The event’s the thing: Brief encounters with the leaderful moment
Martin Wood, University of York
Donna Ladkin, University of Exeter
Where does leadership take place? What constitutes the ‘leaderful moment’; those instants when our quotidian routines are transformed into a wonderfully creative vision, some dynamic action, or the possibility of a more meaningful future? When trying to answer these questions the literature typically starts with one of two underlying fallacies. Either, (1) it puts forward the idea that leadership can be reduced to an individual psychology, or else (2) it tries to find the connection between ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ where the approach is usually to consider these two ‘things’ as isolated or set apart. But leadership may not be explained adequately by the simple occurrence of fixed forms. We propose to retreat from the obviousness of these points as the sources of leadership and expand toward the panoply of relationships, animate as well as inanimate, that we would ordinarily tend to bypass. We argue these may in fact turn out to be a more satisfactory expression of the leaderful moment than designated points. This opens up the possibility of different choice points, both in terms of interpretations that contribute to a mood of possibility for ‘leadership’ without ‘leaders’, but also in terms of actions, which all those involved in creating a leaderful moment might take.
In the paper we consider leadership through the philosophical concepts of ‘process’ and ‘event’, as theorised substantively – though not exclusively – by Whitehead (1978) and Deleuze (1994). Noting both the overlaps and differences we propose that understanding leadership as an event brings into focus and renders discussable the familiar yet usually unnoticed the background flow of routinised activity contributing to a sense of the leaderful moment. In this way we aim to widen our appreciation of leadership as a moment immediately perceived, rather than as embedded within a singular person, or, as an essential ‘thing’ that can be simply located between designated people. By doing so we can bring added depth to our understanding of the leadership phenomenon. This gives us potentially a more complex way of understanding both the possibilities of leadership and its limitations. But we also want to study such events by drawing attention to the ruptures, instabilities and qualitative differences that make the everyday world change in unpredictable ways, where the accent falls on becoming, never on being, on transformations rather than on stability.
How might leadership be researched from this perspective? We present here empirical research conducted into people’s experience of paying attention to the process by which leadership occurs. Building on developments in other areas into the role and utility of visual sense making as a methodology for looking at interactive events (Belova, 2006; Berger, 1972; Warren 2002) we present recurring themes and insights and suggest further work consistent with these ideas offers an innovative and useful line of inquiry, both by extending our theoretical understanding of leadership as an event, but also because of the epistemological and methodological challenges such a study invites.
References
Belova, O. (2006) The event of seeing: A phenomenological perspective on visual sense-making. Culture and Organization, 12(2), 93-107.
Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin.
Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition. London: Athlone Press.
Warren, S. (2002) ‘Show me how it feels to work here’: Using photography to research organizational aesthetics. Ephemera 2(3), 224-245.
Whitehead, A.N. (1978) Process and Reality. D.R. Griffin and D.W. Sherburne (eds.). New York: Free Press.