Dr. Joe Raelin, an expert in collective leadership, discusses leadership as practice, emphasizing group dynamics over individual traits. The podcast explores LAPD for leadership development, real-world education impact, and leadership in varied contexts like crisis situations.
Leadership is seen as a practice reliant on group interactions, not individual traits or behaviors.
Leaderful practice emphasizes shared leadership responsibilities and co-creation in collective initiatives.
Deep dives
Understanding Leadership As Practice
Leadership as practice challenges traditional notions of leadership by focusing on collective, dynamic interactions in everyday activities rather than individual personalities. Dr. Joe Raylan, a renowned scholar, emphasizes the importance of understanding leadership not as a preconceived outcome but as a result of group practices and interactions. By co-constructing leadership through emergent social and material dynamics, leadership can be seen as a shared, ongoing process within teams and organizations, rather than solely reliant on designated leaders.
Exploring Practices in Context
Practices in leadership are viewed as embodied, collaborative accomplishments shaped by collective discourses, emotions, and interactions within specific contexts. By considering practices as habitual patterns that could be damaging or life-giving depending on culture and organization, the focus shifts to collective mentalities in leadership rather than individual actions. Leadership occurrences are identified within the changing trajectories of group practices, emphasizing the importance of understanding leadership within the context of daily practices and interactions.
Focusing on Co-Creation and Reflective Dialogue
The concept of leaderful practice highlights the significance of mutual endeavors and joint leadership in shared initiatives. Practices such as reflective conversations, challenging assumptions, and exploring differences promote co-creation and leadership emergence within groups. By enabling participants to collectively reconstruct leadership practices and focus on mutual interests, the leaderful approach encourages flexibility, dialogue, and shared leadership responsibilities.
Embracing Ethical Co-Creation and Dynamic Learning
Leadership as practice advocates for ethical decision-making through pluralistic and negotiated perspectives within evolving practices. By emphasizing the collaborative co-construction of ethical meanings in real-time experiences, the approach fosters responsible, situational ethics rather than relying on universal principles. The focus on participatory sense-making, dialogue, and reflexive practices aims to navigate ethical challenges, uncertainties, and contested terrain in collective leadership contexts.
Dr. Joe Raelin is an internationally-recognized scholar in collective leadership, learning, and practice. He is the Donald Gordon Visiting Professor of Leadership at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and the Asa S. Knowles Chair Emeritus at Northeastern University in Boston, USA. He was formerly a Professor of Management at the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Joe is a prominent inventor of new theory in leadership and management studies, to wit, his path-breaking work in diagnosing and managing the clash of cultures between managers and professionals, his re-affirmation of work-based and action learning as bridging knowledge and action in the workplace, his creation and application of the work self-efficacy inventory, his designation and application of “leaderful” practice to bring out leadership in everyone, and now, his co-construction of leadership-as-practice, which looks to leadership, not in individual personality but in everyday practice, and in particular, in emergent dynamic social and material interactions.
Toward a Methodology for Studying Leadership-as-Practice
The underlying belief of the leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) approach is that leadership occurs as a practice rather than resides in the traits or behaviors of individuals. A practice is a coordinative effort among participants who choose through their own rules to achieve a distinctive outcome. Leadership-as-practice has a markedly collective orientation because it is less about what one person thinks or does and more about what people may accomplish together. It is thus concerned with how leadership emerges and unfolds through day-to-day experience. The material-discursive processes emergent from multiple actors sometimes change the trajectory of the flow of practices. In those instances, leadership is taking place. To find leadership, then, we must look to the practice within which it is occurring (Raelin, 2017).
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