After Leadership

Brigid Carroll, Josh Firth, Suze Wilson, Brigid Carroll, Josh Firth, Suze Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351615334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Leadership studies today resembles a bewildering diversity of theories, concepts, constructs and approaches, struggling in huge part for meaning, relevance and impact. As Dennis Tourish so eloquently puts it, much of the literature suffers from 'unrelenting triviality' and 'sterile preoccupations'. Seeking to create a clean break from this current state of leadership studies, After Leadership begins with the premise of a post-apocalyptic world where only fragments of 'leadership science' now remain, echoing Alisdair McIntyre's imagining of such a scene as the basis for re-establishing the foundations and focus of moral theory. From these fragments, the authors seek to construct a new leadership studies that challenges much of the established thinking on leadership, exposes its limitations and biases, and, most importantly, seeks to construct the foundations of a more inclusive, participatory, bold, relational and social platform for leadership in the future.

After Leadership thus imagines a brave new world where what leadership is and what we seek from it can be developed anew, rather than remaining bound up in the problematic traditions and preoccupations that characterise leadership studies today.

Offering both full length chapter explorations that explore new ways of understanding and practicing leadership, as well as shorter essays that aim to provoke further reflection on leadership and what we seek of it, After Leadership offers a uniquely critical and creative collection that will inspire students, scholars and leadership educators to reconsider their understanding and practice of leadership.

Part I

Revealing, Reframing, Reimagining

2 An Archaeological Dig into Leadership Competencies in the Twenty-First Century

Vesa Huotari and Brigid Carroll

Below are fragments from a veritable mountain of leadership texts, artefacts and documents from the era we understand as the pinnacle of leadership studies – the twenty-first century. We include them here to illustrate the nature of the fragments that have survived the leadership studies apocalypse, but also to remind any reader of the myriad of ways that leadership inserted itself into that epoch and most of all that we have an opportunity now to decide how it can be reasserted into the future.

Presumably then, when the historical circumstances change along with the criteria for this relevance, a new truth will have to be found that captures the new essence of leadership. This is the ideological at work – the replacement of truth and fact with the need for beliefs that fit with the sociopolitical and economic demands of the day.

(Kelly 2014, 913)

Introduction

• Provides opportunities for people to learn to work together as a team.

• Enlists the active participation of everyone.

• Promotes cooperation with other work units.

• Ensures that all team members are treated fairly.

• Recognizes and encourages the behaviors that contribute to teamwork.

[surviving fragment of leadership competency list]

This is an era reportedly obsessed, as you can see from the bulk of fragments surviving the apocalypse, on nailing down leadership, chunking out its component parts, creating models, frameworks and assessments, and above all designing a plethora of representations and maps for the so-called leaders of those times to follow. From such fragments we, as the archaeologists and custodians of leadership knowledge, can retrospectively explore a largely lost form of social process, as well as doctrinal trajectory, points of agreement, fields of dispute and sites of conflict, both internal and external to organisations, and both real and imagined to its adherents. Given the scale and scope of this lost leadership world, we will draw on the science and art of cartography to not just assemble an understanding of the past leadership mapping obsession, but also to experiment with new mapping technologies and paradigms to help us avoid the pitfalls our predecessors fell into so we can benefit from their leadership pursuit for the good of our own new society.

From the first sight, most of the fragments appear in the guise of ‘shopping lists’ of features, skills and behaviours that we suspect are somehow meant to characterise leadership, the character of a true leader and successful or effective leader behaviour. The vast number of such defining properties, ranging from the practical and pragmatic to the conceptually complex, have perplexed us for a long time. How do we even read these? What were they for? How did anything resembling leadership result? Our first task, as with any unknown terrain, is to assemble fragments into a terrain and investigate its topographical features, hence our incursion into cartography. Our second step is to construct alternative maps and mapping methodologies. It is well-known that mapping territory that no longer exists (like the mythical land of Atlantis) can best be evaluated against alternative mappings and not by comparing a map with the actual object it is attempting to map (in this case leadership). Furthermore, we must acknowledge that all such endeavours are conceptually mediated. The choice of terms and symbols and the relations they purport to capture reflect the very purpose of their makers. The latter, we need to acknowledge, are always immersed in or given legitimacy by the prevailing interests and the respective structures of power. No cartographic account or map after all can be objective, value-neutral or benign. This applies not just to our fragments either as all theoretical accounts should be taken as maps or processes akin to mapping. As such, we include some recovered commentaries from leadership scholars that are insightful for the assumptions and intent they reveal about these fragments.

The notion of an alternative map is an important one in this chapter. Our concept of an alternative map is one that structurally corresponds with the original one (in the sense that both have the very same form) but offers an alternative interpretation or meaning, caters for ideological critique, has the capacity for systematic reflection of its internal and external relations, pinpoints possible sites of contestation, and opens up possibilities for new syntheses and ongoing development. In fact, we envisage that an alternative map for our own era should remain essentially contestable. An essentially contestable map means a map with the capacity to continually change as contexts and conditions change, or new learnings and insights are shared and is driven by divergent perspectives and dialogue. We propose that an alternative map for the leadership terrain can be rigorously achieved as well as advanced systematically by figuring out alternative, formally equivalent, conceptually coherent and thus credible maps, putting the two side by side, and assessing the similarities and differences between them.

This chapter follows the aforementioned method. We shall use recently discovered fragments of texts to give empirical substance to the archaeological work we are undertaking and to help the reader discover and engage with a past leadership era. Our movement forward will need to partly derive from the lessons put forward by the historical case at hand. We suspect our progress will be heavily in debt to the specific fragments of texts we have recovered and feature here. We suspect that the survival of such fragments reflects their sheer prevalence at that time and, in all likelihood, they probably gave character to a whole era in leadership studies. Therefore, we claim them as truly representative of what was significant about leadership over the time. It is thus not only possible but also vital to reconstruct a new era of leadership scholarship from careful consideration and critique of these very cues.

Leadership Competencies: Reconstructing a ByGone Scholarship

Archaeological forays invite us into a different relationship with maps, categories and lists of things. Given much of the surviving leadership fragments are maps, categories and lists, we note that we have to pay a particular kind of attention to their composition and assumptions.

A map says to you, “Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.” It says, “I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.”

(Beryl Markham 1983, cited in Harley 1989, 1)

• Provides opportunities for people to learn to work together as a team.

• Enlists the active participation of everyone.

• Promotes cooperation with other work units.

• Ensures that all team members are treated fairly.

• Recognizes and encourages the behaviors that contribute to teamwork.

[surviving fragment of leadership competency list]

From a shopping list, one can reconstruct numerous different dishes. Likewise, a list of leader competencies gives a glimpse of what we take to be a range of leadership ingredients. While we are very familiar with the function of a shopping list (essentially a reminder of what we need to have at hand for the days ahead), we have to ask ourselves what a similar list of leadership skills and behaviours could be good for and perhaps more importantly why someone thought they needed such a list in the first place.

The fragment above suggests that such leadership lists might have reminded leaders of their duties or tasks for their leadership responsibility. In that sense, at least some of these fragments seem more like behavioural recipes than simple lists of properties, characteristics and features. They suggest lines of action to anyone who wondered what he or she was supposed to do, look after or accomplish as a leader, particularly in order to make leadership happen. Put succinctly, they appear to offer pointers on what to busy oneself with as one undertakes being a leader or displaying leadership.

However, there is evidence from other fragments that such prescriptions could be turned around and used as a form of leadership inventory to evaluate the degree to which the respondent’s behaviours or doings meet these criteria in his or her daily practice. We wonder if evaluation, measurement and appraisal are the real subtext behind this competency movement. Our next text fragment appears as part of such an evaluative questionnaire.

• 4. I lead my people by example.*

○ A

○ F

○ S

○ R

• 5. I have the leadership skills and resources necessary to perform my tasks effectively.*

○ A

○ F

○ S

○ R

[surviving fragment of leadership competency assessment]

If this evaluative intent is a significant one, then at this point we need to ask where all the different competencies come from and how they might relate to each other. In asking this, we are really inquiring how the different competency descriptors came to have a place in the leadership map and even beyond that the overall leadership landscape. We assume, but don’t actually fully know, that researchers played some role in this partnership, perhaps with leadership practitioners and ‘mapping’ experts who we understand were generally called consultants. If our assumption is correct, then how do combinations of researchers, consultants and practitioners succeed in identifying the features that made a difference in and only in leadership, but not say in management or, more generally, processes of work? Furthermore, how are the different features (ingredients) meant to combine with each other? How were such dynamics and relationships verified empirically, derived conceptually and embedded across collective endeavour? There are so many questions that the passage of time thoroughly complicates.

The lists of competencies of course do not reveal their origins. However, their widespread use over the twenty-first century suggests a widespread trust in them and their analytical potential to function as maps for navigating the terrain of leadership. They seem to have been valued in num...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Revealing, Reframing, Reimagining
• Part II Unravelling, Disentangling, Refashioning
• Part III Discarding, Deconstructing, Starting Again
• Index