We are delighted to welcome Jackie Ford, Professor of Leadership and Organisation Studies at Durham University Business School, to present a virtual Distinguished Professorial Address Lecture based on ‘A critical rethink of relational leadership: recognising the mutual dynamic between leaders and led’.
Many accounts of leadership studies appear to take too lightly, if they treat of it at all, the insecurity, anxiety and ambiguity in the lives of leaders and led (Ford and Harding, 2004; Ford, 2006). Through ignoring these feelings, they actively create such feelings. Leaders are told they should be confident, secure and very clear about what they are doing, and why they are doing it, in all circumstances. This is an impossible feat in practice – who could live up to such a paragon? By failing to achieve an over-ambitious norm, leaders can feel themselves to be failures. But in equal measure, there is a risk that control of work processes and conversations may still be regulated by power elites qua leaders who manipulate organisational discourses through structural and cultural norms that remain embedded in historical traditions. This can in turn have disastrous consequences on followers in organisations – as Jackie will illuminate during her presentation.
A little about Jackie;
Jackie Ford is Professor of Leadership and Organisation Studies at Durham University Business School and has held various professorial posts since 2008 at the Universities of Leeds and Bradford. She has over 25 years’ experience of working in Higher Education, having spent the previous decade in a range of managerial roles in the British NHS, culminating in an Executive Board-level Human Resources Director post. Jackie’s research includes the study of working lives, notably in exploring critical approaches to leadership; gender, diversity and inclusion; ethics, management and organization studies. She has co-authored a monograph entitled Leadership as Identity: Constructions and Deconstructions (Ford, Harding and Learmonth, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); co-edited Making Public Services Management Critical (Currie, Ford, Harding and Learmonth, Routledge, 2010); co-edited a textbook, Leadership: Contemporary critical perspectives (Carroll, Ford and Taylor, Sage, 2019. 2nd edn); and has published in a range of journals including British Journal of Management, Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, Leadership, Management Learning, Organization, Organization Studies, Sociology, Work Employment and Society.
Date: Wednesday 2nd December 2020
Time: 17:00 – 18:30 GMT