Making a case for a reflexive approach to leadership, the authors draw upon decades of carrying out in-depth studies of professionals trying to "do" leadership. Through interviews with managers and their subordinates, getting a good understanding of organizational context, and critically interpreting their observations considering both leadership theories and a wealth of other perspectives, their celebration of reflexivity is used to question dominant leadership thinking. Considering and challenging various departures from lines of reasoning results in a book that draws upon rich empirical material and which has a number of new, provocative, critical and constructive ideas that help to develop sharper and more thoughtful thinking and practice - both in academic and practical contexts. Suitable for leadership and organisation courses at upper-level undergraduate and upwards (including MBA-classes and Executive Education) and a thought provoking read for practitioners and management development professionals interested in leadership thought.

This concise textbook seeks to unpack the real-life complexities of leadership by examining the theories and models surrounding it and encouraging self-analysis in the individual’s own contexts. The book: Provides an outline of the various perspectives of leadership theory; Develops a critical and robust framework for considering existing leadership theory and consequently applying leadership practice across the organization; Identifies important individual characteristics likely to enhance leadership practice in the workplace; Considers a framework for analyzing leadership performance and methods and practicalities for application. Reflexive Leadership in Context provides a practical and concise introduction for executive education students currently studying for MSc/MBA apprenticeship programs, as well as supplementary reading for postgraduate students studying modules within leadership and management.

This practical and positive guide shows how good, effective reflection can help people to stay on track, as well as understand what is working well and what might be improved – essential skills for leaders at all levels of practice from newly qualified staff to senior managers. Supporting readers to link theory and action with reflection, the authors illustrate how practitioners can exercise their own kinds of leadership to strengthen, improve and thrive. Taking a realistic and achievable view of leadership, the book: reviews the different leadership approaches and styles that help to inform us about what makes a good leader; explores the role of emotional intelligence, appreciative intelligence and narrative intelligence in leadership, especially in complex, challenging and continually changing healthcare settings; and uses case studies and practice examples to ensure the book is relevant, current and helpful. Reflective leadership is fundamental to providing safe, effective healthcare to all patients, as well as enhancing resilience for individuals, teams and organisations. This guide is an essential read for healthcare students and practitioners, no matter at what stage or level they are at as a leader.

A significant driver of disengagement amongst employees is a lack of psychological safety generated from weak and underdeveloped intra- and interpersonal skills on the part of managers. Addressing the issue head on, this book enables leaders to lead with conscious awareness to build and sustain psychologically safe cultures through which team members may positively engage with work in a far more meaningful and purposeful way. All too often, leadership-follower relationships are purely transactional and focus on errors and problems, resulting in an impoverished transactional leadership culture. These dynamics result in weak rapport, low levels of emotional intelligence on the part of line managers and, subsequently, employee disengagement. This book unpacks these drivers in detail and builds a model that can be used as the basis of personal development and as a large-scale intervention into the leadership culture of an organisation. This model is very accessible and can be used in a structured training programme through a series of action learning workshops based upon coaching relationships and mutual dialogue. The book is ideal reading for HRM managers, change leaders, learning and development managers, students of management and leadership, and line managers in organisations who are involved in leadership roles.

Leadership has never been more important – and divisive – than it is today. The idea and discourse of the leader remains a critical factor in organizational and societal performance, but there is evident tension between the persistent focus on the critical importance of individual leaders and the increasing emphasis on collective leadership. The Routledge Companion to Leadership provides a survey of the contentious and dynamic discipline of leadership. This collection covers key themes in the field, including advances in leadership theory, leadership in a range of contexts and geographies, leadership failure, leadership process, and leadership development. Topics range from micro studies to wider political analyses of leadership, taking in unusual but important aspects such as portrayals of leadership in architecture, media, and science fiction. Contributions from 61 internationally renowned authors from 16 countries make available the full range of perspectives, approaches, and insights on the idea of leadership. Providing both a social sciences and a psychological approach, these go beyond common themes to offer diverse perspectives on such topics as emotion and leadership, portrayals of leadership. This volume situates leadership debates and evidence within contemporary leadership crises, while ensuring that the explorations of the issues are of enduring relevance. With wide and critical coverage of the key topics and potent contextualization of themes in current events, The Routledge Companion to Leadership is the ideal resource for graduate study in leadership.

The impact of globalization is being felt in numerous spheres of educational policy and practice, in rapid growth of information and communication technologies, in economic transformation, and international market competition, all of which conspire to create new demands and place new pressures on school leadership.

Leadership and Change for the Health Professional will provide health professionals with the latest thinking on leadership theory and research. It highlights the issues that can block successful healthcare leadership initiatives, and explores ways of constructively engaging with the opportunities provided by change. Each chapter draws out practical lessons for effective and efficient leadership of care that is compassionate and safe. Leaders and students at all levels will be able to use this book to expand their leadership repertoire in a text that engages with many themes, including: • The basics of leadership and the idea of leadership as a "calling" • Motivating employees • Implicit leadership theory • Developing trust • Building learning organisations • Gender and equality • Planning and organising change in healthcare • Leading change The links between the theory and practice of healthcare leadership are skilfully explored with examples of research implemented in practice, and the textbook further equips your study with helpful summaries and suggestions for further reading. This is essential reading for all healthcare professionals in clinical practice as well as students studying or engaged in research on health care management and leadership. With a foreword by Thomas Garavan, Edinburgh Napier Business School, UK. "Amongst the vast number of leadership texts published every year this book stands out. It has been edited with considerable care by two highly respected scholars in the field to make it accessible to all those interested in, and practising, leadership, whether healthcare professionals or students. It is well organised and moves seamlessly to address many important questions about the nature of leadership, including important questions of ethics, gender, trust, motivation, innovation, teams, and distributed leadership. The final section focuses on leading change in healthcare, a critical element of leadership practice in today’s world. Too many leadership books ignore context. This book, however, is firmly rooted in the healthcare context, and aspires to help professionals in this sector to reflect deeply on the complexities of leading through uncertain times. Whilst each chapter stands alone, the book’s merit is in offering multiple perspectives. Curtis and Cullen have encouraged the book’s contributors to address the big debates and themes in healthcare leadership today, whilst keeping in sharp focus the practice of leadership." Sharon Turnbull, Visiting Professor, Lancaster University Management School, UK "In Leadership and Change for the Health Professional, Elizabeth Curtis and John Cullen have crafted an exceptionally timely collection of practically-based research insights. As global healthcare systems face disruptive and often uncomfortable forces for change, this book tackles complex topics that health leaders must understand. While oriented toward generative practice and creative leadership skills, Curtis and Cullen do not shy away from engaging with controversial aspects of leadership development, such as bias, gendered practice, or even clinical failure, making it a valuable resource for educators and practitioners alike. Accessible and lively, Leadership and Change for the Health Professional is a successful blend of current issues with a visionary future." Kathy Lund Dean, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Leadership & Ethics, Gustavus Adolphus College, USA "Curtis and Cullen bring together a comprehensive overview of leadership, from its historical development up to its role within the current healthcare context, presented by a variety of scholars. The particular challenges and demands faced by leaders and those who aspire to lead are discussed within and it addresses the many facets of leadership approaches. Anyone interested in the development of leadership and change will find this particularly stimulating and a valuable text for academic and students alike." Alison H James, School of Healthcare Sciences, Cardiff University, UK "This book covers many aspects of leadership, which are timely in nature and directly relevant to health professionals. The contributors are highly respected and offer different perspectives on this complex issue. We need to encourage practitioners to see themselves as leaders – this evidence-based text will serve to guide them in this quest. De-emphasising the individual leadership qualities and including those of teams makes this book stand out from others. The NHS features prominently but despite this, readers from other countries should be able to easily transfer the content to their own health services. The useful websites at the end of each chapter provide further direction for readers. This is a text that is written with a very positive stance, even though the difficulties of being a leader are not ignored. It ends with a discussion on the vision for leadership – at individual, team and organisational levels. Lots to read, absorb and you can do this a chapter at a time which is great." Professor Bridie Kent, Head of School of Nursing and Midwifery, Plymouth University, UK "This book addresses an important topic, where there is huge scope to add value. This is partly due to the scale of the NHS. The language makes the text accessible to professionals as well as academics. It is also good to see that the issue of learning organisations is addressed, as well as impact of leadership on patients." Professor John G Burgoyne, Lancaster University Management School, UK "Leadership and Change for the Health Professional is a timely and authoritative academic and professional exposition of the challenges for clinicians and healthcare managers in carrying out their management roles in our modern medical and healthcare systems. Its focus on change is both apt and relevant in the context of the dynamic development of our healthcare structures." Niamh Brennan, Michael MacCormac Professor of Management, University College Dublin

Leading organisations in our contemporary world means grappling with unpredictability, painful pressures and continual conflict, all in the context of an acceleration in the pace of change. We expect the impossible from heroic leaders and they rarely live up to expectations. With countless recommendations, self-help books and new concepts, scholars and management consultants often simplify and dream unrealistically. This book challenges the more orthodox discourse on leadership and presents a way of thinking about leadership that pays closer attention to experience. The contributors in this book, all senior managers or facilitators of leadership development, resist easy solutions, new typologies or unrealistic prescriptions. Writing about their experiences in Denmark, the UK, Israel, Ethiopia, South Africa and beyond, they are less concerned with traits that people can possess and learn, or magical promises of recipes for success, and more with the socio-political process of the interaction between people from which leadership emerges as a theme. We focus on understanding leadership as a practice within which communication, research, imagination and ethical judgements are continuously improvised. So rather than idealising leadership, or reducing it to soothing tools and techniques, we suggest how leaders might become more politically, emotionally and socially savvy. This book is written for academics and practitioners with an interest in the everyday challenges of both individual and group practices of formal and informal leaders in different types of organisations, and is an ideal resource for executives and students on leadership development programmes. We hope this volume will help readers to expand the wisdom found in their own experience and discover for themselves and for others, a greater sense of freedom.

The time has come when the men of God should stand up and take their place of leadership in their homes, their jobs, and their churches! For far too long, the great deception has dominated our spiritual barometer to the point that we are living life upside down. As a result, the spiritual progress of our home has been stalled, our ability to be a witness at work has been damaged, and our church is in desperate need of leadership! Today is the day this all changes! The God of the universe is calling, and he wants you to evaluate who you are in comparison to who you should be for kingdom work! We’ll take an honest look and then find out what he wants you to do. The choice is yours, but first, you must keep in mind that the first person that you lead is you! So ask yourself this question, Does who I want to be look anything like who I really am?

We have written this book because of our unique and real concern for improving education for children who are at risk of school failure. Whether these students are of different ethnicities or speak different languages, the students are not failures, but have difficulty maneuvering in a system we call school. In order to improve education, we have to improve schools and the practices of school leaders. This transformation of schools requires change and improvement of individuals in school leadership positions. In order to change school leaders and their practices toward improvement, we must replicate what is working for kids through reflective practice. Osterman and Kottkamp (1993) offered this perspective: We believe that reflective practice, an approach to educational improvement that is both situational and places the professional in the very center of the attempt to create improvement not only stands in contrast to most other current ideas but has the greatest potential of any approach improving individuals and, through them, schools and education. (p. vii) The book was written because we share professional practices and intellectual interests in reflection and reflective practice. We are passionate that reflection has the best hope and significant change in how leaders examine their personal beliefs, values, and behaviors in such a way that members of the school community realize that it is they who must adapt their practices to meet the needs of students at risk and the diverse communities they serve. However, before we discuss the importance of reflective practice, we need to arrive at a definition of reflective practice. Schon (1983) defines reflective practice as the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning. Similarly, Bolton (2010) stated that reflective practice involves playing critical attention to practical values and theories which inform everyday action, by examining practice reflectively and reflexively. This leads to developmental insight. Another idea by Boud et al. (1985) states, Reflection is an important human activity in which people recapture their experience, think about it, mull it over and evaluate it. It is this working with experience that is important in learning. As for education, Larrivee (2000) argues, Reflective practice refers to the process of the educator studying his or her own teaching methods and determining what works best for students. It involves the consideration of the ethical consequences of classroom procedures on students.