Leading organisations in our contemporary world means grappling with unpredictability painful pressures and continual conflict all in the context of an acceleration in the pace of change. We expect the impossible from heroic leaders and they rarely live up to expectations. With countless recommendations self-help books and new concepts scholars and management consultants often simplify and dream unrealistically. This book challenges the more orthodox discourse on leadership and presents a way of thinking about leadership that pays closer attention to experience. The contributors in this book all senior managers or facilitators of leadership development resist easy solutions new typologies or unrealistic prescriptions. Writing about their experiences in Denmark the UK Israel Ethiopia South Africa and beyond they are less concerned with traits that people can possess and learn or magical promises of recipes for success and more with the socio-political process of the interaction between people from which leadership emerges as a theme. We focus on understanding leadership as a practice within which communication research imagination and ethical judgements are continuously improvised. So rather than idealising leadership or reducing it to soothing tools and techniques we suggest how leaders might become more politically emotionally and socially savvy. This book is written for academics and practitioners with an interest in the everyday challenges of both individual and group practices of formal and informal leaders in different types of organisations and is an ideal resource for executives and students on leadership development programmes. We hope this volume will help readers to expand the wisdom found in their own experience and discover for themselves and for others a greater sense of freedom. |Complexity and Leadership | Business