ConnectorMember

P a g e 1ILA 2015 CFP Now Open

P a g e 2Board Corner: Welcoming New Leaders into the ILA

P a g e 3 - 6ILA Launches New Book Series

P a g e 7 - 1 4Author Interview: How to Be a Positive Leader

P a g e 1 5 - 2 0Leadership and theHumanities: un an après

P a g e 2 1 - 2 3Rigor & Relevance II

P a g e 2 3Leadership Perspectives Webinar: Advancing Relational Leadership

P a g e 2 4Leadership Jobs

P a g e 2 5Public Leadership MIG News

P a g e 2 6Calendar of Leadership Events

OCTOBER 2014

Contents:

Learn more about submitting at: www.ila-net.org/conferences/2015

Now Open! Call for ProposalsILA 2015 Barcelona

The 2015 global conference theme: Leading Across Borders and Generations pushes a challenging question forward: How can leaders around the world develop even better competencies to guide global citizens towards a positive understanding of mental and physical borders and the ways in which they may or might be crossed that are mutually beneficial for both sides? Borders separate mindsets and territories. The ability to see both sides of any border, to work across generations, and to create understanding and collaboration opens immense opportunities for the development of people, organizations, and the common good.

The 17th Annual International Leadership Association Global Conference aims to bring together practitioners and scholars, students and educators, businesswomen and men, and nonprofit professionals and social entrepreneurs from all generations, many nations,and paths of life. We gather to listen, to help deepen understanding, and to engage in open minded dialogue for the greater good of the global community. We will strive to jointly think about leadership, leaders, and the processes of leading across borders, seeing the new ways of viewing leadership as opportunities, not threats.

Join the conversation. Submit your proposal by February 1, 2015 and plan to collaborate, connect, and create with others in the leadership field October 14-17 at ILA 2015 held at the Barcelona International Convention Center (CCIB), Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

by Michael Brandenburg, 2015 Global Conference Chair, IESE Business School, University of Navarra

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ILA Board CornerWelcoming New Leaders into the ILA

By Scott J. Allen, Chair, Board Development Committee; Associate Professor of Management, John Carroll University

As leadership educators, practitioners and scholars, each of you understands the importance of board recruitment, orientation, and development. I am pleased to report the results of our work to find the next generation of men and women who will advance the International Leadership Association in 2015 and beyond.

The Board voted to appoint Georgia Sorenson to the position of emeritus on the Board of Directors. This decision was made to recognize her long-standing support and commitment to the ILA. Janis Balda, Martin Fitzgerald, and Ira Chaleff were each re-elected to a second, three-year term. Officer elections included Janis Balda to the position of Board Treasurer and Katherine Tyler Scott to the position of Board Chair.

Please welcome our three newly elected board members who begin their terms in 2015: Aldo Boitano (Chile), Éliane Ubalijoro (Canada/Rwanda), and Rens van Loon (The Netherlands). Our three new board members represent the Board’s commitment to recruiting a board of men and women that represent our global priorities as an organization. Learn more about the experience they bring to the board in the following biographical snapshots. Finally, we would like to recognize and thank for their past service Kathryn Gaines, outgoing Board Treasurer Margie Nicholson, and outgoing Board Chair, Gama Perucci. Each has played a crucial role in our progression as an organization.

The process of recruiting, orienting, and developing our board never ends. We will begin the process anew in 2015, so please be on the lookout for announcements starting in April 2015.

Aldo Boitano is a professor of MBA at Universidad de Chile and is the executive director of Executive Development, providing in-company tailor made world-class executive education programs and workshops. He has more than 20 years of experience in top management positions. Until March 2014, he was the CEO of Vertical Chile organizing leadership ventures into Africa, Patagonia, and Antarctica for such prestigious programs as the Wharton Business School, MIT-Sloan, NYU-Stern, and others. Vertical’s programs were previously spotlighted in the April 2009 and November 2013 Member Connector newsletters.

Éliane Ubalijoro, chair of ILA 2013 in Montréal, Canada, is a professor of practice for public and private sector partnerships at McGill University’s Institute for the Study of International Development where her research interests focus on innovation in global health and sustainable development. Éliane teaches and advises in Leadership programs to help equip executives in international development with tools that support inner and outer sustainable transformation towards global prosperity. She has been a member of the Presidential Advisory Council for Rwandan President Paul Kagame since its inception in September 2007.

Rens van Loon is Director Human Capital - Organisation, Change & Leadership, and Member of the Global Strategic Change & Organization Transformation at Deloitte Consulting B.V. in The Netherlands. His team works on realizing change in individual leaders, teams, and organizations as a whole, utilizing a dialogic approach where reflection is central to supporting new insights and action. He has extensive experience in the realm of leadership development in the C-suite and describes himself as being highly motivated by the question: What makes a good, effective, and authentic leader?

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ILA Launches New Book Series

By Karen A. Longman, Azusa Pacific University & Susan R. Madsen, Utah Valley University

Despite lots of talk about having a shared commitment to advancing more women into senior-level leadership across all types of organizations and institutions, progress has been discouragingly slow. In a new book series, “Women and Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice,” launched by the International Leadership Association in concert with Information Age Publishing, provocative questions are being asked about the status quo, encouragers and discouragers to women’s leadership advancement, what strategies are working, and whether or not the “pipeline” is a helpful metaphor for addressing the challenges that still confront high-potential women.

This series and the five books currently under contract emerged, in part, from collaborations established through ILA’s Women and Leadership Affinity Group, a network that currently includes nearly 1,000 members. We have the privilege of working with series co-editor Faith Ngunjiri (Concordia College, MN) to shape and guide the development of books across an array of topics such as women and global leadership, advancing women in leadership through applied theory building, and (mis)representations of women leaders and managers in the media. The first book in the series, Women & Leadership in Higher Education, has the distinction of having a Foreword written by Warren Bennis, perhaps one of this leadership guru’s final contributions prior to his death in 2014. His words express the timeliness and the potential of this first book, and the series as a whole:

In reading these chapters I found myself thinking that, for too long, we have assumed that the male-normed models of leadership development would work to inspire and prepare high-potential women to move into institutional leadership roles. Simply put, our attempts to put new “wine” into “old wineskins” has not worked…. As a leadership scholar who has had a front row seat to the evolution of the leadership field for more than 50 years, I want to say ‘thank you’ to the International Leadership Association for supporting this new “Women and Leadership” book series.

In introducing the series to the ILA membership, this article provides an overview of the first volume, which intentionally targeted the crucially important topic of leadership in the field of higher education. As Bennis observed in his Foreword, “The focus on higher education in launching the series is both timely and critical. Those involved in

ILA Members, purchase your copy of this volume for only $24 plus shipping/handling. USE DISCOUNT CODE: ILAWL at checkout.

Go to www.infoagepub.com/products/Women-and-Leadership-in-Higher-Education

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higher education, and particularly those who lead institutions of higher education, shape the future in ways that directly influence the vitality and well-being of the United States and our world.”

Our goal in this first volume, and throughout the series, has been to lay out the current realities facing women in leadership across a variety of sectors and spheres of influence, while also offering fresh perspectives and strategies for diversifying the leadership of organizations and institutions worldwide. Clearly, too many women who could develop into highly talented leaders find their potential dampened by an array of internal and external factors. Much work remains to be done, but it must be done by informed scholars and practitioners who think creatively, no longer bound by male-normed assumptions and programming. Drawing together such fresh thinking and building upon the work of well-respected research, Women & Leadership in Higher Education focuses particular attention on the status of women in college and university leadership in North America. Given that the majority of students at all levels—from associate degrees through doctorates—are female in this region, it is important that all students have role models in senior-level leadership, and that our institutional decision-making benefit from having diverse perspectives around the senior leadership table. Thus, various chapters describe the experiences and contributions of women in those leadership roles, offering strategies and best practices for opening more doors for women to serve in positions of influence across all sectors of higher education.

2nd ILA WOMEN & LEADERSHIP AFFINITY GROUP CONFERENCE

Advancing Women in Leadership: Waves of Possibility

June 7 – 10, 2015 | Asilomar Conference Grounds | California

Keynote Speakers:

Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda (R) General Secretary, World YWCA

Betsy Myers (L) Founding director, Center for Women and

Business, Bentley University

Visit www.ila-net.org/WLC/WLC15 for details.Registration opens December 15. Contact Bridget Chisholm at

bchisholm@ila-net.org or +1.202.470.4818 x103 to sponsor.

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Women & Leadership in Higher Education is divided into four sections as described below, each of which offers distinctive contributions to move the agenda of constructively advancing more women into leadership. In short, we believe that the status quo is unacceptable, that organizations and institutions lose when high-potential women are not encouraged, prepared, and supported regarding leadership advancement, and that fresh thinking as well as new strategies are needed in order to move organizations and our world forward in healthier ways.

Part I: The State of Women and Leadership in Higher EducationAs widely-respected business leader Max DePree has advocated, the first job of any leader is to define reality. The first section of Women & Leadership in Higher Education contains three provocative chapters designed to do just that, establishing the current demographics, trends, and areas of concern. In recent years, many of us have cited gender-related data from the 2009 report titled The White House Project: Benchmarking Women’s Leadership, which overviewed the demographics of women in leadership across ten sectors of U.S. society. Authored by University of Denver scholars Lynn M. Gangone and Tiffani Lennon, the opening chapter of Women & Leadership in Higher Education provides an updated (2013) snapshot of the demographic realities of leadership in U.S. higher education in a chapter titled Benchmarking Women’s Leadership in Academia and Beyond.

The book then moves into two additional insightful chapters. The second chapter, authored by Barbara Kellerman (Harvard Kennedy School) and Deborah L. Rhode (Stanford Law School), is titled Women at the Top: The Pipeline Reconsidered. This chapter offers a “sobering assessment” of the underrepresentation of women in higher education leadership. In short, although the pipeline metaphor has been the assumed solution to expanding the number of women in leadership, the pipeline has proven to be a “pipe dream.” Because the playing field continues to be far from level, fresh thinking must be taken including challenging the gender stereotypes, in-group favoritism, and unequal domestic roles that continue to keep women from realizing their full potential.

If the pipeline metaphor is not working for women, what’s wrong with that model? Nannerl O. Keohane, former president of Wellesley College and Duke University, addresses that challenge in the book’s third chapter, Leadership Out Front and Behind the Scenes: Young Women’s Ambitions for Leadership Today. Keohane explores the attitudes toward leadership of contemporary female undergraduates, drawing from the results of a 2011 study she chaired at Princeton University. She found that Princeton students preferred “high impact” rather than “high profile” jobs, resulting in the recommendation that a more capacious understanding of leadership is needed.

Part II: Strategies for Women’s Leadership DevelopmentThree informative chapters then summarize the learning gained by some of the best-established women’s leadership development programming in the U.S., offering counsel to others who are working on the same agenda at the institutional, state, regional, or national level. The first chapter, authored by Leah Witcher Jackson Teague (Associate Dean of the Baylor Law School) and Kim Bobby (Director of the Inclusive Excellence Group at the American Council on Education), is titled American Council on Education’s IDEALS for Women Leaders: Identify, Develop, Encourage, Advance, Link, and Support. These co-authors provide an overview of programming offered through ACE and discuss the comprehensive Moving the Needle Initiative, a collaborative effort to raise national awareness of the importance of gender parity and to establish a blueprint for achieving gender parity throughout higher education.

The findings of comprehensive assessments of women’s leadership development programming offered to more than 5,000 women through the Higher Education Resource System (HERS) are described in a chapter by Judith White, Executive Director of HERS. Titled HERS at 50: Curriculum and Connections for Empowering the Next Generation of Women Leaders in Higher Education, this insightful chapter includes guidance on curricular and pedagogical approaches that will best prepare women to lead effectively in future years. Similarly, a chapter authored by Lorri Sulpizio, coordinator of the Women’s Leadership Academy (WLA) in the School of Leadership, and titled Developing

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Women’s Leadership: An Innovative and Unique Approach to Raising Leadership Capacity, offers fresh thinking on what women need to understand (e.g., the distinction between leadership and authority) and embrace (e.g., finding a balance between feminine and masculine expression) as they consider moving into leadership roles. The innovative and unique approach to leadership development taken by the WLA programming has important implications for anyone designing or implementing leadership training for women.

PART III: Women’s Experiences and Contributions in Higher Education LeadershipHighly-regarded leadership scholar Adrianna Kezar, from the University of Southern California, provides a service to the field in her chapter titled Women’s Contributions to Leadership and the Road Ahead. Drawing from her extensive knowledge of the literature, these pages offer a compelling argument for the importance of leadership that reflects mutual power and influence processes, attention to relationships and tasks, and democratic and participatory forms of decision-making. Kezar notes that the pressures currently facing higher education result in institutional environments being increasingly corporate and market-driven, and thus not particularly receptive to the important leadership approaches typical of women.

In addition to offering Kezar’s excellent summary of the literature regarding women’s contributions to leadership, three chapters summarize recent dissertation research about the experiences that women face in higher education leadership. Amy Diehl, from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, authored a chapter titled Approaches of Women Leaders in Higher Education: Navigating Adversity, Barriers, and Obstacles. Based on interviews with 26 women in senior leadership roles in higher education, this chapter presents Diehl’s findings to the research question: “How do women leaders in higher education make meaning of adversity?” Another chapter drawn from dissertation research, authored by Rita Gardiner from the University of Western Ontario, is titled Women Leaders, Authenticity, and Higher Education: Convictions and Contradictions. Gardiner’s fresh thinking explores the interconnections among women’s leadership experiences in higher education, authenticity, and an ethic of care. The final chapter in this section also explores the lived experiences of female presidents at doctoral-granting universities. Titled Madame President: Gender’s Impact in the Presidential Suite, author Mary L. Bucklin from Northern Kentucky University found that these leaders experienced their work in ways different than men due to role incongruity. In short, these university presidents indicated that they continued to be judged—but took intentional steps to lessen the impact of that judgment—against the stereotypical model of how women should look, speak, and behave.

Part IV: Lessons from the Trenches: Perspectives from Female PresidentsFive former or current college and university presidents round out the book by offering honest and compelling insights about their leadership experiences. Current and aspiring leaders—within higher education and beyond—can gain much from the reflections of these seasoned role models. The breadth of perspectives offered from their presidential experiences, from the University of Arizona, Rollins College, the University of Texas-Brownsville, the University of South Florida, The Ohio State University, and the University of Massachusetts-Boston, offer readers a treasure-trove of sound advice and inspiration.

Conclusion: Given the state of the world, new models for leadership are needed now more than ever before. Women’s approaches to leadership have much to offer, yet too often women have not been at the table to bring the diversity of perspective that contributes to sound decision-making. Those who have invested in this publishing project are hopeful that having the facts presented, respecting the best of what women have to offer, and identifying thoughtful models for leadership development will contribute to a more sane and constructive future for this generation and those to come.

We invite you to submit your chapter proposal to

volume 5 of Women and Leadership

Gender, Media, and Organization: Challenging Mis(s)Representations of

Women Leaders and Managers

Deadline: November 15th, 2014View Complete Submission Details

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Jane E. Dutton & Gretchen M. Spreitzer, Eds. (2014, Berrett-Koehler)

How to Be a Positive Leader: Insights from Leading Thinkers on Positive Organizations

Jane E. Dutton is the Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Professor of

Business Administration and Psychology at the University of Michigan. She does

research, teaches, and works with organizations on issues related to how

to bring out the best in employees and in organizations. She studies and writes about how people build high quality connections, how people craft their jobs, compassion at work (www.thecompassionlab.com) and

how people construct self-identities that are strengthening. She is a co-founder of the

Center for Positive Organizations (www.centerforpos.org) at the

Ross School of Business.

Gretchen Spreitzer is the Keith E. and Valerie J. Alessi Professor of Business Administration

at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and a core faculty

member of the Center for Effective Organizations (positiveorgs.bus.umich.

edu). Her research focuses on employee empowerment and leadership development, particularly within a context of organizational

change and decline. Her most recent research is examining how organizations

can enable thriving. Based on extensive field research, she has authored many articles

and books including The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship (2011)

with Kim Cameron.

Our guest interviewer, Kathryn Goldman Schuyler, has over 25 years experience

in leadership development, organizational consulting, and somatic learning. She is a professor of organizational psychology

at Alliant International University and has published widely on leadership

and change. She is the author of Inner Peace-Global Impact: Tibetan Buddhism, Leadership, and Work (2012), and is the

lead editor of the ILA’s Leading with Spirit, Presence, and Authenticity. In additional

to her work with organizations, she teaches children and adults with moderate

to severe neuro-motor challenges to move, learn, and live well.

KATHRYN: Good morning Gretchen and Jane. I’m delighted to talk with you today about your book How to Be a Positive Leader and the work of the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) at the University of Michigan and CompassionLab. Let’s start with the book. What inspired the writing of this book, and why this book now?

GRETCHEN: There were a lot of reasons. We felt like we had enough research evidence to make a compelling case about positive leadership. What does a leadership practice look like that attracts people to want to create something better? We also found in our teaching on the topic of leadership that our students wanted something more. Millennial students, characteristically, desire

work with more meaning and more purpose. They want a leadership model with more flexibility, and they want to have closer connections with colleagues and with subordinates. Our students were hungry to learn about how to be a positive leader.

JANE: Another reason why we were inspired to write the book now comes from the scientific developments from neuroscience. Neuroscience is providing evidence that we are actually hardwired to serve others almost more than we are hardwired to serve ourselves. My favorite book of the year is Social by Matthew Lieberman, a top social neuroscientist. The punch line of the book is that our brains and bodies are hardwired for the social world in a very pro-social kind of way.

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So, I think there is a readiness for our perspective on positive leadership, which rests on core assumptions about the importance of prosocial motivations that are backed by this growing foundation of neuroscience.

In addition, being part of the Center has convinced us of how deeply useful this positive leadership perspective is to a wide range of practitioners. It’s pragmatically optimistic. Even in the face of criticism around positive perspectives, our own experiences with both our research and teaching have convinced us that small moves make a difference. We see over and over again that altering how people see possibilities in themselves, in others, in their team, and in whole organizations is often transformative. So I think we knew from our lived experience that this perspective on leadership makes a difference. What excited me about the book was just being able to give people, via the chapters, a variety of places to start in their own exploration of these opportunities.

Our location in Michigan in the U.S. during the recession was also a factor. Our perspective on positive leadership was birthed in an under-resourced time, at least where we are living locally. We are teaching all the time and dealing with practitioners who are in very resource-constrained positions. I feel like we have had a living field test on a daily basis here and have witnessed that this kind of perspective can be deeply emancipatory for people. It gets people started in ways that may grow to be transformative. Each chapter in the book gives you a place to start where you can, in your own practice, make small moves and see the difference that it makes.

What is a Positive Leader?

KATHRYN: People have so many different ideas of what positive leadership is—some of it not so positive. But when people are “debunking” it, they may not be “debunking” what you are actually talking about. Can you sum up your views for readers? What is the positive approach? What is a positive leader?

JANE: First let me say that the critical perspective is very important, in terms of asking major questions about who leaders are serving, and asking what are the possible unintended consequences of “positive”

practices. However, we have to be careful that critical perspectives do not diminish what people leading or people following think is possible. If the imagination for what is possible is dampened by the critical perspective then the critiques can be life-depleting as opposed to life-giving. The critical perspective, while really expanding lines of sight, may inadvertently deplete emancipatory possibilities rather than enrich them.

GRETCHEN: One angle on positive leadership is about unlocking hidden resources that are already within a system. Positive leaders are able to see where there are inherent strengths in a system, where there is potential that’s not being recognized. They are people who are able to look in any given system and find things that others can’t see. They come in with a different set of eyes. They don’t just look at the problems. They look at the strengths. They look at the possibilities and they envision what’s possible, not just what’s there and can be improved right now. That’s an important piece of the positive leadership puzzle.

Imagining Real Agency

JANE: It’s partly about seeing the possibilities that are currently in place in any system, but it is also about what some sociologists describe as prospective agency. So, it’s partly about the consequences of imagining real agency in the future. It is the simultaneity of seeing the possibilities in the present, while also being able to see and institutionalize different ways of thinking about the future in ways that provide returns in the present. The opening chapter talks about this with the idea of the zone of possibility. If what you are trying to affect is innovativeness or courage or resilience or whatever, it is about imaging that there is a frontier of possibility in the future. Changes that you might do today may not produce the same improvement rate that you imagined, but it will change it in a direction that you desire.

KATHRYN: By the way, when you mention sociology, back in 1968 I was in Paris during May 1968—the period known as les évènements. Students occupied the universities; workers took over factories; everybody was in the streets. And they began talking to one another, which is something that simply doesn’t happen in large cities like Paris. There were huge placards and

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writings on the walls that said soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible—be realistic, ask for the impossible—and pouvoir a l’imagination—power to the imagination, which is just what you’re saying! There are roots or streams and tributaries in your center’s action that come from different places. They aren’t directly connected with it, yet they all flow towards working for human flourishing and liberation.

It also relates to what the ILA has been doing. The last two volumes in ILA’s Building Leadership Bridges series have been The Embodiment of Leadership (2013), edited by Lois Melina, and Leading with Spirit, Presence, and Authenticity (2014), which I edited. Although neither book is explicitly related to your center or positive leadership, there is resonance between them.

GRETCHEN: I think that’s a really good point. There is so much going on right now that makes for fertile ground. I just had a conversation earlier today with somebody who is working with the B Team, a group of global leaders—including Richard Branson and Ariana Huffington—who have formed a nonprofit whose mission is “to catalyse a better way of doing business for the wellbeing of people and the planet.” They are looking at the role of business to provide good jobs that are truly developmental and not just jobs that meet basic needs. They are very interested in health outcomes and well-being outcomes in the workplace and in human agency in the workplace to address human rights.

So I think, Kathryn, what you’re saying is right. There are a lot of people who have a voice in this area, so our challenge is how to connect with these kindred spirits. This is part of the purpose of our Center for Positive Organizations (positiveorgs.bus.umich.edu/) and part of the purpose of the Ross School of Business. Our dean, Alison Davis-Blake, has made positive business our school’s mission or vision. To this end, we had our first interdisciplinary conference on Positive Business in May, 2014. We had 350 attendees, practitioners, and academics from around the world. It focused on how businesses can be a positive force for good in the world. It’s exciting because there are a lot of people working on different angles, but we’re really working toward the same purpose.

2015 Award ($5,000) for Best Paper in POSDeadline December 1, 2014http://positiveorgs.bus.umich.edu/awards/pos-research-awards/

The purpose of the award is to recognize outstanding scholarship in POS and to encourage research in this growing field. This award carries a $5,000 (USD) prize plus paid expenses to the POS Research Conference in Florida (see below). The recipient is expected to give an invited talk the first evening of the conference, based on the article that wins the award.

POS Research ConferenceJune 23-24, 2015 | Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort, Lake Buena Vista, Floridahttp://POSResearchConference.com

Presented by the Michigan Ross Center for Positive Organizations, this biennial gathering of top scholars features developmental research sessions geared toward building the next generation of POS research. Join in as participants share and advance qualitative and quantitative research in the field.

CALL FOR ABSTRACTSDeadline December 1, 2014On Day-2 of the research conference there will be multiple research papers presented in 12 different research tracks. The research tracks will be hosted by 12 different content curators. Authors of POS research papers are invited to submit a 1-page, single- spaced abstract for potential presentation.

Positive Business ConferenceMay 14-15, 2015 | Ann Arbor, MichiganU of M Ross School of Businesshttp://positivebusinessconference.com

The second annual Positive Business Conference, will bring together the diverse perspectives of business professionals, academics, students, and industry luminaries. The conference sessions will cover practical examples of positive business practices being implemented, as well as workshops based on the cutting-edge research underlying the practices.

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KATHRYN: If we talked more to one another as we do our own different things, we could create more resonance. The world is so big to influence. It’s quite a challenge.

Assumptions About Human Nature

GRETCHEN: Getting back to your original question of what is positive leadership, I want to bring in the critical perspective again. We were having a conversation recently with some of our faculty and we asked: What can we learn from the critical perspective to help us move our work forward? What assumptions do we have of human nature? Do we have an assumption that people are self-interested? Is there an assumption that employees need to be protected from potential exploitation by management to prevent being taken advantage of? We design organizations with many rules and procedures to try to minimize deviation, ensure compliance, and reduce the potential for self-interest. If we make a different assumption and instead assume that human nature is good and that people are hungry to grow and get better, then our design changes. Instead of designing to reduce deviation or errors or problems, we design for how to bring out the very best in people and for how to create systems that generate more deviance—positive deviance—where people can bring their full selves to work, their passions, and their energy. We are always trying to learn from different perspectives about how to design organizations to bring out the best in people to make a positive difference in the world.

KATHRYN: I can imagine an interesting visual of the two. Perhaps instead of a bar with two ends and a middle road, there is a triangle. For me, I don’t want to identify with either being critical or positive. My identification—to the extent I have one—is with a way of being sometimes called open awareness. It has to do with just experiencing the nature of how things actually are without judgment, grounded in an underlying view that we’re all interconnected at a very deep, very positive—though it’s not labeled as positive—level. It is fundamentally about being present. Perhaps we will create a way of thinking that lets us see choices beyond being either positive or critical.

I want to go back into something that is quite concrete about the book. The overall structure of the book is really elegant. That was one of the things that I noted initially and that I appreciated more and more as I went through it.

JANE: I love that word - elegant. I’m surprised you used it to describe the book structure, but I love it! A big aha for us was the decision a priori to have four different leadership action domains and to put the chapters into these four different buckets: fostering positive relationships, unlocking resources from within, tapping into the good, and creating resourceful change. They each provide a different gateway into what a leader might term opportunities for making a positive difference and opportunities for expanding capacities for excellence. Due to our work at the center, teaching, giving talks, and being part of these conversations for

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a long time, as soon as we created them, we knew that, “oh yeah, that fits. That’s the way to organize it.” These felt like four buckets that had integrity and that went together. And the cool thing was that we knew people who were doing work in each of those domains. In fact, we knew more people than we could put in the book. We could have added many more chapters, but we were constrained by the number of pages that we could use while remaining under our price point.

GRETCHEN: We wanted a book that would be accessible to many, including students in the classroom, so we wanted it to be priced under $20.

JANE: Price point was a biggie for us because we wanted people to be able to use it for classes. I’ve done a number of edited books before and they were prohibitively expensive. They are not oriented towards practice. Another important thing to realize with the structure of the book was what we learned from our community of practice at Michigan, particularly from our colleague Kim Cameron. He had published two books on positive leadership before this one, and we learned from watching Kim struggle with how to map the terrain of new opportunities that a positive organizational scholarship perspective brings to the table.

Making the Book Useful

GRETCHEN: We began discussions with our publisher Berrett-Koehler saying that we really wanted a book that would speak to practice and be accessible to a larger audience than the traditional academic book. They were concerned about doing an edited book, something they don’t do very often, because they find edited books can be a bit hodgepodge. There is little consistency across the chapters. That led Jane and me to think about how to structure the book in a way that would be useful to readers, whether they were practitioners, thought leaders in the realm of leadership, or students in a classroom.

Our answer was to have a similar structure in each chapter. In each chapter, the first part puts forward why the reader should care about that leadership topic. We wanted to embed research findings so the claims are

evidence-based. The next two sections in each chapter contain the how-to parts, consistent with the title of the book - How to Be a Positive Leader. The first section helps illustrate how the reader can do what’s being talked about for himself or herself as a leader. The second contains a set of strategies for leaders detailing how they can do more of each particular topic for their organizations. It has that dual lens focused on strategies to improve the self and strategies to improve the organization. Finally, we wanted to have a real-world example as well, a leader who we think exemplifies this approach. So the last section in each chapter was a mini-case to bring the ideas to life in a real world scenario. That was the structure that we worked hard to ensure each of the authors followed. This really lends itself to teaching and also to being used in a book group. At my daughter’s former preschool, for example, at each of their weekly meetings the teachers and staff are using a chapter to help with their own development as a group. Having that consistent structure across the chapters allows them to use it effectively for their own development.

JANE: Something that also helped was that Gretchen and I began the process by each writing a sample chapter. Then we had the publishers, who are practitioners, read them and make suggestions on how we could improve them. When we asked people to write, we had models that we gave each author to help structure what they should do for their chapter. Having this structure and those examples in place helped to unleash people. Most of the people we asked to write a chapter hadn’t written anything like this before. At the end we also hired an editor to edit all of the chapters in order to give a coherent voice to the book as a whole. Added together, all of these things that we did in the process of constructing the book may explain the elegance.

KATHRYN: You certainly did it well. I think it’s a real challenge to bring in research and make it simple and have it be vivid. It’s very hard to do. Since many of our colleagues may wish to try something similar, do you have any lessons learned that you can share? It’s certainly a different style of writing from writing for a scholarly journal.

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GRETCHEN: Yes, that’s right. One thing people will notice is that there are no citations in the chapters. That was done on purpose so it wouldn’t have that academic feel to it. Originally there were a lot more footnotes in the chapters linking to the research. Then, when we had our Author Day at Berrett-Koehler, they pointed out that we had too many footnotes to be accessible for practitioners. So we had to go back to our authors and ask them to trim down their footnotes to those that were most core to the heart of their chapter.

JANE: Having Shawn Achor involved was also really helpful.

KATHRYN: He wrote the foreword.

JANE: Yes. He is such a popular author; he was quite important in helping to keep the price point of the book down. He was a wonderful asset for us throughout the whole book process. He is such an experienced communicator with companies and social media and was very generous in advising us, even though we did not know him beforehand. It was his idea, for example, to put tweets at the end of each of the chapters. There are three tweets at the end of each chapter that forced authors to crystallize the gems in their chapter. It was another way that we invited authors to see their work and what they were trying to do slightly differently.

Breathing Life into Organizational Studies

KATHRYN: That’s great food for thought. I want to go back a little further now beyond the realm of the book. You’ve both written about the importance of life and energy in organizational studies and organizations. This has obviously been important to each of you personally for quite a while. Can you share with us any important aha moments about how working on positive leadership has brought life to you?

GRETCHEN: That’s an interesting question.

JANE: I will start by saying that Gretchen is just like a living angel. I’m serious. She’s constantly looking at the good side. Personally, part of the life it has brought to me is the joy of working with Gretchen. Previously we had worked on some research projects in parallel, but it was really fun to do this. We both had a midwifery role in this where we were helping other people birth a different voice and a different way into their work. I think each one of us genuinely felt each author we worked with had gems to offer. Gretchen and I have different strengths, but we each have the lived experience of knowing how special this positive perspective has been for our own lives. At one point in the past I was going to leave academia, just leave the field. Being part of this conversation, the soil of this conversation, has been deeply life-giving to me personally.

KATHRYN: Many readers may not know your award-winning article, “Breathing Life into Organizational Studies” [Journal of Management Inquiry, 2003] and book chapter “One Scholar’s Garden: A Narrative of Renewal,” in Renewing Research Practice [Stanford Business Books, 2004]. Can you tell us a quick story of your life then?

JANE: The simple thing is, I made a conscious decision 20 years ago. I don’t even know why. I had in my little notebook—and this is terrible—these two columns with initials of people. In one column were people who, when I was with them, I was literally lit up. I was given life by my interactions with them. In the other column were people who were life-depleting. I just decided to try to minimize my exposure to the life-depleting and try to maximize my exposure to the life-giving. Gretchen was definitely one of those people who were life-giving. Dave Cooperrider and Peter Frost were also among those people. I found that I didn’t even have to interact with the life-giving people personally. If I read their work, it would literally change my body. At a very personal level, I had the experience of what a difference it makes to pay attention to high-quality connections in

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your own life. I was replenished. Hope was restored and I saw a new path where one could make a difference.

Part of my despair at the time was because I was pretty late in awakening to feminism. My lived experience as a faculty member and how that experience related to the fact that I was a woman—I just didn’t get it. It was classic. I kept thinking it was something wrong with me and not something wrong with this invisible structure confining me. When my first consciousness came, I was so angry and so defeated. I remember a pivotal conversation with Bob Quinn where he said, “You can construct it that way, in ways that are hopeless, but then you will be the victim. Or, you can be the change you want to be.” That way was much more liberating and fundamentally an act of leadership. I was reading in medicine about the effects of these quality relationships on your body. It’s not just a trick of the mind. There is actual bodily transformation happening when you see the possibility and the way it affects you, as opposed to seeing these structures that are permanently going to keep you down. That was the core of it.

KATHRYN: I completely understand, Jane. I literally got sick at one time in my career. I published an article about my experience, called “Practitioner Heal Thyself – Challenges in Enabling Organization Health,” in the Organization Management Journal in 2004. I was studying organizational health, focusing on Peter Frost’s writing on toxic handlers—administrators who become ill from handling other people’s stress in their jobs—and I went to a conference in England to present about it. It was so ironic: we actually had to reschedule the session because I got sick. It turned out—and I didn’t find this out until I got back to the United States—to be a very rare autoimmune disease that almost no one in the U.S. gets, and it has to do with the boundaries of one’s cells breaking down. How in the world I got something that didn’t let me sustain my boundaries down to the cellular level no one knows. No doctor knew. It manifested as a skin disease that looked really horrid.

Fortunately, I was able to cure it rather quickly. I read about it and decided that it had to do with stress so I left my administrative job. The doctor was shocked and said, “You didn’t have to do that.” And I said, “Yes, I did.” It was clear to me that my inability to

maintain boundaries in the skin—my boundary with the world—was a metaphor for an inability to maintain boundaries in my work. I let in too much that was stressful. So I resigned from the administrative job. I remember afterwards I was having a discussion on the phone related to that work and thinking to myself, “This makes my blood boil.” Think! If you’re boiling your blood, what is that going to do to you? I completely hear what you are saying when you talk about your experience being embodied, as I’ve experienced it too.

JANE: You sound like you had much wisdom in that situation. Gretch, what about you?

GRETCHEN: For me, it’s about creating those life-giving moments in our everyday work life. I was very interested in this idea of human thriving at work. But I was struck by the fact that most of the work on this was about how people bounced back from difficult situations like the one you just talked about, Kathryn, where you got this diagnosis and it’s life-changing. It wakes you up and you say to yourself, “I’ve got to do something different.” At that time, as I was reading this, I felt like I hadn’t had any difficult major life challenges. I worked hard, but life had been good. So I thought, while it’s good to help people bounce back and bounce better from difficult situations, how can we help people be in a mode where they can keep developing themselves and having courage to do new things even without there being a crisis situation? For me, that was the genesis of the thriving project, that idea of how do people grow, develop, and learn without necessarily doing it in the context of post-trauma. How do we proactively do these things in a way that allows us to stay on the edge or our game?

This brings me back to Jane’s story about wanting a different kind of academic life. The small actions that we talk about in this book are the kind of things that feel like they’re within the sphere of control for many of us. The question is: How do we redesign what we’re already doing? Or, using the words of job crafting, how do we craft things around the edges and think about small things that we could do that don’t require us to make huge changes like leaving one’s job or career in search of something better? How do I make small changes with regard, perhaps, to the people I’m choosing to work with, the topics I’m choosing to work

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on, or the way that I interact with my students that will make life worth living and allow me to thrive?

Small Moves Enable Thriving

KATHRYN: One of the ways to do that is through the energy audit.

GRETCHEN: Yes. For example, take our MBA students. They are under a lot of stress, get too little sleep, and often feel depleted. We can go into class and teach them about motivation and job design and leave them feeling even more depleted than ever. But, using something like the energy audit which I describe in my chapter on human thriving at work with Chris Porath, we help them look at the kinds of things they are already doing in their everyday lives and identify which things deplete them and which things give them energy. With this information, they can then begin to make small changes around the margins to bring more of the energizers into their everyday life and fewer of the de-energizers. They see, through the use of the energy audit, how they’re changing themselves over the course of the class to enable more thriving. It’s really fulfilling as a teacher to see this. Just making a few small changes around how they manage their energy can give them the courage and strength to really thrive during their time at Michigan. Small little things, small actions, can have big impacts.

JANE: Gretchen, that is such a beautiful story. It embodies what this is all about. We appreciate how constrained people are, either in their minds or actually in their situations, but a person can always make small moves that are going to change the trajectory. A possibility for yourself and others is an underlying theme in every chapter of the book. This is what I mean about emancipatory or empowering. It is a meta-point of the work.

Another important point about the work is being able to appreciate the possibilities from an organizational perspective. This isn’t just positive psychology and changing one individual at a time. We are not going to be able to see the changes we need in society at a fast enough rate unless we can scale up. We have to change gardens, not plants. We have to change the soil. The

potential impact is much greater if we can understand how organizations can facilitate and amplify conditions where people can grow and thrive. Organizational researchers have a huge responsibility to step up to the plate and see how organizations, and all the facets of organizations, can make a difference in this way.

GRETCHEN: I agree. That is what really distinguishes us from the positive psychologists. We’re taking it up to the organization level. In some cases, it’s just up to the team level, but most often it’s up to the organization level. It’s why we have the two sections in each chapter. One asking, what can leaders, or anyone, do to move themselves more along this trajectory of being a positive leader? The other asking, what can leaders do to change their systems? It’s the micro and the macro - the individual and the organization. They are both tied together. We have to change ourselves, as leaders, before or as we change the systems in our organizations. Otherwise, leaders run the risk of being hypocritical and creating an even more dysfunctional organization. The dual lens is really important. We don’t stop with the individual perspective. We add on the organizational perspective. But, both really have to work together.

I would add one final dimension. The principles in this book aren’t just about how to create a better organization. They can be useful in many different realms of life. We are not just trying to create positive organizations. We are trying to create positive communities and positive families. These things really work in a lot of different settings. There is so much demand for this. There’s a deep hunger for imagining workplaces and other institutions to be more life-giving.

KATHRYN: That’s very much the legacy that you are crafting and that you want to have out there in the world. Thank you both for your work and your time today. I’ve really enjoyed seeing the synergies in our work and talking with you.

JANE: Kathryn, we’re so thrilled to have met you through this. Thank you so much for taking the time to read the book and to ask us these questions and to listen so beautifully.

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ILA Members read the September 2014 issue of Leadership and the Humanities. Login at: https://ila.memberclicks.net/leadership-and-the-humanities

Leadership and the Humanities: un an après

By Antonio Marturano, Editor-in-Chief of Leadership and the Humanities; Leadership Department, Swiss School of Management, Rome

Editorial from Volume 2: Issue 2. Reprinted with permission of Edward Elgar

In Vingt Ans Après (Twenty Years After), Alexandre Dumas tells about the reunion of the three musketeers with D’Artagnan, in order to protect young King Louis XIV (Le Roi Soleil – The Sun King) and the doomed Charles I from their attackers. They were very tough times: the novel follows tragic events in France during La Fronde, during the childhood reign of Louis XIV, and in England near the end of the English Civil War, leading up to the victory of Oliver Cromwell and the execution of King Charles I. A characteristic of such a novel is that its author comes out on the side of the monarchy in general, or at least that the text often praises the idea of benevolent royalty.

The times in which we currently live are equally turbulent: Europe is experiencing its first political and economic crisis as a global community; corruption is exploding in every part of the world; despair (in the Mediterranean with the massacre of migrants from Syria and Africa) and war (in Ukraine) are just round the corner; and famine has not disappeared. Totalitarian winds are blowing from everywhere. It seems, however, that there is a lack of genuine leadership at every level; and that dominant social sciences leadership paradigms are in trouble or have even failed if they have not been integrated with lessons from other disciplines (Riggio 2011). In other words, we are living in a time similar to that in which Dumas was writing his novel: a turbulent age in which hegemonic culture in each field is indifferent to its methodological problems and its challenged outcomes. Yet mainstream social science leadership studies claims for itself an undisputed role as much as the Sun King claimed during the times in which Dumas’s novel took place.

Leadership and the Humanities crossed the finish line of its first year. We would like to offer some reflections triggered by the submissions we have received so far. They raise considerations on the interdisciplinary nature of leadership studies and on what I would call the ‘methodological problem’ (others have called it the ‘definition problem’). Before addressing those problems, I will disclose some facts about the journal.

SOME FACTS ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Since August 2012 to December 2013, Leadership and the Humanities received 56 papers. Submissions accepted for publication were only 12 (including this issue). Therefore the overall mortality rate for papers is about 79 percent: one out of every five papers submitted was good enough for publication in LATH. While the rate would seem impressive, it is something we did not choose; it is, rather, an outcome of the kind of papers submitted. Contrary to the journal mission, stated explicitly in the journal and on our webpage, most submitted papers nevertheless had a mainstream social science focus, and were not the kind of papers we were seeking. The majority of the rejections were due to the fact that the authors likely thought of LATH as a journal that arose in the wake of the most famous academic journals in the field (namely Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Leadership Studies, and Leadership). Indeed, we rejected some

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very sophisticated papers containing large sets of data, regardless of whether they were analysed under (old or new) qualitative or quantitative methodologies. Our purpose was not to be a pale replica of those leading journals, but a brand new, vibrant, and challenging forum in which scholars with a humanities-focused mind would offer their research, thoughts, and intuitions to leadership studies as an emerging discipline.

It is worth noting that the number of submissions with a social science focus has decreased since the beginning of 2014. What does this mean? After a year, it is likely LATH made its positioning clear within the roster of leadership journals by publishing high quality papers, humanities-related. No compromises for the sake of publishing were made.

Such successful inspiration—after much internal debate—is owed to Thomas J. Wren (former LATH co-editor), who made a fundamental contribution to the journal’s identity-building. Tom, as we usually name him, was a kind of compass for the journal. From his many years of experience, it was he who explained to us how to orient ourselves within the vast landscape of leadership studies. Tom has now retired, but has promised to provide detached yet continuous help with our endeavor to keep the journal lively. We are deeply grateful to Tom for his suggestions and support.

THE INTERDISCIPLINARY NATURE OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES

According to Riggio (2011), leadership studies is an emerging discipline, and he states: ‘I have every expectation that a generation from now leadership studies will be a recognized discipline and universities that do not have departments of leadership studies (or at least programs devoted to leadership) will be a minority’ (ibid., p. 9). Riggio then starts examining a bunch of theories regarding the very notion of ‘academic discipline.’ Interestingly, he examines the so called paradigm development approach as discussed by Thomas Kuhn (1962) in his famous and frequently cited book on scientific revolutions. Riggio makes a huge effort in explaining that leadership studies possesses many of the formal elements of an emerging discipline (journals, places of discussion such as conferences,

websites, and blogs, Library of Congress recognition, etc.) but does not talk about intra-disciplinary problems, including an excursus on how interdisciplinary fields become a new discipline. I will now say something more about this aspect, as it is intimately related not only to the interdisciplinary nature of leadership studies but also to future development within the discipline.

Apparently new disciplines stem from old disciplines (such as philosophy), or they are the result of a coagulation of different disciplines around a particular paradigm. While it is undisputed that Leadership has its conceptual roots in Greek philosophy (usually we refer to Plato’s Republic, Plutarch’s Lives, or Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics as the very first books in which the leadership phenomenon is analysed), it is somewhat difficult to find a continuity (as occurs in some empirical sciences) between those writings and contemporary leadership studies. The term ‘Leadership’ is indeed a relatively recent term (it emerges in the English language around the fourteenth century), and for this reason ancient leadership writings cannot be fully related with modern academic terminology; in Kuhn’s own terms they are incommensurable:1 there are fractures in the history of leadership studies that make old taxonomies in the discipline untranslatable into the lexicon that is actually available to leadership scholars.

We should turn our eyes to the more homogeneous contemporary field of leadership studies and focus our gaze on the interdisciplinary nature of the field. Coagulation of several approaches around a common paradigm is a normal trend when we look at the development of some sciences. Molecular biology started its development by attracting scholars from several disciplines: theoretical physics, medicine, biology, computer sciences, mathematics, and so on. Scholars agreed around a peculiar paradigm such as the DNA double-helix structure and what is called the central dogma of molecular biology.2 Once agreeing around a paradigm, scholars create a disciplinary identity and no established field can claim the primacy of the new one. This is one of the problems Riggio sees as a resistance to the establishment of leadership as a discipline. As he states, ‘several established disciplines claim leadership as their own—psychology, management, and, surprisingly, some in political

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sciences’ (Riggio 2011, p. 16). The reason for their claims is not analysed by Riggio.3

By contrast, Artificial Intelligence—another famously multidisciplinary field—did not find a paradigm around which those interested in the field could agree: failure of the Strong Artificial Intelligence paradigm and the subsequent failure of the Weak Artificial Intelligence paradigm (famously proposed in Searle 1980) led to a disciplinary abortion. As a result, Artificial Intelligence was absorbed into the field of Cognitive Sciences, while at the same time fragmenting into a myriad of tiny hyper-specialized sectors (such as planning and problem solving, synthetic intelligence, nanotechnology, etc.).

Different disciplines have different aims, definitions, and objects, and often different methodologies. No surprise that they tend to claim primacy on Leadership Studies. On the other hand, scholars interested in Leadership Studies should start a serious and collaborative debate over its disciplinary foundations if they wish Leadership Studies to follow the same path as Molecular Biology and become a true, established discipline. This is one of the reasons this journal was created.

THE METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEM

Here we reach another core problem affecting Leadership Studies, namely the ‘methodological problem.’ This term means a series of problems that are—from a methodological point of view—barely touched by leadership academics and scholars, with the notable exception of those with a philosophical education. The definition of the problem is the most known: what is leadership? What is a leader? Are we talking leadership from an ideal point of view or from a real point of view? From such fundamental questions stems another subset of foundational problems: how much weight should we give to leadership structures and personal leadership within Leadership Studies? In other words, is it more important to understand the structures of leadership than how to develop a leader? Do problems of democracy and egalitarianism in an organization have priority over the understanding of leaderful characteristics?

CALL FOR PAPERS

Leadership and the Humanities is a peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to advancing the understanding of, research on, and applications concerning leadership. The journal offers rigorous but readable scholarship on leadership from the broad field of the humanities, an increasingly popular locus for leadership studies. The journal publishes explorations of leadership from many disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, ethics, religion, history, psychology, arts, literature, drama, film, ancient and modern languages, classics, communication and media studies, anthropology, political science, and sociology. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged. The journal welcomes studies of leaders and leadership in many different settings, in fiction and art, and across different times, places, and cultures. This may include studies of formal as well as informal leaders, and it may focus on followers, organizations, and the context of leadership, or on symbolic representations and depictions of leadership. Research that stresses the diversity of leadership across gender, race, class, religion, and age is encouraged.

The journal publishes original papers including but not limited to the following fields:

• Philosophical approaches to leadership studies• History and leadership• Biography and leadership• Analytic psychology, psychoanalysis and leadership• Ethics and leadership• Cultural studies and leadership• Arts and leadership• Literature and leadership• Language (modern and ancient), linguistics and semiotics approaches to leadership• Communication studies and leadership• Religion and leadership• Anthropological approaches to leadership• Law and leadership• Political theory and leadership• Humanities education for leadership development

Authors are invited to submit articles of up to 9,000 words long (including footnotes) with 1-8 key words to LATHeditor@e-elgar.com.

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Another bunch of issues are related to the vast folk literature on leadership which has caught the attention of the general audience (Riggio (2011, p. 17) refers to them as a ‘plethora of popular trade books’) and in some cases are able to influence not only leadership practice but also leadership theory. Here I refer to bestsellers describing how some leaders happened to be leaders, or books written by disciplinary gurus. As many authors have underlined (for instance, see Gosling and Marturano 2005) in most of their popular books, authors start talking about how a leader actually performs and then imply that to be a successful leader you have to perform in much the same way. This implication, far from being clear-cut, is something of a logical or methodological hazard. The implication can be paralleled with the so-called Hume’s Law (or Hume’s guillotine), which famously warns about shifting from descriptive to normative. Inferring a normative sentence from a descriptive sentence is, according to David Hume, a fallacious move. Hume discusses the problem in book III, part I, section I of his book, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739 [2000]):

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.

Related to this problem is the normative/descriptive problem in Leadership; Joanne Ciulla famously developed this issue carefully in her seminal paper ‘Leadership Ethics: Mapping the Territory’ (Ciulla 1995).

Many observed that Leadership Studies is a leader-centered discipline. Scholars are more interested in leadership development than in structures of leadership conceived as a system of relations within an organization: on the one hand there is a leader and on the other hand there are followers; and according to the famous Peter Drucker (2001, p. 271) statement, ‘The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.’ Scholars (but not only they) have interpreted such statements as if substantial research into the ideal characteristics of leaders (that is, characteristics aimed at impressing and catching followers) would be the mainstream way to study Leadership. At the beginning of the Renaissance, astronomy and theology started detaching from each other; as a result, cosmology—that is, the study of the material structure and laws that govern the universe, conceived as an ordered set—has changed. Ptolemy in his Almagest created such a Cosmological Order by using ancient Greek writings. Roughly speaking, according to cosmology, there was a strict correspondence between astronomic order and human hierarchies. In this ordered set, humankind has a central place in the universe (as much as a leader has a central place in the ‘leadership cosmology’). Copernicus, to the contrary, formulated a heliocentric model of the universe which placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the center. The Copernican Revolution has collapsed the mainstream cosmology in which humankind was not at the center of the universe; such a revolution changed the hegemonic cultural weltanschauung, triggering the Renaissance, which, with Galilei’s works, has removed the solar system from its centrality in the universe by putting it on a par with countless other systems in the galaxy. During the Renaissance, the subsequent cosmological dethronement of humankind from a central place in the universe led first to a sense of bewilderment in common sense, but later triggered new and more fruitful paradigms in science, art, and literature. In a similar way, it would be interesting to explore whether studies on leadership—placing leaders as a

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central concept—would shift to the study on followers. Furthermore, leadership–followership relationships should be studied as one of the possible worlds in which such particular relationships may exist, putting emphasis on the complexity and co-existence of all the possible leader–follower relations in an organizational universe. At the end of the day, followers create a leader first, and then a leader should help followers to rise to the leadership level: this is possible only if leaders are selected by followers whose cultural habit is not driven by mere basic needs or selfish impulses, but from a mutual process that emphasizes higher content and long-term goals.

My previous remarks are a proposed humanities point of view agenda for Leadership Studies; a list of issues that would be welcomed as themes for future submissions to this journal, aimed at challenging mainstream research in Leadership Studies yet widening the philosophical or metatheoretical basis of the discipline.

PREVIEW OF THIS ISSUE’S ATTRACTIONS

Along the lines described above, Jon Aarum Andersen in this issue addresses a methodological problem regarding the neglected distinction between managerial and political leadership, which in literature is often conflated. The argument here is that leader, subordinates, and tasks are the properties that must exist for managerial leadership to exist. Political leadership, Andersen claims, contains the properties of leader, leader’s goals, and followers. The political leadership concept, the author argues, does not specify any tasks assigned to the followers. Linked to this, claims Andersen, there is a foundational problem to change leadership into philosophical questions, as many leadership questions are in fact ontological or epistemological problems.

Mark H. McVay’s paper describes Eugene V. Debs’s theory of discursive resistance within the Greenleaf servant–leader paradigm. Debs was an American union leader, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and five times the Socialist Party of America’s candidate for President of the United States. Through his presidential candidacies, as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists

living in the United States. Discursive resistance is a poststructuralist tactic that allows a leader to capitalize on the foundational beliefs of a culture or organization that form the basis for the prevailing narrative the leader seeks to contest. The leader’s alternative narrative may be utilized to challenge and perhaps defeat the prevailing discourse by exposing its contradictions and demonstrating that the new alternative discourse is really more consistent with the foundational beliefs of the culture or organization the leader is operating within. Looking at Debs’s words through a poststructural lens, according to McVay, allows us the privilege of another perspective on an important progressive American leader. This lens, the author claims, clarifies how leaders might utilize the tool of discursive resistance to change a dominant and oppressive narrative.

A quite contested concept today is that of Privacy. In an era of global and pervasive communication, it’s difficult to defend someone’s privacy as many institutions are interested in getting the most intimate and yet profitable data on an individual. In Terry L. Price’s paper, his main concern is with privacy claims that individuals have against other individuals. The focus of the author’s argument is on potential claims a leader might make to privacy. Moreover, the claims Price has in mind are not legal claims but, rather, moral appeals to the value of autonomy. Finally, the context for his argument is political leadership—although, as we shall see, his conclusions have implications for leadership in other contexts as well. Price claims that autonomy-based arguments for privacy do not apply with the same force in leadership contexts and, in fact, that they go in the opposite direction. By this claim, the author means that the value of autonomy does not support leaders’ appeals to privacy; instead, the autonomous choices of leaders (and followers) serve as the moral grounds for reductions in leader privacy. To make this argument, Mill’s analysis in On Liberty is considered. Could this be applied in leadership contexts to derive some special privacy protection for leaders? Price concludes that such an application ultimately fails. It does so because it ignores the special obligations that leaders have to followers and the ways in which private behavior can impede leaders’ ability to discharge these obligations.

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In a new section entitled ‘Poets on Poets’, we are honored to offer the thoughts on leadership of Jehanne Dubrow, one of the most important and prolific American poets and the winner of the Washington Writers’ Poetry Competition in 2009. She takes her cue from two-time Pulitzer recipient Richard Wilbur’s political poem, ‘For the Student Strikers.’ This poem was written in 1970, when students at Wesleyan University were boycotting classes in protest at the war and canvassing the neighboring city of Middleton, Connecticut—not then a particularly anti-war community. The leadership lesson we can get from that poem, according to Dubrow, is that the strikers are urged to listen to others, to empathize with those who are different, and to recognize the humanity in the opposition. Michael Harvey provides a lucid and thoughtful introduction to Dubrow’s piece.

Finally, Chrysavgi Sklaveniti reviews Doris Schedlitzki and Gareth Edwards’s 2014 book, Studying Leadership: Traditional and Critical Approaches. The book is grounded in the authors’ interest in provoking critical thinking in the study of leadership. Their aim is not only to present leadership, but also to recognize different theoretical, methodological, and geographical positions. In doing so, their readers are introduced to a clear message: to study leadership critically and apply their thinking in practice. The target audience for the book is leadership students and leadership educators. According to its reviewer, the complex field of leadership from a multitude of perspectives is presented successfully in the book; indeed, for students, the book is an efficient introduction to the main topics and dilemmas in leadership, while for educators it is a valid guide that will initiate the conversation with students about leadership without imposing a particular perspective or agenda.

I believe that, once again, this issue of Leadership and the Humanities is successful in providing a rich variety of contributions to all readers interested in new and fresh ideas in the field.

NOTES

1. According to Oberheim (2005, p. 365), ‘Kuhn initially used the term holistically to capture methodological, observational and conceptual disparities between successive scientific paradigms that he had encountered in his historical investigations into the development of the natural sciences (Kuhn 1962, 148–150). Later, he refined the idea arguing that incommensurability is due to differences in the taxonomic structures of successive scientific theories and neighbouring contemporaneous sub-disciplines.’

2. The central dogma of molecular biology is an explanation of the flow of genetic information within a biological system. It was first stated by Francis Crick in 1958 and re-stated in a Nature paper published in 1970.

3. Riggio (2011, p. 12) claims that ‘[w]hile there is not a general theory of leadership, there are constructs, such as charismatic leadership, systematic classifications of leader behavior, and interactionist models of leadership, that have been widely and thoroughly researched, some for nearly 100 years.’

REFERENCES

Ciulla, J. (1995), ‘Leadership Ethics: Mapping the Territory,’ Business Ethics Quarterly, 5(1), 5–24.

Drucker, P. (2001), ‘Leadership as Work,’ in The Essential Drucker, New York, NY: Harper Business, pp. 268–271.

Gosling, J. and Marturano, A. (2005), ‘Editorial,’ Business Ethics: A European Review, 14(4),319–322.

Hume, D. (1739 [2000]), A Treatise of Human Nature, D.F. Norton and M.J. Norton (Eds),Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Kuhn, T.S. (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Oberheim, E. (2005), ‘On the Historical Origins of the Contemporary Notion of Incommensurability: Paul Feyerabend’s Assault on Conceptual Conservativism,’ Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 36, 363–390.

Riggio, R.E. (2011), ‘Is Leadership Studies a Discipline?’, in M. Harvey and R.E. Riggio (Eds), Leadership Studies: The Dialogue of Disciplines, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, pp. 9–19.

Searle, J.R. (1980), ‘Minds, Brains and Programs,’ The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 417–457.

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Rigor & Relevance of Leadership Scholarship in the ILABy Rebecca J. Reichard, Chair Leadership Scholarship MIG; Claremont Graduate University,

David M. Rosch, Chair-Elect Leadership Scholarship MIG; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Scott J. Pine

PART II

Last month, in Part 1 of this article, we discussed the role of rigor in the context of leadership scholarly research and writing. Specifically, we argued that rigorous leadership scholarship is theory-based or theory-generating, has testable hypothesis and critical analysis, employs valid measures and ethical data collection, and produces converging evidence resulting from multiple studies or analyses utilizing different methodologies and populations. Related to this last point, we want to emphasize that leadership scholarship can employ a variety of research methodologies including not only positivist approaches but also critical analysis, histories, philosophy, interpretative papers, case studies, thematic analysis, and grounded theory research, to name just a few. Regardless of methodological approach, all studies vary on rigor and we urge scholars to submit their most rigorous research to the International Leadership Association (ILA) to help us ‘to generate and disseminate cutting-edge work in leadership theory and practice’ as called for in ILA’s Strategic Plan (Cherrey & Perruci, 2012). Phenomenological and critical analysis research approaches are particular important for our focus for Part 2: Relevance in Leadership Scholarship. In this brief article, we focus on the role of relevant research in helping fill the gap between leadership research and the practice and development of leadership in organizations.

Relevant Scholarship

Rigorous scholarship means nothing if it is not relevant to the challenges faced by the society of today and tomorrow. Oxford defines relevance as, “to be connected with the matter at hand, closely relating to the subject or point at issue, and pertinent to a specified thing.” In our case the matter at hand, point of issue, or specified thing is the practice of leadership and leader development. We identified three criteria that reflect relevant scholarship. First is (1) the ‘problem’s

centrality to the phenomena being investigated’ or the problem’s reflection of the social milieu (Zaccaro & Horn, 2003), both of which contribute to relevant research. Regarding a problem’s centrality, if scientists want to advance both researchers’ and practitioners’ understanding of leader development, for example, separate investigations regarding different constructs or problems are necessary to uncover the central dynamics that contribute to more effective leader development. In other words, investigation of topics are relevant not merely because they pique some researchers’ interest, but because they allow researchers to design, and practitioners to implement, better leader development programs/interventions that address central problems faced by practitioners.

Relevant research investigations with practical applications include the following: a) they tackle grand challenges that remain unresolved in a specific field, b) they cast a wide net; that is, they are ambitious in scope, ensuring that relevant constructs, mechanisms, and perspectives are addressed, and c) they are actionable in that they provide insights for practice by highlighting the effects of new and important practices (Colquitt & George, 2011). For example, in a recent series of studies, Reichard and her colleagues sought to investigate the process by which leaders develop cross-cultural skills through international experience (Reichard, Serrano, Condren, Wilder, Dollwet, & Wang, in press). In the first study, the authors conducted a thematic analysis grounded in the experience of undergraduate students working and studying abroad and found that level of engagement in cultural trigger events (i.e., culturally novel situations with radically different norms) emerged as a central category between such an event and the development of cultural competence. In a second study, the authors built upon these findings to develop a classroom training that mimicked cultural trigger events from the international context, which, in turn, resulted in the development of

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cultural competence of organizational leaders. These studies provide an example of using contextually-grounded qualitative research to understand and address practical challenges in organizations.

Phenomenological research is particularly well-suited to ensure the problem’s reflection of the social milieu. One may ask: “Is the problem being investigated an actual problem in the world?” Essentially, the focus here is on the context and a concern with understanding leadership phenomenon in depth by addressing questions such as what?, why?, and how? Such research emphasizes data collection in natural and non-controlled settings where researchers surface and acknowledge assumptions and alternate between induction and deduction through observations, interviews, or textual analysis. With regard to the latter, computer-aided text analysis has vast potential for increasing the rigor and relevance of leadership communications research (Bligh & Kohles, 2014).

A second aspect of relevant research is its (2) future focus. Especially relevant research helps organizations solve future, not merely current, leadership challenges as they adapt to change so that they can remain effective. Mohrman and Lawler (2012) recommend several research strategies that scholars can adapt to ensure their research achieves relevancy. First, they recommend researchers be “close enough to practice” to understand how organizations address leadership challenges. This means understanding key issues, operations, and outcomes organizations and leaders are trying to achieve. They argue that inherent in this approach is that academics develop knowledge about practice, which facilitates a knowledge feedback loop between practitioners and scholars. Second, they recommend studying organizations that are outliers. That is, they recommend scholars study organizations that are experimenting with new leadership and leader development approaches because they offer ripe areas to learn more about emerging designs/interventions/programs. Finally, they recommend that scholars adopt collaborative research approaches to understand the multifaceted leadership challenges that organizations face. This entails bringing multiple disciplines, theoretical perspectives, and scholars and practitioners together in leadership research.

Finally, (3) ‘reality-based methods’ are a hallmark of relevant scholarship. In critical analysis, this requires a comprehensive critique of the environment under examination. For example, any general critique of Adolf Hitler as a leader should examine the whole of his body of leadership, not relying on cherry-picked time periods or decisions. In producing original research, reality-based methods mirror real-world phenomena by creating powerful social situations in a laboratory (or in the field) while implementing controls that minimize imprecision. For example, behavioral leadership simulations create a rich context where leaders traverse high fidelity challenges such as email in-basket, leaderless group discussion, and one-on-one meeting with a troubled follower that are realistic everyday challenges faced by leaders. Leader behaviors in these simulations are recorded and then used to predict effectiveness on the job, select leaders for high-potential programs, and develop leaders through intensive behavioral feedback (e.g., www.leadlabs.org/assessment). Such reality-based methods reflect relevant scholarship.

Why is Rigor and Relevance Important?

Now that we have discussed rigorous scholarship last month and the significance of research relevance here, how might we go about producing more of both? Zaccaro and Horn (2003) offer potential solutions that may facilitate a more symbiotic relationship between leadership researchers and practitioners. First, continuous communication and feedback between researchers and practitioners is needed. This will help account for differences in value systems and power structures of involved parties. Second, echoing our call for theory-generating and converging evidence, Zaccaro and Horn discuss the importance of utilizing both quantitative and qualitative research methods. In particular, they recommend grounded theory research where a conceptual framework of phenomena from descriptive data gathered using qualitative methods (the opposite of a priori hypothesis) is developed. Finally, Zaccaro and Horn encourage research that validates the pathways between leader attributes, leadership processes, and organizational outcomes because doing so can yield more reliable tools, assessments, and interventions for the mutual benefit of practitioners and researchers.

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In conclusion, as described in both parts 1 and 2 of our sequence, we summarize rigorous and relevant scholarship as that which: (1) is theory based or theory generating; (2) examines testable hypotheses and critical analysis; (3) includes valid measures and ethical data collection; (4) reflects converging evidence resulting from multiple studies or analyses using different methodologies and populations; (5) situates a problem reflecting the social milieu; (6) is future-oriented; and (7) uses reality-based methods. Within the Leadership Scholarship MIG and with each member’s assistance, we will continue to strive to increase the scholarly rigor and relevance of submissions and sessions within the ILA.

References

Bligh, M.C. & Kohles, J.C. (2014). Comparing leaders across contexts, culture, and time: Computerized content analysis of leader-follower communications. Leadership, 10(2), 142-159.

Boyce, L. A., Zaccaro, S. J., & Wisecarver, M. Z. (2010). Propensity for self-development of leadership attributes: Understanding, predicting, and supporting performance of leader self-development. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(1), 159-178.

Cherrey, C. & Perruci, G. (September, 2012). ILA strategic plan. Downloaded from http://www.ila-net.org/about/StrategicPlan.pdf.

Colquitt, J. A., & George, G. (2011). FROM THE EDITORS. Academy of Management Journal, 432-435. Doi:10.5465/AMJ.2011.61965960.

Day, D.V. (2010). The difficulties of learning from experience and the need for deliberate practice. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 3, 41-44.

Day, D.V. & Sin, H-P. (2011). Longitudinal tests of an integrative model of leader development: Charting and understanding developmental trajectories. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(3), 545-560.

Mohrman, S. A., & Lawler, E. E. (2012). Generating knowledge that drives change. The Academy of Management Perspectives, 26(1), 41-51.

Orvis, K. A., & Ratwani, K. L. (2010). Leader self-development: A contemporary context for leader development evaluation. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(4), 657-674.

Rabin, R. (2014). Blended Learning for Leadership The CCL Approach. Center for Creative Leadership. Retrieved from http://www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/research/BlendedLearningLeadership.pdf

Reichard, R. J., & Johnson, S. K. (2011). Leader self-development as organizational strategy. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(1), 33-42.

Reichard, R.J., Serrano, S.A., Condren, M., Wilder, N., Dollwet, M., & Wang, W. (in press). Engagement in cultural trigger events in the development of cultural competence. Academy of Management Learning & Education.

Zaccaro, S. J., & Horn, Z. N. (2003). Leadership theory and practice: Fostering an effective symbiosis. The Leadership Quarterly, 14(6), 769-806.

Details: www.ila-net.org/webinars/ Registration: www.ila-net.org/webinars/RelationalLeadership/Price: Free for ILA Members; $24.95 for non-members

Advancing Relational Leadership Research

an ILA Webinar Featuring

Mary Uhl-Bien & Sonia Ospina

Wednesday, Nov. 12, 20147:30 - 8:30 p.m. EDT

This popular webinar returns at a new, convenient time for our Oceania members! Join Uhl-Bien and Ospina

as they discuss their co-edited book exploring relational leadership

theory from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives and

discover how they learned to work together across their own disciplinary

borders & boundaries.

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New Leadership Jobs

Organized by the ILA Leadership Education Member Interest Group

Endorsed by the ILA Leadership Education Deans, Directors, and Chairs Affinity Group

LEADERSHIP EDUCATION ACADEMY2-5 AUGUST 2015 | ORLANDO

Attend this cohort-based professional development experience to:

• Enhance your knowledge of leadership foundations and theories• Augment your understanding of leadership education

pedagogies• Practice instructional strategies• Learn from the experiences of seasoned educators

Designed to meet the specific needs of new leadership educators in both curricular and co-curricular settings!

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Faculty PositionFederal Executive InstituteCharlottesville, VAClosing Date: 11/15/2014View Complete Description

Assistant or Associate ProfessorDepartment of Agricultural Communication, Education and Leadership The Ohio State UniversityColumbus, OHClosing Date: Until FilledView Complete Description

Leadership Studies Lecturer/Academic Program Associate

Communication Studies, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KSClosing Date: Until FilledView Complete Description

Leadership Studies Teaching Faculty Position

Leadership Studies, Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WVClosing Date: Until FilledView Complete Description

PresidentGeorge Mason University - KoreaIncheon City, South KoreaClosing Date: Until FilledView Complete Description

Pedagogical Assistant Professor in Organizational Leadership

School of Professional Studies, Western Kentucky UniversityBowling Green, KYClosing Date: Until FilledView Complete Description

Farley Visiting Professor of Ethics and Leadership

Leadership Institute, Washburn UniversityTopeka, KSClosing Date: Until FilledView Complete Description

Assistant DirectorInternational Student and Scholar Services, Baylor UniversityWaco, TXClosing Date: 11/11/2014View Complete Description

Director of the Graduate Program in Organizational Leadership (OL) and Assistant or Associate Professor

Organizational Leadership, Mercyhurst University, Erie, PAClosing Date: Until FilledView Complete Description

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Public Leadership Member Community News

We enjoyed meeting and reconnecting with all of the members of ILA’s Public Leadership MIG who were in attendance at last week’s global conference. One of the strengths of the Public Leadership MIG is our focus on contemporary issues, the challenges posed in the public arena, and our eye toward potential leadership strategies and solutions. This orientation was exemplified in many of our well-attended PL sessions in San Diego including, among others:

• Behind the Scenes of Success: Personal Characteristics of Public Leadership• Leadership in Complex Contexts: Dealing with Challenges in the Public Domain• Bringing About Global Change Through Reconciliation Leadership• Civil Society Organizations Address the Post-2015 Agenda• Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Leadership in China and the U.S.• Global Response to International Criminal Court: Public Leadership Perspectives• International Stories and International Academic Visions on Peace Leadership• Pope Francis I: Head of the Catholic Church, But Is He Exercising Leadership?• Public Leadership in Africa• Returns of Educating Women in Arkansas: Acquiring an Imagined Future

Of special note was the session Building New Leadership in African American and South African Communities. With the backdrop of protests and acts of resistance in Ferguson and St. Louis, Missouri, in the U.S., as well as civil unrest in South Africa, this panel discussion featured Lize Booysen, Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior in Antioch University’s PhD in Leadership and Change program; Gary Cunningham, Founding Member of the African American Leadership Forum in Minneapolis; and David Anderson Hooker, from the J.W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development at the University of Georgia and co-author of Transforming Historical Harms.

Focusing on Ferguson, panelists noted tensions between young African American leaders and older established leaders. Many young leaders expressed clear frustration with the old “tried and (allegedly) true” messages that had been a central feature of the Civil Rights period and earlier social justice movements. Missouri is not the only place where youth feel that there has not been substantial change or improvement in their circumstances. Similar frustrations have been expressed in the case of Trayvon Martin and countless other circumstances where either the justice system or the public has acted in ways that are interpreted as having little regard for the value of young Black (and often poor) life. Similar dynamics between the “old guard” and youth are at play in South Africa within the legacy of Apartheid.

In light of these tensions, panelists considered the questions: How do narratives that inspired and mobilized the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements remain relevant for young leaders? How are today’s leaders weaving new themes with older themes of struggle in order to create new stories for their communities?

Or, as panelist Gary Cunningham elegantly states: “If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If we as African American leaders cannot forge a common agenda, then the long suffering of our community will continue to the next generation and the next after that and so on... In that old song from the Civil Rights movement, ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.’ There is no one else. If we are to move our community forward, if we are going to see significant change in education, housing, employment and health of our community, if we are going to turn the current situation for our people around in this community, then it will have to be up to us to do it.”

Interested in continuing this conversation? Join the new PL MIG LinkedIn group. Send a request for membership, then log on to start sharing articles, resources, collaborative opportunities, your perspectives, and more! With your participation this will become a vibrant networking hub for our MIG. We look forward to seeing you online!

By Chair Cynthia Robinson, AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships; Chair-Elect Nikol Hopman, Leiden Leadership Centre, Leiden University; and the panelists of Building New Leadership in African and South African Communities

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Calendar of UpComing leadership events

2014-2015

Promote your event on the ILA online calendar

by logging on to the ILA website and navigating

to Events > Calendar

ILA Leadership Perspectives WebinarAdvancing Relational Leadership Research, 7:30 - 8:30 PM EDT

Learn more | Register (Free)

Nov. 12Call for Chapter Proposals DeadlineILA Women & Leadership Book Series, Vol. 5 - Gender, Media, and Organizastion: Challenging Mis(s)Representatino of Women Leaders & ManagersLearn More

Nov. 15 CFP DeadlineIndigenous LeadershipA special issue of Leadership

Learn more

Nov. 30

28th Australian & New ZealandAcademy of Management ConferenceReshaping Management for ImpactSydney, Australia

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Dec. 3 - 513th Annual International Studying Leadership ConferenceRelevance and Rigour in Leadership Research and PracticeCopenhagen, DenmarkLearn more

Dec. 14 - 16

Save the Dates!7-10 June 2015

Advancing Women in Leadership: Waves of Possibilities

2nd ILA Women & Leadership Affinity Group Conference

Pacific Grove, CA, USARegistration Opens December 15th!

2-5 August 2015Leadership Educators Academy

Orlando, FL, USA

14-17 October 2015Leading Across Borders

& Generations17th Annual ILA Global Conference

Barcelona, Catalonia, SpainCall for Proposals Now Open!

Submit by Feb. 1, 2015Sponsor ILA 2015

CFP Deadline: McDonough Leadership Conference - Concrete Leadership: Bridging the Divide Between Theory and PracticeMarietta, OH, USA Learn more

Dec. 1973rd Midwest Political Science Assoc. Annual ConferenceChicago, IL, USA

Learn more

Apr. 16-19CFP Deadline: ILA’s 2015 Global Conference, Barcelona, Spain, Leading Across Borders & Generations

Submit Your Proposal

Feb. 1

ILA Leadership Perspectives WebinarEmotionally Intelligent Leadership: A Guide for Students with Scott Allen12 – 1 pm EDT

Details and Registration forthcoming

Dec. 3