Donna Ladkin

Back to the workplace

This paper explores how organisations can become more sophisticated at supporting transfer of learning, by identifying the perceived barriers and facilitators to transfer of learning, by examining a range of individual characteristics and workplace features associated with these barriers and facilitators and then relating these to the type of programme that managers undertake. The longitudinal survey methodology and programme typology used in the research are described. Findings highlight 26 perceived barriers and 17 facilitators to the transfer of learning, significant associations are shown with particular features such as mentoring and personal values. The paper goes on to identify the characteristics associated with a lack of transfer and suggests a tentative model of perceived influences on transfer of learning. Based on this research, it is concluded that it is important to take programme learning design into account when considering support for transfer of learning from management development programmes back to the workplace.

‘The enigma of subjectivity’ How might phenomenology help action researchers negotiate the relationship between ‘self’, ‘other’ and ‘truth’?

This article explores the issue of how action researchers might fully account for their subjectivity while simultaneously seeking to more fully understand ‘the other’ as they engage in inquiry processes. Ideas from the 20th-century philosophical tradition of phenomenology, including that of the ‘Lifeworld’, ‘presence and readiness-to-hand’, ‘bracketing’, and ‘objectivity for subjectivity’ are considered for the insights they bring to this paradox. The article considers the nature of truth generated through epistemologies based in subjectivity, and examines the role objectivity plays in establishing valid claims to truth. It concludes that subjectivity and objectivity are necessarily intertwined in the creation of valid truths with the consequence of this being the interdependence of meaning with truth as well.

From perception to flesh: A phenomenological account of the felt experience of leadership

Although growing numbers of scholars are studying the role embodiment plays in leadership, few attend to the most fundamental level at which bodies are involved: that of the felt experience of being within a leadership dynamic. How do we know, at a bodily level when we are being led, or when we are leading? Does the quality of that bodily based experience have an impact on the extent to which we are willing to engage in leadership processes, either as followers or as leaders? This paper draws on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to respond to questions such as these and to elaborate the perceptual processes central to the felt experience of being within a leadership relation. This exploration culminates in a description of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’, the ‘stuff’ of materiality, as well as the medium through which materiality is experienced. This paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s ideas provide a holistic approach to understanding perception as a full-bodied activity with important implications for the creation and maintenance of leadership relations. In doing so, his thinking offers a starting point for rendering the invisible intersubjective relations at the heart of leadership more visible, thus enabling their material dimensions to become more evident.

Leadership as art: Variations on a theme

FromMax Depree’s Leadership is an Art (1989) to Michael Jones’ Artful Leadership (2006) to Oba T’Shaka’s two volumes of The Art of Leadership (1990–1991), the rhetoric that leadership is an art is alive and well. However, with a few exceptions such as Keith Grint’s The Arts of Leadership (2001), the moniker ‘leadership as art’ is used rather indiscriminately, indicative of everything from ‘skillful practice’ to ‘trendy title for a book’. In this special issue we offer six articles that each work with the idea of leadership as art, not as a loose rhetorical turn, but as a starting point for some rigorous and interesting thinking. Our impetus for generating this issue was curiosity about the consequence of taking the notion of ‘leadership as art’ seriously. How might doing so inform what we recognize as leadership? What consequences would result for the ways in which we understand the role of followers or context in leadership’s enactment? What would it imply about the ways in which leaders might be developed? Why might conceptualizing ‘leadership as art’ be important? The six articles presented here create a surprisingly consistent argument in answer to this final question. In short, we live in a complex world, which cannot be fully understood solely by reference to scientific forms of logic and sense-making. The arts, and arts-based practices, provide different ways of both describing and relating to that complexity, thereby offering novel ways of responding to it. This possibility has been noted by a number of organizational theorists in recent years, for instance Karl Weick writes:

The Enchantment of the Charismatic Leader: Charisma Reconsidered as Aesthetic Encounter:

This article takes a novel approach to understanding the phenomenon of charisma by viewing it through the frame of the aesthetic category of the sublime. It draws similarities between the account of the sublime as theorized by the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, and the theory of charismatic authority as rendered by Max Weber. The resulting analysis contributes insight into the phenomenon in three ways: it serves to locate the experience of charisma as a relational encounter rather than one situated solely within the leader him or herself, it highlights contextual factors which contribute to the experience of charismatic leadership, and it suggests a new way of distinguishing between generative and degenerative forms of charisma based in its relational quality rather than in outcomes associated it. The article concludes that, interpreted as an expression of the sublime, charismatic leadership functions as a means by which followers are empowered to wake up to their own sense of agency to respond in radical ways during times of crisis.

The Event’s the Thing: Brief Encounters With the Leaderful Moment

This chapter is grounded in a radical reconceptualisation of leadership based on the process philosophy particularly of Alfred Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze. Rather than focusing primarily on the individual leader, or even the dyadic relationship between leaders and followers, the lens of process philosophy frames leadership as an unfolding, emergent process; a continuous coming into being. Conceptualising leadership from this perspective, we suggest, stretches the field of potential contributors to its realisation, particularly encouraging a richer appreciation of the role played by contextual aspects, such as history, culture or geographic situatedness. In promoting this view, it joins recent work by Collinson (2005), Grint (2005), Shotter (2005), Wood (2005) and Koivunen (2007), as well as supplementing and extending the work of others in organisation and communication theory (Graen and Scandura, 1987; Hosking, 1988; Dansereau, 1995; Barker, 2001; Gronn, 2002; Pearce and Conger, 2003; Fairhurst, 2005) who are forging theoretical in-roads into how a less individualistic and more process-oriented approach might offer distinctive insights into what is the paradigmatically limited and limiting field of ‘positive’ leadership approaches (Bryman, 1986; Dansereau, 1995).

Meeting the Challenge of Leading in the 21st Century: Beyond the ‘Deficit Model’ of Leadership Development

If the importance now afforded ‘leadership’ rather than ‘management’ reflects more than a fad in the contemporary Zeitgeist, to what might that shift be attributed? Furthermore, as leadership developers concerned with how best to enable leaders to fulfil their roles effectively, how should such a shift be influencing our own practice? This chapter sets out, if not to answer these questions definitively, then to map some of the theoretical and practical territory which informs them. In so doing, we suggest characteristics of leadership development interventions which might complement approaches which have been more typically used but which might not so readily address the needs of those taking up leadership roles in these demanding and complex times.

The Aesthetics of Leadership Development

Over the last ten years there has been an upsurge in the use of arts-based approaches within leadership development (Mockler, 2002; Darso, 2004). For instance, in the UK, the director and actor Richard Olivier has championed the reading and dramatisation of Shakespeare plays as a mode of leadership development (Olivier, 2002), the Banff Centre for Leadership in Alberta Canada regularly incorporates mask-making, poetry and dance in its ‘Leadership Lab’ and the Bled School of Management in Slovenia runs an innovative programme in which participants on leadership development programmes conduct an orchestra as a way of gaining a new perspective on teamworking. Theoretical development in this area is also on the rise, heralded by an International Arts of Organisation and Management conference held biennially since 2002 as well as the introduction of the journal Aesthesis, which encourages discourse amongst academics and practitioners forging innovative theory in the intersection between organisation and art.

‘In through the Nose, out through the Mouth’: How Conscious Breathing Can Help Mere Mortals Cope with the Difficulties of Leading

Abstract This chapter starts from the assertion that leading is a physically demanding activity. The challenges associated with it arise from at least three sources: as a response to ambiguous ‘wicked’ problems taking the lead necessitates moving into unknown situations; followers’ projections and the leader’s conscious or unconscious desire to fulfil them create psychological and emotional pressure and leaders often work in isolation. These realities of leading create physical stress that can result in disrupted sleep, digestive ailments and over-reliance on food and alcohol for short-term relief. Conscious breathing is introduced as a way of mitigating these physical effects. Such breathing can halt the vicious cycle of feeling stressed because one is breathing shallowly and breathing shallowly because of feeling stressed. Additionally, it can reduce the sense of time pressure by introducing an experience of greater spaciousness and provide a means whereby the leader can access her or his ‘best self’ in meeting the demands of the role. The ideas are illustrated through a case study of a senior executive who successfully used conscious breathing practices to transform the way in which he led his team.

How did that happen? Making sense of the 2016 US presidential election result through the lens of the ‘leadership moment’:

This article analyses the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 US election through the lens of the ‘leadership moment’. A phenomenologically based framework, the ‘leadership moment’ theorizes leadership as an event which occurs when context, purpose, followers and leaders align. Perception links these four parts of leadership, in particular the perceptions followers have of their context and the relative strengths competing leaders have to respond to that context. By considering how key voters perceived Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump in relation to their circumstances, the ‘leadership moment’ offers a way of making sense of the election result, as well as emphasising the importance of perceptions of context in the achievement of leadership more generally. Importantly, it highlights the economic and identity-based dynamics which attracted voters to Trump, and which remain in play no matter who holds the Presidential office. Theoretically, the argument contributes to the emerging field of relational leadership in two ways: by looking beyond the ‘between space’ of leaders and followers, to include the ‘around space’ in which those relations are embedded, and by emphasizing the role of affective perceptions (rather than discourse) in the creation of those perceptions.