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.