(Complexity and Management)
by Kiran Chauhan (Editor), Emma Crewe (Editor), Chris Mowles (Editor)
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.
