At first glance, leadership might seem far removed from Professor Garcia’s academic roots. Trained in law, criminology and sociology, she began her career as a researcher combining legal and social science perspectives to study how laws emerge, evolve, and transform in practice, particularly in the context of human rights. This human-centric focus spurred her passion for leadership studies and leadership education, beginning with a few simple questions: how do systems change – and why do they sometimes fail to? And why is it that the best ideas and the best tools for human flourishing, like human rights, encounter such resistance in meaningful implementation?
“In our research, ‘Leadership in times of crisis’, my colleague Professor Richard Dubé and I discovered that when leaders face unprecedented crises – situations where past experience offers little guidance – they tap into a deeper set of human capacities,” says Professor Garcia. “These are qualities that are available to all of us yet rarely activated in everyday life. It’s very automatic and easy for us to be given by our fears, insecurities and anxieties, and it’s very rare for us to be given by our power, our creativity, our courage.”
At the heart of this novel understanding of leadership lies a choice: keep doing only what you know, or embrace the opportunity for expansion, unlocking new ways of being, acting, seeing and relating. “It’s who one is being,” she says, “more than the specifics of what one is doing that seems to be the key to outstanding performance and outcomes in leadership situations.”
Professor Garcia’s current research explores leadership as a lived phenomenon – not as a role, theory or concept. She conducts interviews across a remarkably wide spectrum of individuals, from lawyers to stay-at-home parents, theoretical physicists to Buddhist monks. “I wanted to observe the phenomenology of leadership from the most diverse directions,” she says. The findings to date have led Professor Garcia and Professor Dubé to reconsider some of our deepest assumptions about human nature and human flourishing. Their research invites a rethinking of how we understand failure and success, as well as meaning, purpose, and effectiveness.
“Leadership isn’t about having a title or a certain salary,” says Professor Garcia. “We can all think of people in our own lives who occupied positions of leadership who weren’t actually very good leaders. And we can probably all identify moments in our lives when we saw real leadership happening – something someone said or did that made us see a given situation in a different way.Maybe we were stuck and something or someone came along and got us to ‘unstuck’ ourselves – that’s leadership.”
“One hundred different situations might demand one hundred different leadership approaches. How can you respond accordingly? That’s what we’re interested in.”
Professor Margarida Garcia
— University of Ottawa Leadership Academy
This research has led Professor Garcia to reconsider how leadership is taught and learned. Traditional leadership training, she notes, has often focused more on management than on leadership itself. “The phenomenon of management is very different from the phenomenon we call leadership. They are both essential, but leadership does not happen if we keep defaulting to use management strategies when preparing big visions for the future.”
In 2020, Professor Garcia co-founded the University of Ottawa’s Leadership Academy, and she currently runs the initiative alongside Professor Dubé, who hails from the Faculty of Social Sciences, and Professor Emeritus Marc Dubé from the of the Faculty of Engineering. The Leadership Academy is built around a cluster of ideas, practices, projects, course offerings and professional training on the thriving science of leadership.
“Most people would probably agree that preparing future leaders to lead effectively is a worthwhile goal,” says Professor Garcia. “But relatively few people are willing to put their hands up and say that they want or need leadership training. And we’re all constantly bombarded with spam emails and endless social media posts offering leadership training opportunities – lots of money is spent on training people to be better leaders.But is it actually getting results?Are we happy with the current state of leadership in the world?”
Through the Leadership Academy, Professor Garcia leads carefully-crafted training initiatives – both traditional course-based offerings for students and professional training sessions for the broader community. These courses aim to cut through the noise of the current leadership training environment and get to the heart of what leadership actually is. Courses from Professor Garcia and her team don’t aim to simply give participants more knowledge about leadership – you won’t find lists of the top ten things to do or not do in leadership situations. Rather, these courses adopt a more experiential model that promotes discovery learning and personal transformation. It is a well-tested approach, with participants consistently reporting an empowering experience that sparks breakthroughs in how they engage with their commitments, the results they achieve, and the quality of their relationships
“Real leadership isn’t the result of strict set of rules that says you have to respond to a specific situation in a specific way,” says Professor Garcia. “One hundred different situations might demand one hundred different leadership approaches.How can you respond accordingly?That’s what we’re interested in.”
The University of Ottawa’s Leadership Academy, in partnership with the uOttawa Professional Development Institute, is offering a public course this spring. “Transformational Leadership: Discover the Leader Within” is a six-day program, running on Thursdays and Fridays from mid-April to early May, that approaches leadership with the rigour and novelty characteristic of Professor Garcia’s research. Participants – from all backgrounds, not just managers or executives – are invited to explore leadership challenges and solutions, unlocking natural, effective, and authentic pathways to being a leader.