with practitioners who are doing stuff, and now it’s a different...

SCARPINO:              You’re not really retiring. You’re just leaving the academy.

OSPINA:                    Yes, that’s true.

SCARPINO:              I understand how that works. Bilingual, bicultural, we’ve talked about that. How does that kind of background – bilingual, bicultural background – influence your perspective on leadership?

OSPINA:                    I think that it has allowed me to step back and view things as an outsider and be able to be more critical, and therefore more creative about this stuff. The interesting thing is that outsider/insider perspective has been absolutely fundamental in my development as a leadership scholar. And that’s because when I entered as a sociologist in a very applied field, I was a complete outsider looking and being critical and seeing little insights that I liked, right? Then I said, oh, leadership is meaning-making communities of practice, I like that, I’m going to get there. So, I started working on that and obviously it has an approach to the world that’s very relational and that says researching that with a survey doesn’t work because of the assumptions of what that means. So, in a field that has tried to become very quantitative so that it gets legitimized in the world of academia, I enter as a qualitative researcher and a participatory researcher. So, I’m already an outsider entering also the field as an outsider in the sense that it’s like, here’s mainstream and here’s the work I’m starting to do, right? And then on top of that, I enter studying people who have been marginalized in the society, right? They’re kind of like the third world of the United States, they’re the same stuff I was looking at there. So, I’m studying a type of leadership that very few others are studying at that point in time, right? This idea that these people in these communities, you know, community-based organizations, what? This corporation leadership, you know, like, political leadership, that’s what the field is all about, right? And here I am, so, I’ve been swimming against the current with every single decision that I made, but the decisions have been so good because they’ve allowed for the creativity that’s needed in the field, right? And I didn’t necessarily know that. I was just entering without knowing exactly -- making the decisions that I felt were necessary given the type of scholarship that I wanted to create and making sure that I was thinking leadership for what. And, so, leadership for what in this context was leadership for social change. That’s what interested me. What I tried to do is then to figure out how to theorize about those elements that are there that can be generalized to a theory of leadership, not to a population of leadership, not to any kind of leader, but to a theory of leadership that then is applied to different populations. So, to some extent I really brought the best of my theoretical understanding of sociological perspective in here in a very applied context, valuing very much practice and what knowledge that needs to be created is for, and in a context where social justice becomes important again. So, it keeps coming up, it keeps coming up for me, and it’s been delightful, I’ve enjoyed it so much.

SCARPINO:              You talk about your work with a level of joy, that’s really good. I mentioned bicultural, bilingual...

OSPINA:                    That’s the outsider, is my reaction to it. It’s outsider, but insider also in some way.

SCARPINO:              Do you think that leadership itself is a cultural construction; that is, that leadership grows out of a cultural context in which the leaders exist?

OSPINA:                    I think, yes and no. I think leadership is part of the human condition. The idea of figuring out how a group of people moves and orchestrates, that’s part of our DNA, that’s part of the human condition. But empirically, when it emerges in the world it’s very, very, very determined and influenced - the narratives and the ways it’s constructed by, you know, particular cultures and social structures, right? Because cultural isn’t separated from social structures, right? And from the justifications for the type of structure that exists in that culture. So, the more individualized type of narrative and understanding of leadership is much more typical of the western countries which, it’s not just that they’re western, it’s what they’ve done in terms of having become who they are out of ripping off stuff from other places, right? So, it’s this colonial component that has resulted in the way the west sees itself, right? Now, people are talking, in the South people talk about epistemicide, like, the idea of how colonial domination has killed the knowledge of people in the places where, you know, like the extraction hasn’t just been of resources, it has also been the extraction of the capacity of people to give credit to their own knowledge.

SCARPINO:              All the ways of knowing that human beings developed over time got squashed.

OSPINA:                    Exactly. And the only rational, and, you know, only a particular narrative of what’s evidence and what’s a rational way of doing things and the science-oriented, and science understood only as this detached perspective, so, yes and no, right? But what I would say is like, I was asked in the conversation with Sonia Ospina that’s happening with my colleagues who are organizing, and they said, think about...

SCARPINO:              On Saturday...

OSPINA:                    On Saturday... think about what’s something that you would like to tell younger people. And one of the things that comes up for me when I think about that is that when they do research on leadership, they need to consider the very specifics of the place that they’re looking. Not just because it’s good research for folks on context, it’s because that’s where leadership emerges. And they’re not going to understand what emerges if they don’t understand the assumptions, the culture, the way things are organized. And it is from there that they can move up in the ladder of extraction and theorize about leadership as a human condition; not as a condition of this particular population, but what is in this particular population with this particular context with this particular culture that you find in other places that have a completely different – extract the element of leadership that is about the human condition and theorize about that. Because if you just say, oh, I can only talk about the social change leaders in the United States and these may not generalize to other...

SCARPINO:              But, I mean, if you think about it, one of the things that made it possible for human beings to dominate the globe for good or for ill is the capacity to lead, right? I mean, if we didn’t have that as part of who we are, we probably would not have ended up where we are now, which is not always a blessing. But I mean...

OSPINA:                    But I think that there’s an interesting overlap there of two concepts: One is capacity to lead, and the other one is domination, and they’re not the same.

SCARPINO:              No, they’re not.

OSPINA:                    There’s an interesting discourse that hasn’t entered sufficiently the leadership conversation. Like, if you look at all the titles of ILA’s present conference, which I looked at to see where I wanted to go, it’s all very nice and merry and progressive, and about flourishing, about... which is all very good. But it’s...

SCARPINO:              Not very critical.

OSPINA:                    Not very critical, but most important, because I also believe in leadership as a lever for change and as a lever for people to realize their capacity as human beings who see the connections between another, and only exist because of those connections, right? But behind that there’s a lot of stuff that creates obstacles for that to happen. And if we don’t talk about that, then we’re missing something in the conversation. That’s why I think a critical perspective of leadership is very important. And I didn’t realize that I was categorized as a critical leadership scholar until I saw a chapter that put my name in a critical leadership scholars’ chapter. Oh, there I am... Okay.

SCARPINO:              When did you find out you were going to be nominated for this Lifetime Achievement Award?

OSPINA:                    I didn’t. Suddenly I got a letter saying you won this award. Because there are awards where somebody says to you, please give me information so I can nominate you, right, and then you know from the start and you are kind of like thinking, did it happen, did it not happen? Here, I was going to come because we’re presenting… with my colleagues from Teach for All are presenting, and I said I’ll go. And then I got this beautiful present message that I had... I was so surprised, and I never thought of a lifetime award. I would’ve thought, maybe, a research award or, you know, but it’s a lifetime award, I’m thinking, oh my god...

SCARPINO:              I will tell you that it is an astonishingly distinguished cast of people that have gotten that over the years. I mean, I know... I mean they’re not my drinking friends, but I know a lot of these people because I interviewed them. What an amazing group of people that you have joined.

OSPINA:                    Do I fare okay?

SCARPINO:              You’re great.

OSPINA:                    Oh, I’m sorry, that was an ego-oriented question.

SCARPINO:              No... you’ve talked a lot about leadership, and I’m going to ask you this question anyhow: Do you think that there are certain qualities of effective leadership that transcend individual cultures? In other words, qualities of successful leadership that you would find anyplace that’s successful in any culture?

OSPINA:                    I think that that happens now just because we’re in a global world where things travel, and they travel in the direction of the dominant narrative. So, I see it from a very sociological perspective, you know. I don’t think that they are innate. What is innate is that leadership is part of the human condition, that humans get into these relationships to be able to do things that they need to do. But the list, the characteristics, I think they are very culture connected. So, yeah, and I have to say that I’m now starting to go back to look at some of those attributes, but at the beginning I’m like, I’m not going to interview leaders themselves to know about leadership, and I’m sick and tired of all the lists that are out there that repeat themselves over and over and over and over, and people keep doing research over and over and over about them. How are they helpful? Oh, I have to be courageous... okay, so, maybe then you go and do, you know, the Theory U, from MIT, you know, Theory U from MIT, what’s his name? I’m blocking his name right now, but there’s a real interesting person doing work about how to transform the world. So, it ends being a little bit about leadership and now he talks about leadership... hopefully the name will come in a moment. You know, there’s a moment in that Theory U where people have to… it’s like a technology where people have to reflect about themselves and confront themselves. And so part of what they do in terms of applications is a retreat in the Himalayas, if you have money of course, right, a retreat in the Himalayans where you’re going by yourself into the mountain and you’re... All right, so bravery, you know, you may be able to develop more bravery when you find yourself there and are afraid and figure out what to do about that fear. So, there are ways in which, yeah, you have to be brave to do things that go against the current, and many leadership situations are going against the current, because what you want to do is change something, right? But that bravery is part of the attributes of every single leader? I don’t, I don’t see, I don’t even know if that’s true or not, but I don’t find it helpful, it just creates so much pressure for people.

SCARPINO:              That’s true.

OSPINA:                    So, yeah.

SCARPINO:              I’m going to be respectful of your time. I’m going to ask you one more question, so, let me...

OSPINA:                    On the other hand, there are qualities of being that you can identify in relational leaders.

SCARPINO:              And those are?

OSPINA:                    Being able to see the system, the parts of the system at the same time that you see the individuals; the whole and the parts, that’s a quality of being, right? Meeting people where they are, like, having the capacity to know where they are and have the conversation from there. That’s a capacity, but that’s not an attribute. You see what I’m saying?

SCARPINO:              I do, yes.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, or, instead of humility, it’s having the humility to understand that your perspective is not the only one, and that perhaps a person who is in a different position can teach you something. But it’s not like being humble.

SCARPINO:              Right.

OSPINA:                    So, there are things that I do believe you can extract and help people see, where do they see themselves in having or not those qualities of being? But that’s different than the attribute; humility, bravery, you know.

SCARPINO:              Okay, this is actually probably a pretty good place to stop, because what I want to talk to you about – you got your PhD; you published an impressive amount of articles mostly, chapters in 1991 to 2005, and then in the early 2000s there’s a fairly sudden shift to leadership, and I want to talk to you about that. But I said I’d limit it to two hours, and we’re closing in on two hours. I stopped when we took a break, so we’ve been talking for just a few minutes under two hours. After two hours it becomes cruel and unusual punishment, so, I am going to turn these recorders off, but before I do that, I want to thank you very much for giving me your time this afternoon.

SCARPINO:              Today is Friday, October 13, 2023.  My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI); and Director of Oral History for the Tobias Leadership Center also at IUPUI. Today I have the privilege of interviewing Dr. Sonia Ospina at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association, which is taking place in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre. This interview is a joint venture undertaken by the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association. Biographical on Dr. Ospina is with interview #1. Following the introduction, I am going to ask you permission to record this conversation; to have the interview transcribed; to deposit the recording and the transcription in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, where they may be used by patrons, including posting all or part of the recording and the transcription to the website of the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives; and also to deposit the recording and transcription with the International Leadership Association and the Tobias Center, where they may be used by patrons with the understanding that all or part of the recording or the transcription may be posted to those organizations’ websites.

Do I have your permission?

OSPINA:                    You have my permission.

SCARPINO:              Thank you. Now, I’m going to scoot ahead here to where we need to be. All right, and this is about where we stopped last time. Oh, yes, yes, yes, you’re right. We were chatting with the recorders off, and you wanted to say something about your family life, and you are also going to email me a one-sentence definition of leadership which I am going to insert into the record as though you set it.

OSPINA:                    Right, because you asked me for it last time.

SCARPINO:              I did, yes, yes, yes, yes.

OSPINA:                    All right, so, thank you. I just realized that, you know, we talked a lot about my larger, my extended family, but we didn’t talk about my nuclear family in the present. So, I just wanted to acknowledge them because they’ve had a very important influence in my life. One is my husband, second husband, and he’s a retired professor also of sociology.

SCARPINO:              Can I ask his name?

OSPINA:                    Richard Williams, thank you. We’ve engaged in long conversations about sociology, about leadership from a sociological perspective. He’s not a leadership scholar at all, and as a good sociologist doesn’t quite believe in the power of leadership, but he respects very much my work and is always ready to listen to me, and to give me feedback, which is fantastic to have a partner in that sense. And then...

SCARPINO:              Just a second, I’m going to close that door.

(PAUSE)

OSPINA:                    And, we have a son, Ernesto Archilla, he’s from my first marriage but Richard raised him since he was five years old, so, it’s his child also. And Ernesto is an adult now, in his 40s, and he and his wife both work in social-oriented organizations.

SCARPINO:              In the U.S.?

OSPINA:                    In the U.S. Yeah, he came when he was two years old, and, so, he’s very much an American kid, but speaks Spanish also.

SCARPINO:              I was going to say, you taught him to speak Spanish.

OSPINA:                    Oh, yeah, he speaks Spanish, and they have a child so I have a grandson. We have a grandson who is now 2½ years, and who speaks in Spanish and English and doesn’t understand yet that it is two different languages, but he’s picking up both very well. She speaks mostly in English, and he speaks mostly in Spanish.

SCARPINO:              How do you like being a grandma?

OSPINA:                    I love it. I love it. You know, I heard people talk about this and I was like, oh, I don’t know. Now that it’s my turn, I’m loving it. It’s such a special kind of love and relationship that’s very different, and very unconditional. Are you a grandpa?

SCARPINO:              You can tell by this gray beard that we can’t see on the recording that I have several grandchildren.

OSPINA:                    Several, ahh, yeah.

SCARPINO:              It’s a real joy.

OSPINA:                    Yeah. I just wanted to acknowledge them all because they are really important in my life, and have helped me be who I am.

SCARPINO:              Absolutely. And when you send me the one-sentence definition, I’ll insert it into – I can’t put it into the audio but I’ll put it into the transcript. And I’m telling anybody who listens to this audio to read the transcript, it’ll be there.

All right, last time we were talking about leadership, and just so I have a place to start, we talked about the fact that you had earned your PhD in 1989; you embarked on a stunningly-impressive research and publication record. And I did point out that in some ways your research and publication is like a tale of two careers. 1991 to 2005, you published refereed articles at a steady pace largely in the general areas of management administration. And then in the early 2000s, there was a pretty shift in your research agenda and your publications to leadership. And I note that 2001 to 2009, you had a research grant from the Ford Foundation, the title of which I believe was Leadership for A Changing World: Research and Documentation Component - $3.5 million dollars. For a humanist, that’s like all the money in the world.

OSPINA:                    For me too, it was.

SCARPINO:              And you were the PI on that grant?

OSPINA:                    I was the co-PI.

SCARPINO:              Primary investigator.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, primary investigator.

SCARPINO:              2003 to 2011 you had an operating grant from the Ford Foundation Research Center for Leadership in Action of $2.5 million. I don’t think I asked you this question: In the early 2000s when you got these grants, you didn’t seem to have much of a track record in the area of leadership, how did you sell it to the Ford Foundation? They gave you a lot of money.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, but they gave it to us in smaller amounts.

SCARPINO:              No, I know they just don’t hand it to you.

OSPINA:                    Right. So, I was working mostly on issues connected to public management reform. I was doing work in Latin America, specifically on evaluation and monitoring systems that were starting to emerge, so how they got institutionalized. That was a lot of the work I was doing, and also from my dissertation, which was, again, public management but had this organizational justice component. And then my colleague Ellen Schall, whom you interviewed, got the invitation to do the research on the documentation component of this new program that they were developing. She and I had a very good relationship; she being more of a practitioner coming from a practitioner’s side, and me coming from a research side. We supported each other, and understood and valued each other’s input. So, she invited, she said to me, ‘Will you be my research and I will be your practitioner in this enterprise?’ And I agreed, so, we really imagined together what this grant would look like; what was it that we could do in terms of designing a research program that would satisfy Ford. And what they wanted was to develop knowledge that showed that there was good leadership happening in this country, and they wanted to... at some point they wanted to change the conversation about leadership so that people realized that it was not only the top public officials who determined what happened, but that there was a lot of people on the ground also doing the type of work that was helping to determine how things happen from the bottom up. And, I didn’t know much about leadership, but I knew about social change work, and social change organizations. I think I mentioned this yesterday – I said, I’ll learn about leadership if I’m going to have an opportunity to engage and learn from these social change leaders on the ground. And that’s when I... but Ellen had read a lot about leadership because that was her area. Even as a practitioner, she had a very good sense of the area, and she was coming from more of a social psychology perspective, but not quantitative, much more practice grounded. So, we started reading, and I did a very, very thorough, deep read. As I told you yesterday, as a sociologist I didn’t feel satisfied with what I was reading. I kept saying, so what? Like, all the lists, and all the correlations, it seemed like a conversation that was too narrow and too much about people, individuals. And when I bumped into the Center for Creative Leadership, people notice practice – I mean, they are PhDs and do serious research, but they are in the world of application. I thought, this made sense for me as a sociologist, and so I took it to Ellen and we started looking at it, and she was intrigued. She was intrigued. So, we started developing that line. We called them, we had conversations with them. And out of a sense that that was the way in which we could go, then we started thinking about... how do we research a way of thinking about leadership that is socially constructed; that is about meaning-making in communities of practice; but it’s about a work that is happening but it’s about the achievements that the group produces as opposed to the individuals or the processes alone. And, as a good researcher, I knew that the research design had to be in good coherence with the theoretical perspective. And, so, if I hadn’t taken that theoretical perspective, and let’s say I had stayed in a more traditional view, we may have ended up having doing surveys to all the leaders in these organizations, right, and... what they feel? How do they work? What are their qualities? Right, that would’ve been the way to go. But it didn’t make any sense if we were thinking about this way of thinking about leadership as a co-creative reality that produced something. So, we thought very hard about, well, what kind of approach should we take on that? And, again, drawing from my experience in Colombia, I said, ‘Let’s do participatory action research;’ in other words, let’s invite the leaders to come and make sense of their work with us. And let’s not ask them about their leadership, because then they’ll go to the traditional mental models of individual heroic stuff, and then the whole thing would be like if we did a survey. Let’s ask them about their work, and how they accomplish the things that they have accomplished, and what is it they do to get there. And, so, we developed three different streams of research that helped us kind of like tap these from different directions. One was like, invite people to develop ethnographies with traditional ethnographers that they would trust in their own communities, and that they would choose themselves what was the problem of their practice that they wanted to advance. And notice there’s nothing about leadership yet, right? And the idea was, when we see what kinds of problems they talk about in their practice, leadership is going to be there somewhere. The second stream was stories, narrative inquiry. We developed a questionnaire where we asked a lot of, tell me a time when blah, blah, blah. So, a lot of storytelling at a time when storytelling was not fashionable. I have to tell you, everything that we were doing then is now fashionable. Not just because of me, I’m not taking any credit for it. But it’s just...

SCARPINO:              But you should, actually.

OSPINA:                    No, there were other people doing this work, and the leaders’ storytelling was really important for them from the start, right? It’s not like, but, yeah, I take credit for being part of that wave that pushed the envelope in that direction, right? But we were being incredibly creative at the moment. So, we developed these stories and they weren’t individual questionnaires, they were a group that represented the different stakeholders for each organization. And we went and organized group interviews, and they would say, ‘Oh, remember that time blah, blah, blah...” So, they were feeding on each other in terms of really telling stories about when they felt they were at their best, and they were arriving to where they wanted to arrive.

SCARPINO:              Did they let you record those meetings?

OSPINA:                    Yes, yeah. We had the most trouble with the first group because we had no track record. They weren’t sure if we were going to be just exploiting them, but once we managed that situation, and at the end of that group I won the Jane Goodall Award for Taming the Apes. That’s their words and they gave me a little diploma and everything. And from there on, every time that a new cohort came, we would invite some of them; they would come to the Cohort and they would say, these are the people, they’re giving you stuff, it’s a fair exchange, it’s a different kind of a relationship, trust it. And that made the difference with all the other four cohorts. We had five different cohorts. But the third stream of research, which I think is really important, was the more participatory, which it was doing cooperative inquiries, which is a particular type of participatory methodology where a group of people get together and decide together what is the burning question from their practice, even if they have different contexts where that burning question is happening. And, so, they make sense of what might be the situation, and they go with those hunches and practice, test the hunch in a situation of their practice. They observe what happens. They come back. And they make sense together of the different findings. And, so, they go through these cycles of backward reflection, and at the end they have an answer to their practice question. And they loved it. They loved that because it was really about their own work. And then they created their own materials that came out of those, with some of us. And we owned mostly the narrative component where we did a lot of more traditional qualitative analysis, and then we would take it back to them and then, you know, get their feedback. They owned them, completely, we just got the final product. But they owned that completely working in participation with their ethnographers. So, it was from a little participation in the narrative only at the start, right, and then at the end to more participation in the ethnography because they work all the time with the ethnographer, to lots of participation with the other one. And the idea was to bring together all that information and create a database with the different cohorts as we were moving along. And from the start, start getting hunches of where was the leadership in this, right? And little by little we were able to identify what appeared to be practices. From a sociological perspective, a practice is something that a group of people agree works for what they want to do, and they start repeating it over and over and over until it becomes kind of like common sense to them. So, we started tracking whenever we saw something that seemed similar to what somebody had said. And we did the traditional qualitative analysis where we said, okay, here are three kinds of things these people are doing to get to where they want, and that’s where we developed the three concepts of, or constructs of reframing discourse, which is about interrupting words and narratives and mental models that are in fact reproducing the problem that they want to address, right? So, that’s a very resistant kind of approach, but it was like, no, that’s not how the world works. No, that’s not the problem. If that’s not the problem and this is a problem, then, no, that’s not the solution, that’s not the policy solution. This is a policy solution. So, a lot of reframing around the problems. And also reframing about how their own children in the communities felt about themselves and reintroducing the idea of the value that they had in their own experience. So, the first set of leadership practices were about reframing discourse. Then, the second set of leadership practices was about bridging differences. And this one was about how they constantly... it was a very relational approach: Guess what? That’s what the leadership people were saying in the early wave of collective leadership. It’s about relationality. So, the difference is a value, it’s important, it’s bringing different perspectives that are important. And, so, how do we bridge them? And, so, there was a lot of work, leadership work that was around that. And the third one we called unleashing human energies, which was like the idea of developing spaces where people started to understand and discover their own self-efficacy. And from there they knew what kinds of contributions they could make, and then they would be also motivated to go learn in more particular trainings about policy issues. At first, we said, okay, these are three, let’s continue to see if others come up. But nothing else came up that wasn’t specifically connected to organizing, right? But these seemed very, very clear and specific, so we called these like three types of leadership practices; three dimensions of the work of leadership. When you put them together, they have a direct impact on developing the capacity the group needs to be able to make a difference and make an impact in the work. So, the story ended up developing in a very nice and organic way.

SCARPINO:              I mean, it was really kind of a symbiotic relationship, right? You were, in effect, studying them, but at the same time they are developing a sense of themselves as active agents in the world in which they live.

OSPINA:                    I think they had a sense of themselves as agents. I think what they didn’t have, in fact, they rejected at first saying, ‘We’re not the leaders, the community are the leaders, and we’re here to support the community.’ And, through the process, they realized that the word leadership had an important component that by rejecting it, they were not maximizing the possibility of using it towards a positive way. And it was very interesting to hear them say afterwards, you know one of them said, ‘You know, I’m so glad that you make me reconsider what it means to be a leader and to reclaim that word for our communities. Because that’s a word from the other side, it’s not a word for us.’ And also the other thing that was fantastic was when we were giving them feedback about the type of work that we saw them doing, one of them came back and said, ‘Can I use this in my trainings? This is exactly, this is exactly what we do and I didn’t have a word for it before.’ In that sense, it was a lot of give and take. But I think the most important part was really appreciating the knowledge that they had, and truly trying to see how they applied it, how they used it. Because these are organizations that in order to make it to these very good program that Ford was offering, Ford was offering resources for them to do stuff, and was offering the spaces for this network to be able to engage with one another. And there was this program-wide meetings...

SCARPINO:              Ford was funding these organizations as well as the scholar and the practitioner who are studying those organizations.

OSPINA:                    This was a multimillion flagship program that they had for... they had it for, each cohort was two years, they had it for seven years. And then we managed to convince them that if they dropped us at year seven, we wouldn’t really be able to make sense of the whole thing because we were still working with the last group, so we ended up being funded for more time. You know, the original question that you asked and I kind of like went away from it because I love telling this story about how the work happened, but the original story is... why did I end up doing something that I wasn’t an expert on? I was an expert in research on conditions associated with humans, and my work was a lot about organizations. And, so, I was looking at these as organizations and the work that people were doing in organizations. But I discovered this approach to thinking about leadership in this, and I was very comfortable with that. And I was very excited to know that it was still not in the literature so that we could actually help develop this way of thinking about it and make a contribution that was original and different. I was so tired of reading the same old stuff over and over and over and over. And then there were some voices that were starting to emerge that were saying different things. But, people like Mary Uhl-Bien, who you also interviewed, she came from the very traditional way of thinking about leadership. And then, the word she uses is, she crashed against the wall because she was thinking  genuinely about this and realized that the way she was thinking there was something missing. So, she tried to develop this relational leadership approach. And, we saw each other in a meeting and I heard her talk – it might have been an ILA meeting, in fact, or Academy of Management, I’m not sure which it was. And I went to her and I said, ‘I’m doing exactly the same thing you’re trying to do. We come from very different perspectives.’ She’s from the private sector; I’m from the public sector. She’s an associate in a business school, and she was more interested in the complexity perspective and how that would apply to cases in the private sector. So, we got together and started talking and said we need each other just like I had done with my other colleague, right? Let’s help each other learn about these and figure out about this. And, in fact, that got developed several times afterwards; we created a network called Colleague Net, which was about bringing people who were genuinely interested in thinking about, what is this thing called collective leadership? How does it work? How is it different? How... don’t we go back to the traditional leader-centered perspectives? So, I became a leadership scholar by thinking very hard about something, an empirical reality, and a problem that was interesting, which is: What is this thing called leadership? How does it happen? And, how is it more than just a leader?

SCARPINO:              Do you think that it’s possible because you were not embedded in that world of leadership scholarship that, in a sense, it gave you the freedom to think differently?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, yeah. Someone like Mary was embedded in it, was working very diligently in it until she hit the wall, right? And I presume sometimes people hit the wall and say, okay, I’m going to just veer a little and continue. You have to be, I think, Mary would be a very strong model in terms of saying no, I need to figure this out. And for me it was figuring out how could I think about this in a way that made sense to me and not to a field, but at the same time, as a good researcher because I am a good researcher, thinking okay, what are the conversations that they’re having that will make them pay attention to what I’m going to say, right? So, what is the cost for the field of not knowing that leadership is more than leaders? And how can I come back to this field to have the conversation so that people say, oh, that’s interesting, that’s helpful for us too. Because, if not, if I didn’t do that, I would’ve never been heard.

SCARPINO:              Did you meet resistance from established leadership scholars?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, yeah, so, even the friendlier ones, like Boas Shamir, was a really good friend of our program, and he was part of our network and he was part of our advisory committee, he was a sociologist. So, when I read his material, his work was all about transformational leadership, which was as far as some people got in terms of bringing in context, sociological perspective to thinking about more than just the leaders. But he, and Mary at some point kept saying, ‘You are throwing the baby with the bathtub because when you say that there’s no influence, that’s a problem.’ We had this conversation yesterday. It depends on how you define influence. So, part of it is this way of thinking about leadership also reframes challenges a lot on how...yeah, it reframes ways of thinking about the world. And therefore you have to come with new language and you have to reject certain language, and I was not going to use the word ‘influence,’ even those influence was happening. But at that point I didn’t know what I know now, that is that influence comes from objects, from groups, you know, not just from the leader.

SCARPINO:              The various groups that you worked with when you were doing these Ford Foundation grants, and you deliberately did not use the term ‘leader’ or ‘leadership’ I assume in part because people have an idea what a leader is and it usually isn’t them. You know, it’s the person in Congress or the person in the City Council, or somebody. At some point, did these individuals in these groups you were working with begin to understand that they were engaged in leadership?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, yeah, and they talked about regaining – no, that’s not the word – it’s bringing back something they had rejected but with a new understanding of what it was, yeah. And, so, many of them started using the word ‘leadership.’ And, yes, they were leaders as much as their constituents were leaders as much as they understood what they were trying to do. And a lot of that comes from the organizing component that they were using. Part of what we were able to see also is that, when you think about leadership develop, how do you develop leadership, what people do is they go and think about -- in an organizational context – what are the things that people need to do to make the organization perform well? And those are the leadership skills that we’re going to give them, right? So, we call that, that’s a type of work that’s management work; it’s about the technologies of management. So, strategic management, strategic planning, budgeting, developing, getting resources, all those things are technologies of management that people in these organizations need to be very well-versed with in order for their organizations to survive. And, mostly, the formal leaders need those. And what leadership development programs have tried to do is give capacity in that area. But, wait a minute, there are two other types of work that are happening: So, the first one that is connected to the work is what in organizational theory is called the ‘core tasks’ of the organization. So, if you’re in a hospital, the core task is to heal. If you’re in a university, the core task is to teach, or to learn. Those core tasks require a lot of attention because they are the ones associated with what you want to produce? And, so, there’s a connection between the technologies of management and these leadership tasks that are very specific to the type of organization you’re looking at. In this particular case we were looking at social change organizations that had very specific areas. There were people working in reproductive rights, there were people working in education, youth development, environment stuff, community development. So, the core tasks there were some connected to the policy area where they worked that were very specific, so, environmental stuff for example. But then the other core tasks, because they were trying to change those conditions, were organizing, advocacy, and community building. At first, we confused those with the object that leadership was there, at first, we thought leadership is in there. But, no, leadership isn’t there. Those are also very highly technical areas.

SCARPINO:              Right.

OSPINA:                    And then there’s the third type of work, it’s leadership work. And to some extent, although Heifetz had already been talking about leadership work, he had been talking about it as a leader doing a kind of work with his followers, or her followers. And the way we were conceptualizing this was different. This is a third type of work that needs to happen in the organization, and it’s the leadership work that allows people to give meaning to the technologies of management and to the core tasks, and to decide how they are going to develop those for the purpose. Because the leadership work is the one that focuses those on the purpose and makes people want to do that work. In our case, what we were proposing, the leadership works were reframing (INAUDIBLE) human energies and bridging difference. And you can see how the work that they were doing in these other areas of work in the organization were completely imbued and colored by this type of leadership work. And it’s that type of leadership work the one that was giving purpose to the work they were doing. I think that’s an interesting contribution to think about leadership work in that way.

SCARPINO:              And the last few sentences you just said, would you say that that is the contribution of your scholarship to this area?

OSPINA:                    I think the contribution of my scholarship is to have made more legitimate an understanding of leadership as something that has very important collective dimensions; so much so that you can add as an adjective to the word leadership, ‘collective leadership,’ and talk about it and develop theory, theorize about it and develop knowledge from the theory and the research. I think another important contribution of my work is the idea that in order to understand and figure out what kind of leadership you need, you have to think leadership for what?

SCARPINO:              Right.

OSPINA:                    And in this case, it was ...

SCARPINO:              That’s probably the most important question, right? Leadership for what?

OSPINA:                    Right, yeah, yeah. So, if the ‘for what’ in this organization is social change in a particular area, then does that mean that this work only focuses on organizations that are doing social change? No. It means in this particular context when you take into consideration what is it that they want to do, the leadership work is helping them make meaning to get there. But that way of thinking about it can be applied to any organization where there’s passion around the purpose.

SCARPINO:              In the case of organizations that are engaged and are trying to make meaning and they have passion for whatever purpose it is, but they’re, I don’t know, they’re racist, they’re sexist, they’re organizing the Ku Klux Klan or some terrible thing like that, do they fit into your definition of leadership, your understanding of leadership?

OSPINA:                    I think they can be very efficacious, because they do the kind of work, precisely this type of leadership work, but for causes that are horrendous. What is interesting about the social change organizations that are more progressive is that they have – I developed a social change leadership framework, and what that framework has is like this type of work that I was talking about, these three types of work that are embedded in a world view which from the characteristics they had, we called, grounded humanism. It was about, you know, making human beings, life for human beings better, but it was based on an anchor, on a trigger that was rejection of injustice, right? So, each organization has kind of like a point of departure about what’s the problem and the diagnosis is always around social justice. And from there, they develop a value system that is about solidarity, about responsibility for one another, about supporting people where they need it, about respecting, about understanding knowledge in a way that incorporates also understanding change as transformation and not just reform. That value system supports the work, and produces work that’s more ethical, right? But I do think that organizations can do, very effectively, bad things, using the reframing...

SCARPINO:              I’m not advocating for bad things, but I mean, I always want to think, is leadership only in play when individuals or groups are doing something positive?

OSPINA:                    Well, it depends on what you mean by positive, right, because ideology.

SCARPINO:              When it benefits the human condition.

OSPINA:                    When it benefits the human condition, yeah. There’s a big discussion about that in the leadership field. Some people say it’s not leadership if it creates a bad outcome; and other people say, leadership is leadership, and the outcome, you don’t have to agree with that outcome, but leadership happened because they were able to do what they wanted, right? And that’s an unresolved, interesting conversation in the field.

SCARPINO:              2003 to 2013, you were Faculty Director and Co-Founder of the Research Center for Leadership in Action, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University. And then. 2013 to 2023, you’re Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Leadership Development. What was the purpose of the Center for Leadership in Action?

OSPINA:                    It came out of the work that we did and an understanding that more research needed to happen, that we could support people who were doing leadership development programs and bring a different perspective on it. Because, you know, like there’s a lot of implications of thinking about leadership in the way we were proposing to think about leadership. And a little anecdote there is that when we first took our design to Ford, the program officer was fascinated, loved this original design with these three streams. He was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so fantastic. Why don’t you create a center. I’m sure that we could fund you because there’s a lot of people who come ask for leadership research and we don’t see any... it’s not interesting for us, what they’re proposing, but this is interesting.’ And I remember we said, I said actually, I said, ‘Listen, hold it, this is a little risky. Give us a couple of years to try this, and if we see that it works, that the promise fulfills itself, then we’ll come back and then you can fund us.’  And we did that.

SCARPINO:              And you did, and they did.

OSPINA:                     We did, and they did, because I think we did very good work, very convincing, very rigorous, and very different from the traditional way people were thinking about leadership.

SCARPINO:              When I’m looking through your CV - curriculum vitae – and talking to some of your colleagues and reading, it looks to me as though one of your earliest publications on leadership was “Governance and leadership for social change. Reforma Democracia in Spanish, right? So, how did you get there?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, there’s two things I want to say about that: The first one is, I started doing this stuff, and at the same time the work on reform that I was doing was like really also being very successful, and I was being asked to do a lot of work. And I did books with a colleague from Latin America, and at some point I was going crazy because these were two so different areas that I was feeling like schizophrenic. On this side, I was wearing this more traditional reform kind of stuff, and on this side all these interesting in-the-making ways of thinking about leadership. I was trying to navigate that world. For example, I wanted to go to the conference in reform, but I didn’t want to talk about the stuff that... I wanted to talk about leadership. So, I said, what the heck, why not introduce these ideas in that conference? And, so, I wrote it in Spanish. I sent it. They loved it. It got published. And that was the beginning of the conversation about the same topic in Latin America. I have to say to you that writing it in Spanish was so helpful for me to clarify things that were not so clear when I thought about them in English. But when I thought about them in Spanish, doors opened up that weren’t opening. So, I do think my bilingualism...

SCARPINO:              Spanish is your first language.

OSPINA:                    Spanish is my first language, yeah. And there’s a nice story. Yesterday in the opening session in the party, a young man - a professor, a young professor, Latino professor – came to me and said, ‘I want to say something to you. When I read your stuff, and I first read some of your Spanish work, it changed the trajectory of what I wanted to do in my PhD.’ I was so moved, and I said, ‘tell me more.’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, I was being trained in English in the traditional ways of thinking about leadership. And then I looked for stuff in Spanish...” and, I don’t know how he got to my name or my Spanish... he said, ‘I read every single thing that was in my Spanish that you did, and it was like a transformation for me, it was transformative for me.’ And I was saying to him that, you know, having these two ways of thinking, in English and in Spanish, because the language – language is life, language is the world, language creates the world.

SCARPINO:              Expressive of ways of thinking that are better in the culture.

OSPINA:                    Right, right, and so you end up getting to the more expressive side of yourself when you use your primary language. So, yeah, I wish I had more time to write more things in Spanish. I didn’t. A lot of the things I wrote in Spanish were co-written with colleagues from the Leadership for A Changing World who were doing work with Latino organizations. And, so, we created this booklet in Spanish and translated some of the other booklets that some of the other social change leaders had done in English also to Spanish so that it could be used in that context.

SCARPINO:              You did a piece called “Sensegiving and the role of cognitive shifts in the work of leadership.” The Leadership Quarterly - which is a good place to put your work – with E.G. Foldy and L. Goldman. I didn’t look up their first names, and I apologize.

OSPINA:                    Erica Foldy is my partner in thinking at NYU.

SCARPINO:              And Goldman’s first name?

OSPINA:                    You got me there. She was a student of Erica.

SCARPINO:              Okay, all right. Ms. Goldman was a graduate student.

OSPINA:                    I think she was, or maybe she was a graduate student, or she was in graduate school with Erica and now she was a professor. I never met her. Most of the work was done by distance with Erica and myself in the same place. Erica was the first author, so she really was driving the ideas here based on the notion that we had already discovered and determined that reframing was an important piece of work. And, so, it was going back to the data and saying, ‘Where is reframing here? And how do we write a paper that really opens up and focuses on what that is.’ Obviously, I was co-author with her, and it was a lot of my ideas, too, but she was writing...

SCARPINO:              But “Sensegiving and the role of cognitive shifts,” what does that mean? I mean, how do you explain that to somebody who is not a sociologist?

OSPINA:                    It is about reframing. It is about making sense of things and being part of an experience that allows you to change, shift the way you are thinking about the world, your cognition. ‘Cognitive shift’ is a word that is used very much in the literature. It’s risky, it’s a risky term because there is a whole group of people doing work in leadership that is about cognition. But it’s very much cognition, it’s very much just about the mind, about cognitive structures. And what we really meant by ‘cognitive shifts’ here was really re-thinking the world, which is a little different. It’s creating new mental models as opposed to the leadership work in cognition is more about how the leader uses cognition to influence others. So, there’s a connection. But when I’m teaching my students this way of thinking about leadership, many of them believe that it is just about different perceptions of the world. But it’s not just about different perceptions of the world, it’s really about transforming the way you look at the world. And that opens up a completely different set of alternatives about how you can act in the world. And if it was just about how you perceive the world, that’s more traditional, that’s more the cognition type.

SCARPINO:              I looked at another piece of, “Weaving color lines:  Race, ethnicity, and the work of leadership in social change organizations.” I was particularly interested in race and ethnicity. How did you work those into your own work on leadership and then as engaged scholar, engaged scholarship?

OSPINA:                    Before doing the work, the leadership work, the leadership research, I was very interested based on my dissertation work on issues of organizational justice, and obviously issues of race, gender, ethnicity come up. There was a lot of occupational segregation, and so the clerical career ladder that I was looking at mostly was women of color. And their salaries were completely deflated compared to the analysts, which had mostly white men and white women and, even though they were deflated in comparison to the sanitation workers, they were much better. There wasn’t the idea of occupational segregation. So, all that was there, and when I started writing the articles I was thinking about the issue of diversity, again, at a time when diversity was starting to be talked about, but it wasn’t fashionable yet. Diversity, inclusion, that kind of stuff. Social inclusion, social exclusion was an important part of me thinking about organizational justice. And, so, I was bringing all that to this work, but at the same time you cannot be in a social change organization without talking about race and ethnicity, and they, in fact, bring those cultural elements into the work. At some point we said, ‘we’ve learned a lot about the importance of naming this diversity, naming race and ethnicity, and how it’s used in this context is a lesson, it’s really interesting, it’s a positive way of thinking about the self. Kind of like, similar, like in the ‘60s, ‘black is beautiful’ so it’s kind of like that same idea and approach that you’re bringing a set of cultural elements into a society that can be very creative and positive, and then you can use them to push for things that are not the way that you would like them to be, but also to make a gift to the society. So, it’s kind of like that kind of stuff. That piece comes out of that. And at that point I was working with a colleague, Celina Su, from CUNY, who was doing a lot of work on communities and with youth – and where she was also using a lot of the diversity lens. We got together, and she brought a lot of that information about the work that she was doing in those communities, and I brought the information about the work I was doing in these communities, and we came up with a...

SCARPINO:              City University of New York is where...

OSPINA:                    CUNY, yeah. I’ve worked with such amazing colleagues. It’s just like I’ve been very, very fortunate to have met, identified, and in some way recognized as kindred spirits people who are very different from me, and who were bringing ideas that were fabulous. You put them in a pot and you mix them and it’s fantastic what comes out.

SCARPINO:              Some of the joys of doing publicly-engaged work isn’t it, I think so. 2001-2008 when you were making this shift to researching and publishing about leadership, you’re also a tenured associate professor at the R.F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. When you shifted from a successful researcher and scholar in one area to somebody in management and administration to take on leadership, did that create difficulties in terms of your own ability to get promoted within an academic department?

OSPINA:                    No, and I would say there are two reasons: One, I was being very successful in bringing money to the school.

SCARPINO:              That always helps.

OSPINA:                    Second, I think more importantly... and this is something I would tell young people, I see a link between all the work that I’ve done. To some extent, I never said, oh, I’m shifting gears. I basically said, I’m exploring another area of a type of work that I’ve been interested in doing. And the way I’ve defined my work throughout is that, as a sociologist, I’m interested in understanding how people make agreements and negotiation about the responsibility for public problems. How is it they do that? That’s governance in general, right? And, so, at first, I was looking at that in the context of a public organization and how these people were making agreements and had grievances about the differences. And then I moved to look at how people in societies were making agreements and negotiating ways to make government more accountable through evaluation and... and a lot of the work was also about engagement, about participation. It was never fully, fully disconnected what I ended up making my primary agenda for the rest of my career. It was just like a different angle of the same thing. So, here I am now looking at how these single society organizations are negotiating and making agreements amongst themselves, and with government, and with business, around who’s responsible for what and how they contribute to create new ways of thinking about solving the problems than the traditional ways when it’s only business or only the state bringing in solutions. It was just a shift in terms of what I’m interested in studying independent of context. I’m really intrigued by how societies actually are able to negotiate who is responsible for those collective problems and at some point, it was a state and nobody else, and now it’s opening up. Now I teach a course on cross-sector of collaborations where we look at the issue of leadership in there, which it has to be more collective. The leadership has to be more collective. But of course, what students are most interested in is kind of like the technical stuff about how do you manage a collaboration. With my leadership expertise plus learning about these collaborations from a technical perspective, then I’m able to bring those two things into the classroom. If you have a clear sense of what is the thing that you really want to figure out as a puzzle through the career, it doesn’t really matter if you end up doing things that look very different from one another as long as you can figure out how they connect to this basic piece. And that is very important when you’re creating, for example your tenure packet. You can’t just say, ‘oh, I first worked here, and then I worked there,’ and then they say ‘she’s all over the place, she’s nowhere.’ But if you have a clear sense of what – because there is something that connects the pieces of work that you’re doing. And it’s a matter of figuring out what it is. And that’s going to also give you more motivation, and it’s going to also help you make decisions about opportunities that arise that may be very interesting but have nothing to do with what really makes you thrive.

SCARPINO:              Mary Uhl...

OSPINA:                    Uhl-Bien.

SCARPINO:              Uhl-Bien... I had a very nice conversation with her. She told me that at first you struggled in the world of leadership scholarship, which, she described, her quote: ‘an old boys club.’ And at the time you were trying to establish yourself in leadership studies, she said you got your papers published and whatever, but then they just ignored your work. Do you agree with that assessment? Where you were getting published but colleagues in the field were basically ignoring your work? I don’t think they do anymore, by the way, but...

OSPINA:                    She said that about me or about her?

SCARPINA:              About you.

OSPINA:                    About me... yeah, I think she was referring a lot to the fact that I wasn’t an insider in the field. I had to insist and publish a lot. I had the fortune that we had a lot of data, and so even though I wasn’t doing quantitative research, but I had big ends, and that’s what people care about. And so, I was able to put my feet there. But it took a while until it became like a robust contribution, yeah. And I think I also attribute that to this thing I was telling you about yesterday where, you know, I entered the leadership studies as an outsider, as a sociologist. I chose to look at school that wasn’t even developed, and then in that school I chose to use qualitative research when they value quantitative research. So, I was positioning myself with all the wrong possible attributes to be considered interesting, I guess. But I think that the work spoke by itself eventually. The ideas spoke by themselves.

SCARPINO:              Why do you think for your work, qualitative research made more sense than quantitative?

OSPINA:                    Because if you’re thinking about leadership as co-constructed, you have to be there, you have to look at it, you have to ask people what is it that they’re thinking as opposed to create, like for example a survey with fixed answers or as opposed to collect big data that then kind of like goes through the little machine and throws out a result without telling you what happened in that black box. Precisely what you want to know is what happens in that black box. In quantitative you have a hypothesis, you create a design that allows you to input data and produce some statistical models and stochastic models and spit out an answer, but you have no idea what it means. You have to create your own speculation of what it means, as opposed to if you’re talking to people who are having the experience, they’re telling you, right? They’re telling you. Of course, you believe half of it. You understand that they’re making also their own constructions. But when you’re talking with lots and lots and lots of people then you’re able to...

SCARPINO:              That’s what I do, is qualitative research and lots of oral interviews. Talk about constructive reality... I don’t want to make this about me, but it’s an interesting conversation. You were co-founder of the Collective Leadership Network, an international network of leadership scholars that were interested in advancing the theory and the research on collective leadership. I looked it up and I found this description: international network of academics, practitioners, graduate students interested in better understanding collective leadership and to help it gain tractions for some positive change. Your name is on this. Enrica Gabrielle Foldy...

OSPINA:                    Erica.

SCARPINO:              Erica, I’m sorry... convened the network in the first three years; presently convened, I think, by Professor Suzanne Gagnon, at McGill University in Montreal?

OSPINA:                    Yes, and then she moved to another university and convened there again, and then Covid came. Covid destroyed a lot of solid institutions. After three years of being hidden, I personally didn’t have the stamina to restart the process. And I actually told Suzanne, ‘let’s re-establish it,’ and she said, ‘...yes, yes, yes,’ and then neither of the two…

SCARPINO:              People are going to, at some point, do some very interesting studies about what Covid did in addition to making people sick and killing them. I mean, it had just a tremendous impact on society.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, that’s true. But I think we did great work. We had like four or five different conferences. We funded the first two with money from the Research Center for Leadership in Action. We had good resources. We had operational resources from Ford plus, at that point, several other foundations were funding us. We jumpstarted it, Erica and I. At that point Ellen had moved, like, she became a dean, and then she became a big deal in the university, so she had to stop doing all that. So, she was my partner in crime in the first part of this, then Erica came in and she was my partner in crime for the second half.

SCARPINO:              The Collective Leadership Network became a casualty of the Covid pandemic?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, in the sense that we had momentum, and in fact someone I’m working with right now, Kerry Priest, a professor from the University of Kansas who does leadership work in higher education, had said she wanted to do the next one in Kansas. And so we were all ready to start shifting from having been in New York, then to two cities in Canada, and now we’re going to shift back to the United States... and Covid happened. All of us were too distracted to think about – we knew we couldn’t meet anyway... and three years later everyone was doing their own things. Yeah, I would say it was a casualty of Covid. Now, we had said we would fund two, and if it didn’t catch up, that would be it. But it caught up. There was already going to be a third cycle of someone else doing it. And I have to say, it was so productive. The work that we did was so productive for all of us to really advance our thinking on this, and to share different understandings of it and also to learn from one another about those different understandings. I think the most important piece that was coming out of it is, how do we make sure that the research that we do doesn’t revert back to the traditional assumptions of a leader-centered perspective? How do we make sure that with the best intentions we don’t trip ourselves into going back instead of going forward? What are the things we need to be paying attention to? How do we make sure we’re moving forward and not… And I think the work there was fantastic. Gail Fairhurst, leadership scholar in the communications field, was very active in our network. Ann Cunliffe, someone who does really interesting philosophical interesting research, she was very active here. Ann – I’m blocking her name, someone from management who is really well established in management and she wrote an article called, Leadership In The Plural, what’s her name?

SCARPINO:              I actually don’t know that piece.

OSPINA:                    Okay, it’s a really interesting piece - Langley, Ann Langley.

SCARPINO:              Ann Langley... When we started, you said that somewhere at the half-point or so you wanted to take a break?

OSPINA:                    No, I’m actually good, thank you. Thank you for asking.

SCARPINO:              It’s actually a little bit beyond, but I wasn’t keeping my eyes glued to this.

OSPINA:                    Since I mentioned all those names, others who were incredibly active and also had a lot of weight were Barbara Crosby and John Bryson. They had the book that they wrote in 2005, and then a second edition - I’m forgetting the name right now – was really very influential also. I had a lot of conversations with them, and they also come from the public leadership side. They were really very involved in the network and doing really interesting things.

SCARPINO:              Rosemary O’Leary; Edwin O. Stene, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, School of Public Affairs and Administration, Kentucky.

OSPINA:                    Did you talk to her?

SCARPINO:              No. I could’ve. She got a hold of me, I think I told you at like the eleventh hour, I mean, I was already thinking about wrapping up these question sets and getting on the plane.

OSPINA:                    Did she or...

SCARPINO:              She’d been out of the country, I think, am I thinking of the right person?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, she was out of the country but she came back mid-September. You had said that mid-September was fine, that you would catch her. But John Bryson is the one who I asked him, he said, ‘Yes, but you have to answer some questions for me first.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I have the time or the energy to answer questions.’ And he finally convinced me, we had a conversation and he said, ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’ And that’s the person I told you, but...

SCARPINO:              You know, I felt bad about that, but I just had to reach a point where I said I have just got to tie this up.

OSPINA:                    The reason why I thought that O’Leary was good is because she was president of the Public Management Research Association, so she was going to give you an interesting perspective about my influence in leadership in the public sector more than just in the general…

SCARPINO:              I’m reading out of the description of her that you sent to me, you said, ‘We share challenges of thinking about how to translate general leadership theory into something that makes sense for the public management leadership theory and practice. Talk about what you meant when you said translating general leadership theory into something that makes sense for public management leadership and theory.

OSPINA:                    It’s two very distinct groups. People who do public management and are interested in leadership as the domain, they turn to the traditional leadership literature, get concepts from there, and then come back and add the pieces that are associated with the nature of public organizations. And then they do work. But they are kind of like stuck in the traditional models, and don’t engage in conversation with leadership studies. They engage in conversation with public management people, and then in that context things about leadership come up. I actually wrote a piece about these, saying, the public management, the public administration has a lot to contribute to leadership studies if we engage the conversation that is happening there. But we don’t engage it. And in public management we’re doing all this thing around collaborative governance, opening up the government to be able to address all the stakeholders and think about the big problems in a different way. The stuff that we learned there about relational leadership and more collective forms of leadership and less leader-centered is fantastic. We’re losing an opportunity; both the public management people are losing an opportunity to offer learnings to the leadership studies. Then, the leadership studies people who end up doing research in public organizational contexts do very bad justice to what those contexts are about, as they just apply their models as if the context was neutral. So, they’re also not doing very well, right? So, there’s like this silo. And the piece I wrote was about let’s take advantage of the fact that the leadership studies is looking at this relational approach; let’s bring our understanding of that in the context of public management. And, let’s make sure that we also shape the conversations about leadership there, and not just in our little corner of public management. And I think that’s also what Mary may have been referring to, about the fact that it’s just two very different worlds and so people in one don’t pay attention that much to the other one.

SCARPINO:              Leadership scholarship has exploded in volume since about the late ‘70s or so, but it occurs to me – and I’m not going to pretend that I’ve read everything because I’d be lying if I said I did, but I’ve read a lot – but it seemed to me that as the field developed, and more and more scholarship gets produced in the field, it followed the same trajectory as other fields. Narrower and deeper silos with walls in between. Is that a fair assessment, and if it is, why do you think that happened?

OSPINA:                    I think it is a fair assessment. I think it’s a search for legitimacy. So let’s replicate those fields that are recognized as good, let’s do quantitative and let’s specialize. So it’s like this idea of specializing and becoming something on its own, which goes against interdisciplinarity and imagination. But it’s very good for careers. And academia; you can just do a career in academia and never contribute anything.

SCARPINO:              Walk off-campus... well, I mean, I’m an academic. I’m not in your field, but I sort of understand how those things work. Plus, I did help to create the field of public history in the United States, and it’s spread around the world. I didn’t do it alone, there were lots of other people, but I was one of the participants.

OSPINA:                    Oh, that’s why I saw your face of recognition in many of the things I was saying.

SCARPINO:              I try to keep myself out of this... you know, happy to talk to you about, but yeah, I’m an applied scholar. I have been for almost forty years now. I read another piece, Contestation, Negotiation and Resolution: The Relationship Between Power and Collective Leadership; it appeared in the International Journal of Management Reviews, and you had a co-author.

OSPINA:                    It’s funny, you chose the two pieces that Erica was the first author.

SCARPINO:              Right.

OSPINA:                    That’s interesting, and, in management, the first author really leads. My ideas are absolutely there because we co-produce.

SCARPINO:              And I may have made an assumption because I’m not in your field...

OSPINA:                    That the second person...

SCARPINO:              We don’t use first and second authors in history. I mean, that is just so, so unusual to do that. But, my son’s a biologist, my other son’s an engineer and so on, so I kind of know how this stuff works. But I kind of guessed that you were second author because maybe she had been your student or something at one point, or you were mentoring her.

OSPINA:                    No, no, no, you know, we thought of it. She developed, she loved the idea of bringing back the idea of power, and then we co-produced the piece, but whomever is first author is responsible for making sure this thing comes out at the other end. I give her a lot of credit for a lot of the – and she read a lot of the pieces that we used as the basis.

SCARPINO:              I mean, what struck me about this was in part, you know, the relationship between power and collective leadership, and you started to talk about this, but in terms of this piece that you co-authored and in terms of the way you look at the world of leadership, how do you define power? What is it?

OSPINA:                    Ay-yi-yi, power is such a contested word. I am of the view that there are several forms of power, or several approaches to power; power as domination, power against, the power with, the power for, and each of those has a particular way of helping to get others to do what you’re pushing for. But it’s a very slippery word, and people use it as if it has the same meaning when people use it with very different meanings. And what we wanted to do in that article was to counter the idea that some scholars in the pushback that they had towards collective leadership, there was a group of people who kept saying, ‘Oh, they’re so naïve. They believe that it is all kumbaya. They don’t have anything about power in there. It’s just like a fluffy kind of thing.’ And, we knew from what we’ve read about collective leadership that there was a lot of stuff that was, that power was very present, sometimes even without being present, right? And, so, we wanted to make a claim that it’s not true, that collective leadership as a domain lacks a view of power, and I think we demonstrated it very nicely.

SCARPINO:              In your world view, the argument that you and the co-author made in this piece, how are power and collective leadership related?

OSPINA:                    Without power, without thinking about power you cannot define or do collective leadership. It’s, what’s the word, ubiquitous... it’s there. Precisely because collective leadership is about getting people to collaborate. And what is collaboration? Collaboration is not we’re all together kumbaya. Collaboration is, I’m going to put aside a little bit of my power in order to enter here, lose a little bit of that power, because what I’m gaining at the end is something I need or want. And, so, collaboration is about giving away part of your power in the name of a collective goal. So, that already tells you that when you’re doing a collective approach to leadership, people are negotiating power and are negotiating power arrangements.

SCARPINO:              If individuals who enter into collaboration give up or set aside some of their power, collectively though they gain power.

OSPINA:                    Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. That’s why I don’t believe that this is about consensus and everyone agreeing on everything. It’s really like collusion-building, it’s really about being very pragmatic about what you need to get, and therefore, because you can’t do it alone, you’re willing to give some of the power of doing it the way you would like it be done. Now, it goes to extremes, like, what is happening now in...

SCARPINO:              I was going to say, do you mean the House of Representatives, but I didn’t want to lead the witness.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, but let’s not even talk about that right now. But, no, the other thing that is important about power in my work, and in our work, because Erica has been really very important contributor to the work, is the notion that really the work of collective leadership when it is for social transformation, it is about leveraging power; it is about creating the conditions and the capacity to leverage power so that others who are outside who have power will have to pay attention to what you’re saying. In the social-change leadership framework, the work that is happening, the leadership work, the three types of work that is happening with the diagonals of the social (INAUDIBLE) with the grounded humanism, all lead towards leveraging power and having an impact outside the organization with people who hold power under certain conditions. And the idea is to make them change that position, or open the space and share their power.

SCARPINO:              I’m going to set my next few questions up with a little bit of context. And it’s Mary Uhl-Bien...

OSPINA:                    Bien.

SCARPINO:              Bien...

OSPINA:                    Bien.

SCARPINO:              Bien, okay. I had a really interesting conversation with her, I mean, I enjoyed talking to her, I learned a lot from talking to her. She was talking about the fact that men and women experience organizations in different ways. She even sent me a PowerPoint, she was really nice to send it to me and said ‘you can use it.’ And I did. She had a few PowerPoint slides that kind of interested me. And she talked about men and women relating to organizations in different ways. She had the feminine relation, and I just partially pulled out some of her points: empathy, helpfulness, caring, nurturance, interpersonal sensitivity, attendance to acceptance of others, orientation toward the collective interest, toward integrative goals as a group, and so on. And then her image, her slide on masculine: an ability to be impersonal, self-interested, efficient, hierarchical, tough minded, and assertive – that sounds scary - an interest in taking charge, control, domination, a capacity to ignore personal emotional considerations in order to succeed. And then she argued that in order to be successful in a male-dominated world of leadership, many women trade away the feminine approach and adopt the masculine approach so they can be accepted. She told me this, but I want to ask you, do you think that there are these gender differences in the way in which men and women experience organizations?

OSPINA:                    Yes, I do. But I see it in a different way. I see it in the fact that because of big regimes, ideologists like patriarchy, if we accept that, you know, that has been kind of like the dominant ideology, or one of the dominant ideologies in the West, and in the East actually, in the world, then a lot of the organizations get set up by men to address the issues that men are bringing. And, so, the institutions themselves are gendered. They are favorable. Men experience it in a nicer way than women because, for women, they’re entering something that was constructed by men. And, so, of course the experience has to be very different. And, it’s the same thing, it’s not only for women, it’s for people of color, more recently it’s like the whole movement of disability, the whole movement of LGBTQ. All those groups enter these organizations and don’t feel that it belongs to them because it’s all constructed with a particular mindset and rules that will promote the opportunities in particular ways, and so on and so forth. So, I don’t see it kind of like men are all like that and women are all like that. I see it more as a person could have both characteristics from both of those extremes, and that would be ideal for society. Some of the strengths of the male characteristics that have been attributed to men, and some of the strengths of the female characteristics that have been attributed to women. But in the process of socialization, you end up kind of like shaping women in the female characteristics and shaping men in the male characteristics. And, in fact, if a man has women characteristics, they don’t like him. And the same thing with women. So, in a traditional perspective, that’s what actually has happened. Now, there’s been a lot of paths open in terms of saying, what you want is a balance.

SCARPINO:              Right.

OSPINA:                    And, so, it’s not like if you think of women as just female and behaviors as maternal and all that and you believe that women have to be like in the workplace, I think that’s not correct. But what has happened is that, because of the way things have been constructed, the dominant ideology about who a leader is, is more associated with the male characteristics. The dominant ideology describes leaders as aggressive – but they’re not called aggressive, they’re called... if it’s a woman they’ll say she’s aggressive, but if it’s a man they’ll say he’s strong, he’s powerful, right? And, so, the mental models that we have when you think about leaders, leadership, it’s mostly male characteristics, and some of them the bad ones, I would say.

SCARPINO:              Where I was going with this, I mean, there are certainly a lot more women in leadership training programs now than there were 20 or 30 years ago. But given the fact that there probably is a gender difference in the way men and women relate to organizations, what does that say for the practice of leadership or leadership training?

OSPINA:                    It says that you have to pay attention to gender issues and how people are affected by them. Nowadays, like I’m reviewing again the literature on diversity, because I’m writing something about that, it’s not just women, it’s the whole idea of intersectional identities. It’s when you have several different identities that are within the same experience, on top of the problems for being a woman, you have the problems of being a person of color, or you have the problems of being an indigenous person. It’s not like, here’s my indigeneity, and here’s my gender; no, when you’re the two things together it’s more than the sum of... it’s like a multiplication. So, issues of intersectionality have started to become really important in terms of thinking how do you manage, because you do have to consider...

SCARPINO:              How do you manage? What do you tell the female graduate students who are going to enter an organization, I mean, what advice do you give them? Or the men for that matter, but I mean...

OSPINA:                    I don’t know if I’ve experienced giving specific advice connected to gender as such. I’ve had conversations where women tell me experiences that they have had, and then we talk about them and how they can confront them and be resilient in front of them. But what comes to mind for me is more what I tell to my students when they feel that they’ve been empowered my class on collective leadership and a very different way of thinking about leadership and where they feel now they have tools that they can go use in the organization; and what I say to them is, be brave and go against the current, because you’re going to go against the current. But also, don’t burn yourself, right? Don’t try to change everything as you go in...

SCARPINO:              In one day...

OSPINA:                    In one day, right, you have to meet people where they are, which is one of the qualities you see of a person who is doing collective leadership. And, so I would say the same in terms of issues of gender and, you know, like those kinds of situations is like people have to be aware that they’re getting into a structure that has a lot of givens, and where you have to navigate resources. In fact, this is reminding me of a paper I wrote with... from the work on indigenous women in Colombia, and where we basically shadowed two women, two indigenous women who were coming for several years for the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York City; and they were working with my colleague, Angela, in a leadership development program and we created this space for them. What we discovered in the way that they are doing leadership is very interesting and, I think, has great potential for thinking about how should people think about this, which is there are contexts where they are not granted a leadership identity, they’re not recognized in terms of their leadership identity. What they do is they leave that context and move to another context where there is more permission; where they can claim their leadership and accept the granting that comes from others saying, ‘yes, you’re a leader.’ Get energy, empowerment, resources from there, and then go back to the place where they were being ignored. It’s a navigation that is happening so that you’re managing your identity as a leader and you’re constructing it by being very relational, and by realizing strategically that in different places you have different capacity to claim sufficiently – but not to get stuck, not to just get stuck and demoralized because you weren’t accepted as a leader in a particular context, but go to other contexts where you gain that and then you can come back with more strength, and with more recognition from other parts to now present yourself as a leader.

SCARPINO:              Do you think that if women are entering into leadership positions that one of the things they have to deal with is that most people have sort of a sense of what a leader is, maybe that they picked up in school somewhere or they, you know, read in TIME magazine or wherever they got this stuff from, and most of the time it’s not women, particularly if you’re old like me. It’s men in a male-centered world. I mean, is part of the deal that they somehow have to deal with that stereotype of what a leader is or who people think a leader is?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, but I think it’s recognizing that that’s the world we’re entering, but that it’s not a fixed world... it’s a constructed world. And you can start reframing with your actions, with your words, with the discourse that you use, how much you accept with creating the boundaries that you want to create. Yeah, if you don’t have that understanding, then you’re internalizing oppression, then you’re just feeling like, why can’t I do this, I don’t understand what’s wrong with me. And, so, the idea is to really understand that this is in the air, this is out there.

SCARPINO:              How do you, how does one avoid internalizing oppression, and not just thinking this is the way things are?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, well, I think it’s hard, but it’s by finding validation in relationships that produce energy and zest, and where you are recognized as an individual and not as a particular part of yourself. There’s a lot of feminist theory that has developed this relational psychology that shows how there are relationships that are very generative, and what you want to do is to find those relationships, to develop those relationships, to be like that with other people, where you find spaces that make you feel like your best and therefore you can really thrive. And that’s a lot of the work that is done in these organizations, for example, with young people so they understand, even though they’ve gotten messages that are out there about ‘oh, you’re poor, therefore you’re lazy,’ those kinds of messages, right? So, it’s like validating their capacity and doing work that shows that they actually can do it changes completely how they think of themselves. But also making sure you have a critical perspective; understand that these are structural issues. And now in the United States, that’s accepted. Now, there’s a discourse of course, there’s a counter discourse, ‘oh critical race theory, that’s bad.’ But at least a lot of people are claiming the possibility of being activists around this stuff. But that’s new. That’s after the last couple of horrible things that happened that have made people realize that they have to do something. Before that it was a lot harder to talk about this stuff. You were labeled a troublemaker, communist, or whatever.

SCARPINO:              You were, I think, the principal investigator of, 2018 to 2022, a project called Indigenous Women Leaders in Colombia in collaboration with Professor Angela Santamaria.

OSPINA:                    We were co-PIs.

SCARPINO:              Okay. The Intercultural Indigenous Diplomacy School, Rosario University in Bogota?

OSPINA:                    Mm-hmm.

SCARPINO:              So, two parts: How did you become interested in indigenous women leaders? And then what is this project about?

OSPINA:                    Okay, so, how I became interested in indigenous women leaders is, I’ve always been interested in people who are in the margins at some levels. I’m interested in that and how they can enter and become powerful and do what they need to do. But I suddenly got invited to go to the Banff Center in Canada, this beautiful public space that does a lot of work, and it happens to be in an area that belonged to an indigenous community. And they made an arrangement with the government that they would this center to be created there. In exchange, they got a leadership development program for indigenous people. It’s a beautiful place in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, fantastic. And they read my stuff and said, ‘We’re interested in the way you are doing research about this stuff.’ I went a couple of times and met a lot of people, and I actually met also an indigenous woman scholar from Australia. She was using my work, and so we started talking about it. So, it was like the stars were starting to align. I was getting all these calls from indigenous groups interested in what I was doing. And then, Angela knocked on my door with here indigenous colleague and said, ‘We’re reading your work. We really are inspired by it. Would you work with us?’

SCARPINO:              And the name of her indigenous scholar?

OSPINA:                    It’s one of the women who’s co-author of the article on indigenous woman – and her name is...

SCARPINO:              I can look it up, but I just think people should have names, to give them credit for their work.

OSPINA:                    You’re absolutely right, it’s such an important thing. But I’m blocking her name right now.

SCARPINO:              But if she is a co-author on this piece, I can look it up.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, I can’t believe I’m blocking her name, I’m so sorry. She’s an Arhuaco woman from Colombia.

SCARPINO:              What tribe?

OSPINA:                    Arhuaco.

SCARPINO:              Arhuaco.

OSPINA:                    Yes, from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. They believe they are heart of the world, and from there they’re trying to save and support the world. It’s a very beautiful philosophy, actually. They’re a very peaceful group, also, which is interesting. So, they actually came to my office. We had a conversation, and they told me what they were trying to do, and I told them I would think about it. The idea of doing work in Colombia and with indigenous people sounded really interesting to me. But I had so much work and I was doing so many other things that it was kind of like hard to think about it. But then I thought, the stars aligned; it’s coming from here; it’s coming from here. There’s something that’s telling me I should do it.

SCARPINO:              And, so, did you go to Colombia and work directly with these folks?

OSPINA:                    I went to Colombia for a couple of times. But the one who holds the project – and she has worked with indigenous women for 15 years and continues to work with indigenous people – is my colleague, Angela Santamaria, who’s another amazing person. And, so, we started talking about the idea of creating like a school for them and got a couple of grants from several places together and got money also for them to be able to come to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, created spaces where they could also engage in conversation with other indigenous groups who were also coming to the UN, but like in an environment that’s different, that was more co-produced and more about sharing experiences. We interviewed... then, we asked them, we chose these two: gosh, I can’t think of their names... Nazareth is the name of the other indigenous woman, Nazareth Guererro, and she’s from the Amazon.

SCARPINO:              I’m going to ask you something I normally wouldn’t, but my transcriber probably, can’t speak of word of Spanish, could you spell that for her please?

OSPINA:                    Nazareth, N-A-Z-A-R-E-T-H, like the town Nazareth. Guererro, that’s a harder one, G-U-E-R-R-E-R-O, Guerrero. And, oh my gosh, I’m blocking my other colleague’s name, I don’t know, that’s terrible.

SCARPINO:              I mean, if you can think of it just email it to me and I’ll insert it in the transcript, I can’t put it in the recording.

OSPINA:                    And, so, they agreed. And the invitation was ‘think with us about your identity as a leader and how have you developed that identity? What has helped you?’ And, so, we collected a lot of interviews, we did the shadowing. We went and did many ethnographic, like, micro-ethnographies. I was working with my doctoral student; she ended up being first author on this one. There’s also a little bit of generosity there, but it’s a way of really developing the thinking of other colleagues.

SCARPINO:              Right.

OSPINA:                    It was the two of us. It was Angela, who had a lot of experience and knowledge about all the stuff that was going on. It was Celina Su, who with whom I had worked before and she was part of the United Nations Forum. And then we invited the two indigenous leaders whose cases we developed to be also researchers in that project. And that paper was kind of like the product of four or five years of working together, trying to develop spaces where they could train themselves and develop the knowledge they wanted and needed to develop, with lots of other women, indigenous women leaders in the field.

SCARPINO:              How would you assess the significance or the success of that project? Did it work?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, I think it worked, but for whom?

SCARPINO:              For the indigenous women.

OSPINA:                    For the indigenous women, yeah, I think that they learned a lot about themselves and about their leadership. And, for them, also being co-authors was an important experience in terms of feeding their sense of self-efficacy. The other person who I’m blocking her name, and I don’t know why, she actually is a lawyer in Colombia and now is getting a master’s degree in Universidad Nacional. For her, being one of the co-authors means a lot in terms of her own career. And for the other one, for Nazareth, it’s less of an academic incentive and it’s more about also being able to position herself as a leader in her community as she does the work that she wants to continue to do. So, these are all credentials that help them, that give them much more authority about it. And from the perspective of Angela, my participation and the researchers that I offered allowed us to develop a more specific perspective on leadership that was complementing the work that she was doing on more technical stuff that was important, but bringing in a leadership perspective that was missing. And she was looking for someone who had that perspective and someone who speaks Spanish because you don’t want to go to the field to have a translation.

SCARPINO:              I hope this doesn’t sound like an ignorant question, but for indigenous people in Colombia, is Spanish the first language?

OSPINA:                    They’re bilingual. They have to be bilingual, yeah. Unless they’re in a faraway community, they’re completely bilingual, which is not something you can say about many other people who have a higher education.

SCARPINO:              One of the things that struck me when I was in Colombia, and I admit I was at the university and not out on my own too much, but most of the people who I met who had advanced degrees were at least bilingual. Now, it may have been Spanish and English, and for the chair of the history department there it was Spanish and French, but they all had more than one language that they had command of. That is not the case with Americans. I mean, I admit, I struggled, but most Americans don’t feel as though they need to have a second language.

OSPINA:                    Yeah. Now there’s a recognition in Colombia that you need English. But there’s, you know, Universidad (INAUDIBLE) this is a very privileged world, and, so, I’m sure people have much better... the higher possibility that you’ll find bilingual people there than, for example, you’ll find in Universidad Nacional, which, there will be a lot of people who are bilingual, but not everyone will be bilingual, right? So, it also depends a lot on the resources.

SCARPINO:              This woman who I had a hard time talking to because I’m not fluent in Spanish and I don’t speak French, but she wrote a graphic novel called L’antagonista. And, you know, I had to struggle my the way through it, and it’s really good. You know, it was a really excellent way to teach, sort of, high-school age people history in a way that was extremely interesting even for an old guy like me. All right, I think I got this off the NYU leadership website where you or somebody on your behalf wrote:

‘No one individual, organization, or sector is capable of addressing the pressing issues of today’s shared-power world. Shifting geopolitical and digital landscapes require that we move beyond traditional "heroic" conceptions of leaders to instead recognize leadership that enables people to work across sectors and boundaries to find common solutions.’

And then you go on to explain your solution: Your ‘...approach to leadership understands that people from all sectors and levels can

contribute to leading for the public good.’

On the one hand, I’m really drawn to that. On the other hand, the question I have is: How do people from all sectors and levels learn to contribute to leading for the public good? How do they recognize that this is even possible?

OSPINA:                    You should read Bryson and Crosby’s stuff because this is really directly their area. That question, they would be able to answer it very well. But it’s not easy because we’ve lived in a world where the three different sectors have worked independently from one another. Each of them had been assigned responsibilities, and you don’t cross – it’s bad to cross. And we’ve shifted towards a world where those boundaries have become much more permeable and where there is a need for that, where in fact there’s, you know, like a claim that is being done by people in civil society, by people in business, that it’s also their responsibility, right? And there’s a claim from the government of needing to open the bureaucracy, open it up for other stakeholders to take part of the stuff. So, what has happened there is new efforts of collaboration. People from the different sectors have started to emerge and appear, and they’ve struggled to figure out how to cross those lines. It’s all about valuing what people are bringing, but realizing that what you believe is the truth is not the truth in the logic of the other sector. A lot of the work in my class on cross-sector collaboration is putting themselves in the shoes of the people who are in another institutional context where the logic is completely different from your logic. So, in government you go slowly, you’re dealing with issues of equity, you have accountabilities that are very clear in terms of representation. In business, you move very fast, you know, like the accountability is only to your boss and to the shareholders. The equity issue, now it’s starting to be important, but it wasn’t. So, those are two very different logics. And so you imagine, you put one person who goes at a very slow pace because they have to worry about all these kinds of stuff – with someone from here who’s saying, ‘You have to do this’ like this... and they can’t figure each other, and they go very crazy and very frustrated. But if they can share that logic and understand where they’re coming from, and what is the good thing about that logic and appreciate the good part about it, and incorporate it into the work, what is that? It’s leadership as meaning-making in communities of practice. It’s back to the same thing. So, how do you do it? You do it by engaging with a specific purpose.

SCARPINO:              I’ve got some wrap-up questions that I’m going to ask you. And I think this first question that I’m going to ask, I think it was suggested by one of the people I talked to. The question is, we established at the beginning that you recently retired at the end of August, so, the question is: What makes you ‘tick? Until you recently retired, why did you do the work that you did? What drove you forward?

OSPINA:                    I think that being in a school of public service was the place where I had to be. And what drives me is trying to make things better for the world, for society, for those who have been excluded, and for society in general. It’s not that you’re now going to exclude the others, right? But in the public management lingo, it’s creating public value, value that goes for several generations and that really is about public good. It’s about making sure that somebody is taking care of everyone. Taking care might sound a little paternalistic, but who is considering and thinking in the interests of everyone.

SCARPINO:              Kind, respect for human dignity and potential. You’re retired, recently, do you still think of yourself as a work in progress?

OSPINA:                    Oh, yeah, yes. One thing is, I can’t stop thinking about all this stuff. So, one of the ways in which I’m thinking that I would continue to think about it, because I still have lots of questions, is by working with practitioners who are struggling with stuff on the ground. And so, I’ve started to do consulting work with these colleagues from Teach for All, where we’re trying to create a document about collective leadership in the context of sustainable development. We’re presenting, that’s the afternoon of Saturday we’re presenting that work. And it’s been a lot of fun because it’s not about writing a paper that needs to be published, but it’s a paper that has to meet the standards of the people who are looking for tools to be able to think about this in a very practical way. I don’t have a stake anymore of one more publication, right? So, I think I’m going to accept consultancies and do volunteer work in places where people are really passionate about something, and are trying to figure out how to do it, and to try to contribute with them – not for them, but with them in the context of what they want to hear about. I have to tell you, I think I’m retiring at my peak. And, that has positive and negative things. The positive thing is that I have a lot of energy and time to think about how do I reopen and imagine new pieces of myself that have been left aside because... I haven’t been able to touch my guitar in the last eighteen years because every time that I try to do it, I don’t have the time, I just don’t have the time. I think of myself as an artist in a certain way; I do a lot of drawing, and I picked up some collage techniques. There’s a creative side of me that I’ve kind of like left aside, so I want to think about how I incorporate that back into my life in a more systematic way, the way you have to do it. You have to practice it every day, otherwise, it’s not going to happen. I got good as a leadership scholar because I practiced it every day. And I thought about it every day. And I got obsessed with it, right? And I want to be able to have the space to do that with my art, and the music.

SCARPINO:              As you think about...

OSPINA:                    Oh, and my grandson.

SCARPINO:              I understand, I understand. As you look back on the lifetime of work, what do you think were your accomplishments?

OSPINA:                    Well, from an academic perspective, I think positioning this way of thinking about leadership, in a way that’s credible, legitimate, where it resonates for people and is helpful to people is a big accomplishment. And so is positioning qualitative research as more legitimate and rigorous. People recognize my research as good research. In the same way that there’s a lot of bad quantitative research, there’s a lot of bad qualitative research that makes it harder for people to accept good qualitative research. So, I think that I have opened a space for others to be able to do this without feeling that they’re not going to be published, both in the leadership field and in the public management field. In the public management field I wrote a couple of articles about that.

SCARPINO:              What do you want your grandchildren, or grandchild to know about you?

OSPINA:                    I’m glad you asked that, that’s a very beautiful question. I would like them to know about me that I care about others, that I care about the well-being of others; and... I don’t know, I’m not sure how to answer. It was a beautiful question and I’d love to think about it, but I don’t, I’m not sure. More than that, I’d like him to enjoy time with me. I’d like to tell him that I would love him to continue to be as inquisitive as he has been as a baby. He’s very, very, very inquisitive, you can see that he’s thinking and he’s looking at stuff in a way that, later on, kind of disappears if you don’t cultivate it.

SCARPINO:              That’s the trick, isn’t it, having it last and persist into teenage years and adulthood?

OSPINA:                    Yeah, yeah.

SCARPINO:              Just a couple of more questions. Do you think that in the United States we face a crisis in leadership?

OSPINA:                    Yes, I do.

SCARPINO:              What do you think the nature of that crisis is?

OSPINA:                    Well, I mean, it’s a crisis. Again, I do agree with the Ford Foundation the way they talked about the motivation that they had, which is that, even though I think we did change a little bit the conversation about leadership, and in fact there’s a lot more voices that were not heard as sources to do research on leadership and make it legitimate, right? But I do think that when you think of leadership only as the people who are in positions of authority and there is the type of polarization that there is right now, everything gets paralyzed and that creates a crisis. It’s not just a crisis of leadership, it’s a crisis of society. But it reflects a crisis of leadership right now in this country, yeah.

SCARPINO:              Professionally, who do you look up to? Who inspires you?

OSPINA:                    Professionally?

SCARPINO:              Personally, if you want to, but just who inspires you?

OSPINA:                    I’ve given you names of a lot of people who inspire me.

SCARPINO:              Yes, you did.

OSPINA:                    Yeah, a lot of people inspire me. Something about myself is that I can see the good things in people and really appreciate them in a way that sometimes people kind of like only focus on the problems, or the negative side. I don’t know, I just think people always have something interesting to say and to teach. And finding that and validating it is amazing, and it’s amazing for you, also. It’s amazing for me because I learn from it.

SCARPINO:              Two questions, it’s the same two questions I ask everybody I interview at the end. And the first one is: Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t?

OSPINA:                    I think it was a really interesting conversation, and it wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t asked the right questions. And I was very appreciative that you were well prepared, that you knew about me already in a way that allowed you to make this conversation interesting. I don’t know, maybe we got a little more into some personal questions and personal pieces that are indirectly related to my work, like creativity and that kind of stuff. But I don’t think there would have been time.

SCARPINO:              I’m going to end up running over here two or three minutes, but the last question is: Is there anything you wanted to say that I didn’t give you a chance to say?

OSPINA:                    No, I think I was able to say everything I thought I wanted to say.

SCARPINO:              Before I turn these recorders off, I want to tell you how much I appreciate your time, and how much I enjoyed talking to you. And I want to thank you, not only behalf of myself, but the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association that made this possible, so, thank you very much.

OSPINA:                    Thank you very much.