Complexity and Leadership

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.

"I have studied and taught leadership for many years, yet I have growing doubts that what I’ve learned is up to the challenges we face. I found my experience of reading this book to be both profoundly disruptive and surprisingly freeing to my perspective on leadership. It has brought me a renewed sense of curiosity and hope to my work."Dan Leahy, Leadership Development Specialist, Waypoint Leadership Consulting, Kirkland, WA, USA "This is a meaningful and timely inquiry about the ways in which we engage with the concept of leadership. The authors lean into the tensions of traditional leadership education with a lens towards the social and collective agreements that are leadership in practice. An interesting exploration of leadership when context, complexities and relational constructs are essential to the experience."Erica Montemayor, Associate Director, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA"'The future ain't what it used to be' – never was American satirist Yogi Berra's quip as relevant as it is to our current age. A global swirl of change, ranging from the digital revolution through to geopolitics, is invading almost every area of our lives. This volume is an indispensable guide to the dilemmas and possibilities of leadership in the context of these complexities, informed both by theory and practice."Anthony Giddens, Member of the House of Lords and Life fellow of King's College, Cambridge, UK"The picture of contemporary leadership is complex, and this volume wonderfully captures this complexity providing valuable insights into the practice of leading people in organizations. The contributors to this book avoid simple recipes and platitudes about leadership, and instead they question the myth of truly harmonious relations between organizational actors. A really engaging bottom-up and participatory approach to research."Sabina Siebert, Professor of Management, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, UK"If you feel disappointed by literature that idealizes leadership, and if you cannot entirely recognize your own experiences in literature that takes a critical stance towards the very idea of leadership, this book might become an important read for you … By reflecting on the processes of relating they are part of, and by reflecting a diversity of research literature, the authors offer nuanced reflections on the political nature of leadership, with a recognition of own intentions and engagement. As a result, leadership stands out as neither demonized nor idealized but described from within, yet with the critical distance the reflexivity has enabled."Henry Larsen, Associate Professor, Department of Entrepreneurship and Relationship Management, University of Southern Denmark

Kiran Chauhan is an organisational consultant at The King’s Fund, a health and care policy think tank in the UK. He is also a visiting lecturer at Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire, UK.Emma Crewe is Professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, UK. She is also a visiting professor at Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire, UK.Chris Mowles is Professor of Complexity and Management at Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire, UK.