Although there has been substantial research into the experiences and practices of inclusivity and its links to leadership, much of what we know so far is based on traditional research carried out and published mainly in the English language. We argue that a much more contextually sensitive perspective is needed to unpack what inclusivity looks like in contemporary organisations.
We have now completed the first stage of our data collection and analysis process; conducting interviews with participants employed by a partner organisation in Italy and the UK, interviewing 29 participants using a technique called photo-elicitation. Participants provided photographs they felt represented their experiences of inclusion and exclusion and discussed these with a researcher from the research team in their first language. Through creating a safe and non-judgmental space we were able to have very thoughtful and reflective conversations with all participants about their experiences. Having translated and anonymised the transcripts into UK English and completed a detailed analysis of the photographs and interview discussions we have now reached a stage where we can share some of our findings and reflect upon why these might be relevant for multi-national corporations wanting to build inclusion across their organisations. Given the current global climate and discourse around the benefits and challenges of investment in Diversity, Equality and Inclusion policies- issues of interlingual translation and different cultural contexts seems particularly relevant and applicable. We want to join the debate by highlighting the complexities of promoting and embedding inclusivity agendas and their influence on the everyday practices and lives of employees.
More specifically we wanted to explore:
How is inclusion and exclusion experienced by staff in different roles and work contexts in a leading global contemporary organisation?
• What do meaningful inclusion and exclusion practices look like in daily interactions between individuals and in teams?
• What are the barriers and enables of inclusion for individuals, teams and the organisation as a whole?
What did we find?
We refer to findings in general terms here because our study is still in progress, and we want to ensure that we don’t come to premature conclusions as well as for confidentiality.
Context influences both experiences and practices of inclusion.
Our data shows that experiences of inclusion and exclusion are inherently linguistically and culturally situated. Influence occurs in different ways; national and international values; organisational values and values linked to different sites, e.g. HQ and international host sites. We found that cultural values and norms travel in different ways; a) from outside to inside organisation sites; influencing the desire to change organisational culture and climate to reflect its wider context; b) from inside to outside; organisational approaches were at times used to challenge taboos in a wider societal context and c) between sites, where one site was regarded as a centre of excellence; practices were ‘translated’ across to host sites differently. These contexts encompassed a wide range of different diversity and inclusion challenges moving well beyond notions of protected characteristics and were entangled with different power relationships.
Inclusion experiences are not universal.
Given our reflections upon the complexity of context; it is perhaps unsurprising that inclusion and exclusion experiences are also complex. However, aside from the differences in context influencing the physical, spatial and emotional experiences of the includee (the person being excluded or included), we have noticed another difference. There were contrasts between the ways in which participants used language to describe their experiences. When scripts were translated there were self-referential accounts and more abstract responses. Some participants were more self-referential; placing themselves at the centre of their narratives, describing experiences happening to them and their sense of agency in acting in a particular way. Others described narratives in more abstract ways; accounts were less about ‘something happening to me’ and were more general, describing how exclusion or inclusion could happen in more general terms or referring to others. Combining these translated narratives with analyses of the pictures provided showed us that there were more similarities than might be deduced from listening to narratives alone. Paying attention to the interlingual differences allowed us to challenge assumptions about similarities or differences in experience and take a more nuanced view so that voices were not simply ‘lost in translation’.
How language matters
The translation process of this research has been fascinating; and we have had meetings and discussions with the translation team throughout. This has highlighted a number of very subtle differences in the ways in which roles, people and practices in the organisation are referred to; for example using gendered nouns in ways that are different to the cultural norm; or borrowing words from UK English to make certain points clear, or where a literal translation would not convey the same meaning intended. This adds additional layers of meaning to participants’ accounts which provides additional insights into assumptions and values in organisations and how participants make sense of their experiences.
There is a shifting dynamic between these three areas (context, experience and language) which adds a nuance to our findings; both in terms of intersemiotic meanings (words to pictures) and interlingual understanding (language to language). This has potential implications in terms of how organisations translate and practice EDI in global contexts.
What next?
We are in the process of drafting journal articles for review from translation studies, methods and management journals. We are also planning two series’ of podcasts where researchers will discuss the research process in detail and then reflect upon these findings with organisational practitioners to consider the pragmatic implications of these discoveries for organisations. This will also provide a useful resource for students and teaching purposes.
Further research dissemination activities are planned to reach as wide an audience as possible with the explicit aim of ensuring that our findings are accessible and practical. We have a LinkedIn page entitled ‘Leadership Language and Visualisation’ which will act as a repository for all our work, including resources from conference presentations and knowledge and learning created during the research process as well as academic papers when published. A practitioner event is also planned in early July to share knowledge in more detail and to give practitioners an opportunity to ask questions and to network and discuss these issues further.
We are now keen to continue collecting data from other countries so that we can begin to consider further the nuances across other cultural contexts for inclusion practices. We are working with our partner organisation to recruit the next stage of participants.
If you’re working in our partnering organisation and would like to find out more or take part in our study please reach out to us as we’d really like to hear from you.
You can contact Gareth on gareth3.edwards@uwe.ac.uk who will put you in touch with one of our researchers responsible for data collection in your division’s respective language.
If you would like to follow our progress or find out more about the project in its entirety, look out for future blog articles and social media updates.
Professor Peter Case has been active in global health for the past twelve years, collaborating with partners such as the Malaria Elimination Initiative (University of California, San Francisco), Centre for Innovation in Global Health (Stanford University), HEALTHQUAL, and the Department of Disease Control (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). The LEAD work focuses on improving the management and leadership of healthcare programs in Africa through Organization Development change interventions and Quality Assurance techniques. Peter is one of the main architects of the LEAD methodology, which has been field-tested on projects funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and other sponsors from 2014 to 2025. These projects aim to enhance service delivery for malaria and HIV/AIDS healthcare in Africa. LEAD interventions also include healthcare staff capacity-building and training elements accredited by the UWE PG Cert in Professional Practice in Change Leadership. The methodology has achieved significant health impacts in Zimbabwe, Eswatini, and Namibia, as documented in journals such as BMC Public Health,Malaria Journal, and the American Journal of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene.
Currently, the LEAD team is preparing for a three-year MRC/UKRI-funded project to study the impact of malaria vaccine rollouts and other preventative measures in West Africa. In collaboration with Population Services International, the team is also developing a malaria elimination initiative funded by BMGF for the Zanzibar National Malaria Control Programme.
The workshop began with a welcome address by Professor Gareth Edwards, Associate Dean for Research and Knowledge Exchange. Professor Paschal Anisoke, Director of UWE’s Centre for African Social and Economic Transformation, and Jimi Ogunnusi, who leads UWE’s Africa Strategy, also met with the LEAD team.
HEALTHQUAL’s Dr. Joseph Murungu highlighted the challenges faced by the African continent due to recent drastic reductions in healthcare funding announced by the US Administration. The discussions focused on how LEAD will need to adapt to and accommodate these changes as it moves forward with malaria research and service delivery interventions.
Additionally, the team is in the process of establishing a new international NGO, the LEAD Ubuntu Global Foundation, which will support future health system improvement interventions and foster resilience. Part of the workshop was dedicated to discussing the practicalities of setting up this Foundation.
Despite the difficulties faced by health systems in Africa, Professor Roly Gosling from LSHTM was optimistic about LEAD’s prospects and strongly endorsed the team’s efforts. He praised the impactful outcomes of their healthcare research and emphasized the need to scale up activities while reducing implementation costs.
Team members left the intensive two-day workshop with a renewed sense of purpose and vigour.
Thanks go to Ripley Williamson King for her logistical support and ensuring the smooth running of this event.
The authors of this article have been commissioned to edit a book on Ghost Leadership: Uncovering the Hidden and Unsettling Sides of Leadership for the ILA and Emerald Building Leadership Bridges book series. To find out more and to submit a chapter proposal please read the complete CFP. The Deadline for initial outlines is 18th November 2024.
Halloween (see Notes for a discussion of Halloween’s roots) is an inherently liminal time and space — straddling Autumn and Winter (in the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere at least), the natural and the supernatural, feast and famine, life and death — a period where normal rules, categories, and identities are momentarily suspended, and change, transformation, experimentation, and play come to the forefront. Despite increasing commercialization, Halloween is still fundamentally centered on the fear of the unknown, unseen, and unsaid, and allows a temporary and anarchic zone of ambiguous groupings.
Of course, these kinds of periods also enable a space for pause and reflection —for sensemaking and understanding (or perhaps questioning) our own taken-for-granted rules and assumptions. When normal service is suspended, it allows us a glimpse behind the curtain, and this is regularly felt with the deep examination that Halloween offers of inclusion and exclusion in society. Indeed, Halloween provides us a lens to examine the place of “outsiders”’ and notions of societal belonging — whether that be the monsters and ghouls that descend onto mortal soil or how those traditionally marginalized in society (such as children) may take on more dominant roles during the time. After witnessing safe structures being inverted and previously invisible forces bubbling up, when the dust settles, we emerge with a deeper understanding of “normal” life — perhaps more appreciative, perhaps more questioning. We are granted a view of the “strange.”
This offers up a powerful opportunity to explore leadership dynamics in organizations. What can we learn from the temporary suspension of convention at Halloween that can enable us to see leadership in new ways in our organizations? How can we ask different questions about the unseen and unsaid? About hidden forces? About mortality and vitality? About individual and organizational identities, and how they may typically serve to marginalize and disempower? And, unlike the short-term (and often superficial) suspension during Halloween, can we develop our own capacity to adopt this questioning mindset as a permanent part of our organizational experience?
Facing Our Monsters
The phantoms and monsters that have come to characterize the festival of Halloween can be considered as archetypes that provide insight into our greatest hopes and fears. In what follows we will consider four of the most widely known Halloween monsters — ghosts, vampires, werewolves and zombies — as productive metaphors to unmask the hidden and uncanny aspects of leadership.
Ghosts — The importance of Culture and Place
Ghosts are amongst the most ancient manifestations of the supernatural. One of the earliest accounts is attributed to Pliny the Younger, who wrote in first century CE of an old, bearded man with rattling chains haunting his house in Athens (History.com, 2023). Ghosts, phantoms, and spectres are ubiquitous — with stories in most, if not all, communities around the world. A common notion underpinning ghost lore is the separation of the body and soul — with ghosts being those unfortunate spirits that, when freed from their bodies, become trapped between life and the afterlife (a space previously referred to as “purgatory”).
In her book The Ghost: A Cultural History, Susan Owens (2017) suggests that ghosts serve two main functions within society — firstly to remind us of the inevitability of death and secondly to offer reassurance that death is not the end. Through popular culture, ghosts vary hugely in temperament, from benevolent (e.g., Casper the Friendly Ghost), through benign (e.g., many of the Hogwarts ghosts in Harry Potter), eccentric and unpredictable (e.g., Beetlejuice), to outright malevolent (e.g., Freddy Kruger). The scariest ghosts, however, are perhaps those that we cannot see — either lurking in the shadows or simply invisible.
In applying the ghost metaphor to leadership, several points come to mind. Firstly, ghosts are usually a sign that something is amiss — that a soul hasn’t passed through to “the other side;” that something terrible happened in a particular place; or that some wrongdoing has occurred (such as the building of houses on burial grounds in the films Poltergeist and Amityville Horror). Secondly, ghosts remind us of the situatedness of experience — ghosts don’t, by and large, turn up at random but are integrally linked to the people and/or places they haunt. And thirdly, there is the importance of stories and storytelling in making sense of who the ghosts are and why they do what they do. Key themes we might consider here are the importance of organizational culture and the need to acknowledge and, if necessary, purge the spirits of the past to move forward. We might also consider aspects of place-based leadership and the interconnections between workplaces & organizations, cities & communities, countries & societies, and virtual & imagined worlds (Sutherland et al., 2022). Finally, we might be encouraged to consider the experience of being “haunted’” — as similar to a followers’ account of the legacy and impact of their experiences (good and bad) in relation to the ghostly “leadership” influences around them.
Vampires – The Complexities of Ascension
The typical theme surrounding vampires is one of ascension — where, following their conversion, an ordinary human suddenly experiences immortality, previously unknown power, and now occupies a permanently hierarchical position above mortal beings. Leaders may find themselves experiencing a similar transformation through promotion up the ranks (Kempster & Stewart, 2010). Like vampires, they may find that their worldview is shifted — peers becoming subordinates, power imbalances straining relationships, and becoming detached, perhaps, from their more “human” tendencies and emotions, finding them replaced with a focus on broader concerns and strategic goals that they didn’t consider previously — without which, survival would be impossible. Indeed, leaders may be aware of the potential for leaving permanent marks on their organizations and people they lead — where their policies, visions, and impacts can not only be perceived of as unquestionable, but also conceivably lasting long after their time in a formal leadership role ends.
The challenge throughout this is to understand that the archetypal tale of a vampire is of one who has lost their empathy with their previous kind, becoming hyper-individualistic and seeing the question of survival as a solo pursuit reliant on others being “drained” (Godwin, 2012). Within organizations, this power, if left unchecked, can quickly become destructive — either through exhausting morale or even, intersubjectively, “destroying” their team. As mortals, we have the opportunity to resist those vampiric tendencies. We have the agency to contest the temptation to see a leadership role as one that comes with irrefutable authority and instead balance our newfound power with empathy and compassion — driving for a sustainable influence rather than exponentially extracting from those around us.
Through this, we can see that the metaphor of the vampire helps us to understand how leaders might frame their roles differently, but that this also involves a complex renegotiation of the self in the process. Whilst conversations around the anxiety that accompanies leaders is still surprisingly scarce, portrayals of vampires do regularly focus on the challenges and complexities of their new position — coming to terms with their new power (and often over-stepping the boundaries in their early stages), loneliness, the requirement for training, understanding their severed relationships, and renegotiating their places in society. From Dracula, to True Blood, to Twilight, the story of the vampire is laced with sorrow as well as aspiration. Thus, in addition to understanding the impact of leaders on their teams, the vampiric metaphor also may help us to understand in more complex detail the journey of the individual who finds themselves transformed. Whilst promoting an aspiration for power is common within Western cultures, much less is dedicated to exploring and coping with the contradictory feelings that come afterwards — emotions that leaders may feel make them an imposter and that subsequently encourage them to fall back to occupying the “default” position of wielding power over others. Perhaps this offers us the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of tales of vampires, and bring in the messy, contested, and complicated emotions that come with ascension to powerful positions. Our following reflection on the experience of werewolves delves further into this complexity.
Werewolves – The Crisis of Self
In folklore, a werewolf (lycanthrope) is a human who involuntarily transforms into a wolf at full moon. Werewolves represent the manifestation of primal human instincts with energies and fearlessness fueled by desires for power and freedom whilst at the same time, offering loyalty. Symbolically, werewolves represent the underlying struggle between good and evil in the human psyche, one that is captured in the identity crisis that occurs in the human-wolf-human liminal states.
Werewolves offer fertile ground to study identity transformation and crisis given that symbolic, agentic, and experiential transformation aid understanding the liminality of identity struggles (Belk, 1988, 2013; Schouten, 1991). Applying liminality theory (Beech, 2011; Cody, 2012) the ability to integrate new self-concepts is vital for human-werewolves as they transition from one stable way of structuring their identity to another, letting go of their old identity before their new one can be established. Whilst in transitory mode, the human-werewolf teeters on thresholds (literally “līmen”) often portrayed as struggling with the multiple possibilities of what they will become. The identity struggle includes the uncertainty of what will occur whilst transformed and how the new, reassembled identity will manifest. The fears, fantasies, and desires of the new, wilder human-werewolf on the threshold capture endless possibilities.
A vivid illustration of this is Martin Parker’s (2004) autoethnographic account of taking on the role of Head of Department at Keele University and the challenges of assimilating this alongside his professional identity as a Critical Management Studies scholar. The title of the article — Becoming Manager: Or, the Werewolf Looks Anxiously in the Mirror, Checking for Unusual Facial Hair — powerfully captures the very real struggles experienced (yet rarely discussed) by people in such situations. Liminal identity is conceptualized as “a threshold state of existence that involves the dissolution of one self-whilst reflexively recrafting a new self” (Beech, 2011). This highlights that liminality occurs at the intersection between agency and structure wherein identity is viewed as a co-construction between self and socio-cultural contexts (Beech, 2011; Ybema et al., 2011). The journey of werewolf liminal identity struggle typically involves multiple phases. As shapeshifters, the werewolf identity crisis has caught the attention of scholars who examine embodied identities, hyper sexuality, psychology, heredity, and othering (e.g., du Coudray, 2002; McMahon-Coleman & Weaver, 2012; Bernhardt-House, 2016). Werewolves as depicted throughout history, represent threats to established norms and behaviors of a social context, hence when in the “monster” liminal states, they are often imprisoned (Koetsier & Forceville, 2014). The phases of transformation include Awakening (an initial realization of one’s werewolf nature); Denial (attempts to dismiss or rationalize the emotional response to these changes); Exploration (as the individual begins to experiment with their newfound abilities); Conflict (inner turmoil and/or external conflict as the individual grapples with the duality and tensions of their human and wolf identities); Isolation (a sense of alienation from “normal” human society and struggle to connect with others); Acceptance (as the human comes to terms with their dual identity, and discovers ways to manage their transformations); and Empowerment (where the human-werewolf learns to harness their abilities and may, on a good day, use their experiences to help others navigate similar struggles or, on a bad day, unleash their inner identity struggle and crisis on the world — terrorizing, murdering, and devouring prey with unstoppable momentum).
Whilst werewolves may be famed for their potential savagery, they are also regarded as intensely loyal. A second theoretical lens that could be applied, therefore, is Social Identity Theory (SIT) (Kleine & Kleine, 2000), which suggests that individuals strive for high self-esteem by affirming the value of social groups to which they belong, while avoiding associations with social groups perceived as less valued (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). In terms of werewolves, an SIT framework assumes individuals align their werewolf selves to referent groups in order to associate more strongly with or distance themselves from particular social identities (Reed, 2002). The same may be true of leaders and managers as they associate with and promote the interests of certain “in” groups, often in direct competition with “out” groups. SIT helps to understand what motivates human-werewolf (leader/manager) behavior as it posits they will employ strategies to achieve the desired identity status. The human werewolf will act in ways that demonstrate its loyalties to certain groups to mark their position in this new group. Ultimately, the werewolf builds group membership by ensuring that those who survive an attack are destined to transform into werewolves themselves at the next full moon.
Metaphors provide a powerful opportunity to reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions behind organizational life, granting us a glimpse at the unseen, uncanny, and unsettling nature of leadership itself.
Zombies – Following the Herd?
Whilst the metaphor of the vampire and werewolf can help us to understand the experience of the leader, what of metaphors that can enhance our understanding of the follower? In our final section we reflect on how narratives around zombie-like behavior can raise questions about the nature of followership in organizations, serving as a direct counterpoint to the leader-centric narratives that pervade much Organization Studies literature.
Whilst there are a wide range of zombie typologies in modern media, they tend to be known to follow their herd mindlessly (Lauro, 2017) in a perpetual search for their next “hit” of brains, destruction, or the infection and conversion of others. Our experience of encountering zombies in media often results in a kneejerk disgust at the swarm, and fear of the power of large and interchangeable numbers (McAndrew, 2018). However, zombies can provide an appropriate metaphor for understanding the logical extreme of mindless followership in organizations, where individuals eschew their critical thinking skills in favor of adopting a herd mentality — where they are unreflexively be a part of something bigger than themselves but lose themselves in the process. Indeed, Jackson and Parry (2009) note that followers are often thought of as “recipients” of leadership practice, with Collinson (2006) articulating that they can be “marked by their susceptibility to their leaders’ aims and goals.” Whilst this mechanistic framing may have served the theory of more traditional post-Taylorist management studies — which focus on the centrality of top-down leadership, harmony, clear direction, and unquestionable hierarchy (Fournier & Grey, 2000) — we only have to apply our zombie metaphor to begin to unpack the problematic aspects of this.
If we work on the oft-stated assumption that “leadership implies followership,” we run the risk of adopting the view that power relations in organizations should be permanently asymmetric — there are active leaders, there are passive followers, and rarely is the boundary breached. For those cast in the latter category, there is then an implicit instruction that voice, innovation, critical thought, and independence are not characteristics to be prized, but denigrated (Tourish, 2013). Instead, the responsibility to lead falls in the lap of a chosen few who have hordes underneath to conduct their bidding. The dangers of herd mentality in groups have been a topic of great interest for years, with the problems of groupthink never lurking far behind — defined by a lack of criticality and an assumption of homogeneity in goals (Janis, 1971; Grube & Killick, 2023).
What futures can be re-imagined if we break the cycle of seeing followers through the metaphorical lens of zombies? What if we question the notion that leaders are all-powerful and that followers are subservient and only interested in the relentless pursuit of the leaders’ instruction? Not only does this free those in leadership positions from the anxiety and fear that comes along with the expectation of omnipotence with their new identity, but it also sets a precedent that organizations are built on collective not individual capacity. Breaking this cycle involves us unlearning decades of management theory and a confidence from leaders to lead, perhaps, more from the “side” rather than the “top” — seeking diverse perspectives, encouraging red-teaming, and fostering genuine and authentic innovation from their organizations.
Unmasking Leadership
Throughout this piece, we have drawn on different Halloween-inspired monstrous metaphors to help prompt reflective questions about contemporary leadership practice — whether that be ghosts and the significance of culture and place, the aspirational vampiric narrative, werewolves occupying liminal spaces, or the dangers of zombie-like herd mentality. We follow in the footsteps of Morgan (1989) and Alvesson and Spicer (2011) in arguing that metaphors provide a powerful opportunity to reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions behind organizational life, and, in our case, grant us a further glimpse at the unseen, uncanny, and unsettling nature of leadership itself. Taking time to reflect on how cultural reference points are played out in reality offers us a trip to hyper-reality that can open up avenues of exploration that might have been closed off before.
To take this one stage further, let us finish with one final comparison. Masks are synonymous with Halloween — from children dressing up in spooky faces for trick-or-treating, to the grotesque guises that famous horror villains, like Michael Myers from the Halloween series, don. At a surface level these masks serve as both protection and concealment against true identities, perhaps as a deliberate effort to deceive, intimidate, or manipulate, and/or as a productive opportunity to occupy a new self for a temporary time (O’hUadhaigh, 2024). Organization Studies literature has regularly pointed toward this from a dramaturgical perspective and the presentation of self (Goffman, 1959; Jeffcut et al., 2007; Peng, 2023), reminding us that, similar to wearing a Halloween costume, organizational members often adopt specific personas to meet preconceived expectations.
Whilst there is clear psychological security that comes from this, we argue that there does need to be reflective space opened up in leadership practice about the masks we choose to wear — about why we need them, where our desire to wear them comes from, and about the ways in which they make us act when in character. These masks enable action, but they may also limit our activity as we unreflexively act out dominant narratives. Just as Joaquin Phoenix’s titular Joker experiences, this becomes especially problematic when the mask begins to “eat into the face” — moving from a temporary shield into a permanent persona that distorts self-awareness. Leadership positions are frequently lonely and vulnerable places (Lam et al., 2024), fraught with both real and imagined unseen expectations, and, although our masks can provide some temporary respite by hiding our own perceived weaknesses, openly acknowledging our imperfections and uncertainties may provide an alternative avenue for agency and for gaining insights into behaviors, motivations, and power dynamics at play in our organizations.
In this short piece, we have explored how several metaphors can provide rich insights into leadership, identity, power, and performance in organizational settings. We encourage you to consider the masks that you may wear and the “metaphors you lead by” (Alvesson & Spicer, 2011). The unmasking process is an inevitably frightening one but placing it aside — even momentarily — may tell us more about what lies beneath.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Notes: With its roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain, Halloween tends to be celebrated in Western English-speaking societies. Different traditions and festivals are used to celebrate/remember the dead in other cultures, such as Day of the Dead (Mexico and Latin America), Obon (Japan), Chuseok (South Korea), Gai Jatra (Nepal), Pchum Ben (Cambodia), and the Hungry Ghost Festival (celebrated by Buddhists and Taoists around the World) (see https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/festivals-dead-around-world-180953160/), although these are not the focus of the current article.
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Although there has been substantial research into the experiences and practices of inclusivity and its links to leadership, much of what we know so far is based on traditional research carried out and published mainly in the English language. This does not reflect linguistic and cultural diversity in contemporary global organisations and societies and its implications for everyday interactions at work. We argue that a much more nuanced, contextually and language sensitive perspective is needed to unpack what inclusivity looks like in contemporary organisations. We have therefore set to out to explore inclusion (and exclusion) in different languages and from the perspective of different cultures.
More specifically we seek to explore:
How is inclusion and exclusion experienced by staff in different roles and work contexts in a leading global contemporary organisation?
What do meaningful inclusion and exclusion practices look like in daily interactions between individuals and in teams?
What are the barriers and enables of inclusion for individuals, teams and the organisation as a whole?
We will then consider how meanings might change during the translation process to create new ways of thinking about inclusivity. This responds to calls for more reflexivity about language and translation in organisation, management and leadership studies.
Participation in the study involves taking part in a research interview with one of our researchers using photo elicitation. Participants bring photographs that capture their experiences of inclusion and exclusion within the organisation to the interview. All interviews are run in a relaxed atmosphere where we then discuss the photographs and related questions. Our participants have praised the non-judgemental, safe space that we create which is an ideal setting to reflect differently on one’s experiences and organisational practices. Here are some excerpts from testimonials we have received:
“It was a very safe space in that I felt comfortable speaking out about my good (and bad!) experiences regarding inclusion (or lack thereof!)”
“The interview was great! I really enjoyed it.”
“The study has made me reflect and helped me stop excluding myself. Thank you! ”
Participants regularly comment that they appreciate the opportunity to discuss experiences in a ‘non-work’ setting and share their perspective so as to positively impact upon future workplace practices and policies.
The study is designed to make a positive contribution not only to academic debates but also to practice and the experiences of our research participants and their colleagues. Upon completion of the study, our findings and report will be shared and discussed with the partnering organisation. All participants will receive a summary of our findings. The opportunity for a positive impact is significant. As our participants have observed:
“It will help shape [our] inclusion practices and helpcontribute to a more positive environment goingforward.“
“Inclusion needs to come from the inside out, so if we’re an inclusive employer then we can be inclusive for our customers too. But to be as inclusive as possible, we need to know what we are currently doing…This interview is your chance to help answer that and help [us] be as inclusive as possible.“
“The study ‘should help [understand] how we see eachother, what makes us who we are. Having difficultconversations is all part of us moving forward.“
Research is in progress, and we are currently actively recruiting participants. In particular we are looking for German, Irish, Austrian and Czech participants from our partnered international company so that we can best deliver on our goal of tapping into diverse language and cultural contexts.
Once we have completed an interview we begin analysis, this process has already started for interviews that have already been completed. The analysis involves examining the similarities and differences in representations of inclusion in the pictures, narratives in the original languages and scripts that have been translated by professional translators into English. Translators fully engage the research team in the translation process, working closely with us to explain their decision-making rationales as texts are translated. This transparency enhances our ability to interpret and analyse the data more accurately.
This multi-layered approach allows us to explore how the concept of inclusion takes on meaning and is experienced both within and across different linguistic and cultural and socio-political contexts.
Why this matters:
We foresee that this research will improve knowledge in the area of leadership practices across cultural, socio-political and linguistic contexts; advance research methods by applying visual methodologies to the study of language translation and advance organisational practice by highlighting the linguistic intricacies of inclusivity agendas and their influence on the lives of employees.
If you’re working in our partnering organisation and would like to find out more or take part in our study please reach out to us as we’d really like to hear from you.
You can contact Gareth on gareth3.edwards@uwe.ac.uk who will put you in touch with one of our researchers responsible for data collection in your division’s respective language.
If you would like to follow our progress or find out more about the project in its entirety, look out for future blog articles and social media updates.
We are a seven-person strong multilingual and multi-disciplinary research team with expertise in leadership, critical management studies, sociology, anthropology, HRM, applied linguistics and visual methods. Our team includes: Professor Doris Schedlitzki (London Metropolitan University), Dr Sylwia Ciuk (Oxford Brookes University), Professor Gareth Edwards, Dr Harriet Shortt, Professor Hugo Gaggiotti, Dr Jana Patey and Dr Kay Galpin (UWE Bristol). We have partnered with an innovative organisation which has offices across several countries, including Germany, Italy, England, Ireland, Austria and Czech Republic.
Gareth Edwards –Principal Investigator
Director of Research and Enterprise and Professor of Leadership and Community Studies at the University of the West of England. Gareth’s research centres around the idea of distributed or dispersed leadership, but taking this approach to leadership from a community perspective. Access Gareth’s full profile here.
Reader in Organisation Studies and the Deputy Head of OBBS Doctoral Programmes at Oxford Brookes University. Sylwia often builds innovative research methods into her research designs. In the past she has developed a range of methodological innovations, such as narrative photo collages and experiential maps. Access Sylwia’s full academic profile here.
Doris is Professor of Organisational Leadership and the Head of Research at Guildhall School of Business and Law, London Met. Doris’ main research focus is on leadership and explores the areas of cultural studies of leadership, discourse and leadership, leadership as identity, psychoanalytic approaches to leadership and the role of national language within cultural leadership studies. Access Doris’s access here.
Hugo is a Professor at the Faculty of Business and Law at the University of West of England. His research focus centers on the intersections between leadership, organizational narratives and professional mobility from an interdisciplinary organizational ethnographic approach. Access Hugo’s full Profile here.Email:Hugo.Gaggiotti@uwe.ac.uk
Harriet Shortt –Lead Researcher
Harriet is Associate Professor in Organisation Studies at the University of West of England (would you want to mention your secondment here?) Harriet’s research focuses on organisational space, artefacts, and the materiality of work. She has expertise in qualitative research methods including visual methodologies, specifically, participant-led photography. Access Harriets full profile here. Email:Harriet.Shortt@uwe.ac.uk
Jana Patey – Research Associate
Jana is a Researcher at the University of West of England. She holds a PhD from the University of Essex and the University of Suffolk in the area of workplace relations, affect and psychoanalysis. She has expertise in applying qualitative methodologies and has worked as a Researcher on several research projects including a longitudinal work on workplace wellbeing and productivity. Access Jana’s full profile here. Email:Jana.Patey@uwe.ac.uk
Kay Galpin – Research Associate
Kay is a Researcher at the University of the West of England. She holds a Phd from this university in the area of storytelling interventions and organisational change. She has an expertise in the application of qualitative research methods and is part of an a research and practice community called ‘The Unleadership Movement’ that is interested in creative enquiry exploring how leaderly practices can develop. Access Kays full profile here. Email:Kay.Galpin@uwe.ac.uk
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, hybrid working models have become the new norm for many organizations. With employees splitting their time between the office and remote setups, it’s crucial to understand how these evolving workspaces impact their psychosocial health and well-being as well as considering the individual need when planning these spaces.
Using researchers at the University of the West of England as a case study the research team took a deep dive into this very issue, investigating the lived experiences of hybrid working among knowledge workers. Drawing from Salutogenesis, (A model which focuses on factors that promote health and well-being) the study employed a unique participatory visual approach.
University staff members were asked to capture their hybrid working practices through photographs, offering an intimate glimpse into their daily realities. The visual data revealed fascinating insights into the paradoxical nature of workspace curation.
Figure 2 Comfortable function and productivity
On one hand, personalizing workspaces allowed employees to anchor their self-identity and foster a sense of belonging. Decorating a home office or displaying personal items at work helped create comfort and connection. However, the research also discovered that excessive personalization could lead to a sense of depersonalization and spaces became too closely aligned with specific professional identities.
The study highlighted the tension between territorial and nomadic approaches to workspace curation. Some participants embraced their home offices as sanctuaries, curating them as deeply personal havens. Others adopted a more fluid, nomadic mindset, tidying away their work belongings and embracing the fluidity of their professional identities across
Figure 3 ‘Curated comfort’ in home space
Through this lens, the research revealed three significant contributions:
It highlighted the importance of giving individuals control over shaping their environments to promote personal well-being in hybrid setups. This autonomy plays a crucial role in navigating the complexities of hybrid work.
It demonstrated how visual methods can reveal the nuanced ways individuals mobilize resources within their workspaces for self-care and health responsibility. The photographs provided a powerful window into these often-unseen practices.
It underlined the need for organizations to recognize individual circumstances when developing hybrid work policies. A one-size-fits-all approach fails to account for the diverse needs and workspace curation practices that impact employee well-being.
In a world where the boundaries between work and personal life are increasingly blurred, organisations need to take a timely reminder of the importance of curating healthy hybrid workspaces. By empowering individuals to shape their environments in ways that foster comfort, connection, and well-being, organizations can unlock the full potential of the people within them.
As we continue to navigate the uncharted waters of hybrid work, embracing the art of individual workspace curation may well be the key to thriving in this new reality.
This paper provides an extensive review of the literature examining the role of communication in social organization and organizing processes across multiple academic disciplines over the past several decades.
Through an analysis of research publications in SCOPUS from 1980-2022, the authors identified five major perspectives that have shaped organizational communication studies:
Communication as transfer
Communication as discourse
Communication as conversation/conversation analysis
Communication as narrative
The Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) perspective
In addition to synthesizing these key theoretical lenses, the article highlights notable gaps in current research. This includes calling for more study on the paralinguistic aspects of communication, analysing communication in relation to actual workplace practices, examining one-way/monologic organizational communication, and expanding research on communication dynamics in non-Western cultural contexts.
The open access paper is an excellent resource for students taking courses that cover organizational communication components. It also provides a valuable overview for scholars and practitioners researching communication processes within organizational settings.
Congratulations to Professor Case on this publication synthesizing and advancing the field of organizational communication research!
The role that communication plays in social organization and processes of organizing has received considerable scholarly attention from multiple disciplines over several decades. This paper provides a review of the diverse literature that has sought to contribute to the understanding of communication and its implication for management and organization studies. An analysis of the SCOPUS database for the period 1980–2022 enabled us to cluster reference material and identify five perspectives which emerge from a review of the literature: communication as transfer, discourse, conversation (analysis), narrative, and Communicative Constitution of Organizations. These categories are not intended to be exhaustive, but they do provide a useful critical heuristic for navigating a field of study that might otherwise appear overwhelming. To map the terrain’s theoretical underpinnings, our study also adopted a problematizing approach to the review which revealed various conspicuous conceptual and empirical absences at a ‘field level’ which merit further attention. The paper offers provocations and suggestions that we expect will inform future studies of organizational communication. Possibilities for developing the field include paying attention to: (a) paralinguistic dimensions of communication; (b) communication in relation to actual work practices; (c) monologic communication and (d) organizational communication in non-Western contexts.
Bristol Leadership and Change Centre (BLCC) at Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, is incredibly proud to congratulate our very own Dr. Harriet Shortt on being named a 2024 Woman of Influence by The Planner.
Harriet has been named one of 54 Women of Influence in 2024 for her pioneering work in developing innovative methods for inclusive and participatory engagement within the urban planning and placemaking process.
As an active member of BLCC, Harriet’s research has focused on bridging the gap between academia and industry practice. Her ground-breaking “Picturing Places” project, shortlisted for a 2023 Planning Award, exemplifies this approach. Using visual arts-based methods, Harriet engaged local communities and stakeholders, translating their values and experiences into a series of key performance indicators to embed within a masterplan from conception through to implementation.
Harriet’s research has explored vital issues like the design of workplaces for hybrid environments and how the creation of inclusive spaces can foster cultural change within organizations. She has collaborated with organisations such as Stride Treglown, ISG, Argent LLP, Aster Housing Group, and the RFU on supporting this type of organizational transformation through authentic public engagement.
At BLCC, we have greatly benefited from Harriet’s dual roles as an academic researcher and industry practitioner. As head of visual engagement at BiBO Studio and founder/director of SHORTt CONSULTING, she continually tests and implements her research findings within real-world planning and design projects. This integrated approach ensures her work generates tangible social impact.
In response to receiving this award Harriet said:
“I’m delighted to have been listed as a Woman of Influence 2024 by those working in the placemaking industry. Not only is it great to be recognised for the work I’m doing, but I think this demonstrates how public engagement and knowledge exchange – where we as researchers working with industry and wider communities – can really add social value. It highlights the value of working at the nexus between academia and industry, and that impact beyond academia is fundamental to research success”.
We are immensely proud to have Harriet as a core member of the BLCC team. Her passion, creativity, and commitment to inclusive placemaking embody the highest values of our research group. Congratulations, Harriet, on this well-deserved recognition! We look forward to your continued groundbreaking work and impact for years to come.
We are incredibly lucky here at BLCC to have so many talented researchers within our group. With that in mind we have not one, nor two but three books recently published by members of our team.
Join us to celebrate their achievements and learn about their books at the BLCC Triple book launch this month. This launch will give you the opportunity to discuss the books with the authors and find out more on their wider work.
Volume 6 in the series De Gruyter Transformative Thinking and Practice of Leadership and Its Development
Leaderly acts and practices from unexpected places are often overlooked and yet have remarkable power. These spontaneous acts are in sharp contrast to those of formal leaders in governments and leading corporations. Global events like the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis light up these differences. This book delves deeper, exploring these leaderly acts and practices more fully and beyond extraordinary events. The authors describe these as “unleadership”, a term defined in this book as a set of acts and practices that are undertaken in a spirit of spontaneity and generosity for social good.
Four dimensions of unleadership are identified in this book: paying it forward, living with the unknown, catching the wave, and confident connecting and collaborating. Unleadership exposes the potential that is unleashed when members of the community discover their own power to act and reclaim what they have delegated to their leaders.
Based on extensive research, the authors highlight the flourishing of alternative forms of leading that encourage rethinking ideas of leadership and followership. They provide practical guidance to organisations and practitioners for enriching their leaderly capacity and cultivating unleadership practices to co-exist with and complement leadership practices.
Unleadership is an invaluable resource for leaders and managers in public and private organisations as well as students of leadership and organisational development.
Innovation leadership is essential to survive in today’s turbulent landscape. For many organisations, their environment is characterized by internationalization, customer centricity, digitalization, sustainability, and a call for greater diversity. In these volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, and complex (VUCA) settings, there is also the need to create new and sustainable sources of value.
How are current-day leaders helping to turn ideas into value, whether that be through new products, services, markets, experiences, partnerships, processes, or business models? What are the new competencies and skills required in order to respond and effectively innovate in a changing environment?
Innovation Leadership in Practice provides a unique source of new insights on the role of innovation leadership and effective practices through conceptual models, empirical case studies, development interventions, and tools.
A social history of Greenhill, Swansea which used to be a thriving urban place where Welsh and Irish people lived, worked and loved together. All of which was lost in one generation.
Shops, churches, pubs, social clubs, libraries, parks, schools, streets, windowsills, gardens, pavements… These public spaces can have an extraordinary effect on well-being in a community. They bring people together and form the bonds that lead to people supporting each other.
With vivid descriptions and heartfelt anecdotes, Pieces of Us is a moving tribute to the people who made up this distinct part of Wales. The author, Rob Sheffield, shares first-person accounts of how the area formed then lost the strong bonds that held the neighbourhood together. And he describes growing up here, leaving for university, and the effect of this on identity and family.
From this story of Greenhill arise implications for community development everywhere, including the importance of collaboration between local residents and government.
In Pieces of Us, our co-author discusses the mixed fortunes of Greenhill, a distinctive Swansea inner-city neighbourhood, created through the successful integration of Welsh and Irish people, who’d moved there to provide labour for Swansea’s industries. The story has particular insights for our current health and care systems landscape, and some historical ‘scene-setting’ will give a useful context.
The process of ethnic integration was relatively trouble-free, though with several critical leadership interventions. When cholera struck in 1849, the newcomer Catholic priest, Father Kavanagh, worked with Dr William Long, tending the sick, washing them, combing their hair and administering last rites. This demonstration of compassionate leadership and community-cohesion helped enmesh separate parts of the community in a single survival story.
As the area grew in both size and political power, infrastructure increased: Swansea’s only cathedral, a school and a church social club. This triad of formal institutions balanced educational, spiritual and pleasure needs, offering an elevating sense of purpose and belonging to Greenhill’s residents. Roads, shops and pubs followed, establishing both formal and informal meeting places – school gates, the church, pavements, doorways and windowsills – resulting in thousands of ‘chance conversations’. These exchanges developed social capital and established a shared sense of identity and mutuality between community members; finding form in neighbourly acts of practical and moral support. Thousands of people engaged in a continuous rich exchange, crossing generational, ethnic and faith boundaries.
Neighbourhoods are complex systems where an unpredictable order emerges from many disordered interactions. Over a period of 100 years, Greenhill evolved an extremely cohesive community, exhibiting strong civic engagement and social connection. However, from the 1970s onwards, the area entered into gradual decline, as the infrastructure and social fabric of this community was dismantled in a series of naïve social development projects.
Technocrats from outside the community intervened to raise housing standards, reduce air pollution and improve traffic flow in the area. This was done with little regard for the impact on Greenhill’s entangled lives and intangible community assets. ‘Sub-standard’ dwellings were demolished, displacing residents from inter-generational neighbourhoods. A major road was widened, removing shops along with the opportunity for neighbours to cross paths and exchange news and points-of-view.
In the vacuum of absent conversations, social capital depleted, urban blight spread and crime rose. Since then, significant sums have been invested on a series of social and economic regeneration projects aimed at reversing the decline caused, in part, by these well-intended ‘outsider interventions’.
While this is a particular case, spanning some 170 years, (and focuses on just one aspect of Greenhill’s decline), we believe these insights offer lessons for leadership effectiveness in today’s health and care systems.
Firstly, system leadership must be a collective effort.
There are lots of ways to describe our health and care systems and each has its merits. Acknowledging the lens we see through is therefore vital. Incorporating the alternatives, even better!
Given current political, regulatory and management pressures – the demand for “more grip” – it’s perhaps understandable if leaders privilege a mechanical view of their system. However, this perspective tends to reduce participation; hoarding control ‘at the top’. And – because it denies the distributed nature of ‘system knowledge’ – its solutions are likely based on only partial understanding. Accordingly, leadership development must focus on enabling leaders to work in partnership and to draw out the knowledge and histories stored-up in diverse pockets of the system.
Secondly, leaders need to be more curious about the emergent phenomena of the socio-technical systems within which they operate.
Where social is the time-woven tapestry of local stories, rituals, symbols and language; and technical is about structure, organisation, policy, etc. And – crucially – where small-scale localised events may result in large-scale whole system changes! We recommend that leadership development focuses on a collaborative enquiry into a system’s inherent dualities and non-linear system dynamics.
Greenhill’s civil re-engineering scheme was – no doubt – undertaken in good faith. However, it lacked an understanding of the social-technical system as a whole. This resulted in negative unintended consequences that have since proven extremely difficult and costly to remedy.
Thirdly, senior sponsors and boards have a responsibility to develop board assurance approaches that are fit for complex health and care systems.
Traditional board assurance ensures that the risks to achieving key strategic goals are properly understood and controlled. However, complexity necessarily involves ambiguity and uncertainty, which cannot be controlled because causality is both unclear and unpredictable. Senior sponsors and boards must seek reassurance that staff are cognisant of the complexity of the system – that proposed interventions are “built to learn” and can be contained if they go awry. Moreover, do ensure that feedback mechanisms provide robust, short, medium and long-term data on system impacts and emerging risks.
Lastly, system leaders must design for greater connection.
In the case of Greenhill, much of what was most valuable was the unintended – yet deeply desirable – fruits of people coming together to ‘work things out’: a more diffuse form of leadership than we generally envisage when addressing organisation challenges. Thus, system leaders must foster the skills of convening and containing – inviting people to take a seat at the metaphorical table (striving for representation and diversity) and then making it safe for people to ‘bring their difference’ in open, honest and collaborative ways – especially when this involves conflict. Difference, after all, can be a source of learning and innovation, if supported by social bonds that are strong enough to resist the urge to fragment.
Too much of leadership development (as with how we select, evaluate and incentivise our leaders), still focuses on the heroic individual’s abstract knowledge, skills, behaviours and personality. Perhaps however leadership is better understood as an emergent phenomenon – a product of the live system! Accordingly, relationships and relatedness ought to be the primary focus of our change-methodology. Whilst they may be capable of affecting localised change, leaders certainly cannot control or predict the wider or longitudinal responses to it, and making sense is generally only possible in retrospect.
It’s been said many times: system leadership is a collective endeavour. In practice however, this never involves marching in regular fashion to a single tune. Accordingly, a greater maturity is called for in how we ‘lead’ health systems, in all of their diversity, disorder and discordance. Indeed, it may very well be that the parts we least control represent our best hopes for the future.
Jem Peel is a leadership and organisational development practitioner, working across a variety of sectors and industry; supporting leaders, boards and teams to make a positive and sustainable difference to staff, service users and the wider system. (See more: http://www.everythingisconnected.co.uk/)
Rob Sheffield
Rob Sheffield is a leadership and innovation facilitator, working in healthcare, energy and education. He helps groups break from current habits and develop creative approaches that bring sustainable value to their stakeholders. (See more: https://bluegreenlearning.com/)
This is a re-blog from Richard Bolden on the ILA blog in which he discusses the challenges facing higher education leadership and asks those of us working in HE to reflect on what we can do to reclaim our role(s) and responsibilities as leaders in our organizations.
I have spent the past two and a half decades working as a leadership researcher and educator in UK universities. Throughout much of this time I have studied leadership in higher education (HE) as well as experiencing it first-hand. I have taken on leadership roles — both formal and informal — and have witnessed the trials and tribulations of colleagues as they have endeavoured to navigate the complexities of this context. In this article I share reflections on what I have learnt, why it matters, and what we can (all) do to enhance the quality and inclusiveness of leadership in this important sector.
Why Higher Education Leadership Matters
To begin it’s worth considering why HE matters for leadership theory, practice, and development. My own interest in researching leadership in this context was sparked by early work on distributed leadership in schools (e.g., Gronn, 2003; Spillane et al., 2004). HE provided an obvious testbed for exploring how such ideas might apply to other educational settings — particularly those with more complex structures, cultures, identities, and performance outcomes. Although there is fairly widespread agreement that the key purpose of effective school leadership is to improve pupil outcomes (Leithwood et al., 2006), the same does not apply to universities. Whilst student outcomes are undoubtably important metrics — and if you are a student, parent, or potential employer, perhaps the ones that concerns you most — this is not the only criterion by which HE institutions (and their staff) are evaluated. Another essential area of activity for universities is research — typically assessed in terms of “high quality” publications as well as by the volume of funding secured. Alongside this are agendas for external engagement and impact, not to mention the very real concerns of keeping universities running as viable businesses. Together, the diversity of stakeholders and priorities in HE produces a complex and contested environment where people and organizations may feel pulled in different directions. Such issues are not unique to HE but do make it an interesting context in which to study leadership, with important insights for emerging areas of scholarship, including complexity leadership (Uhl Bien, 2021), paradoxical leadership (Smith, et al., 2016) and collective leadership (Ospina et al., 2020).
At the center of any analysis of leadership is the interconnection between purpose, values, and identity, yet the somewhat schizophrenic nature of academia disrupts these dynamics in ways that can produce a sense of disenchantment, disengagement, and alienation. The HE system (in the UK and elsewhere) is founded on competing values systems — emphasizing both normative aspects (such as public service, professional autonomy, collegial practice, and traditions) and utilitarian principles (such as profit-making, corporate management, customer service, and change), such that a university “considers itself (and others consider it), alternatively, or even simultaneously, to be different types of organisations” (Albert & Whetten, 1985, p. 270).
The hybrid nature of HE poses particular challenges for leaders trying to establish credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of those they seek to influence, as different stakeholders identify “more with members of their own subcultures rather than as members of the university” (Winter & O’Donohue, 2012, p. 566). This is particularly true of academics who, as knowledge workers, carry professional identities and affiliations that extend well beyond their immediate employer. Whilst these, and other factors, make HE a particularly rich and rewarding context in which to study leadership there remains surprisingly little robust empirical research in this area and the HE leadership literature tends to be fragmented according to the perspectives and ideologies of different groups (Macfalane, et al., 2024).
Crisis, What Crisis?
The conceptual complexities of leadership in HE may, in part, help explain some of the difficulties facing the sector. Universities were particularly hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic (PWC, 2021) and whilst the immediate crisis may have passed, it has exposed deep-seated issues that have (by and large) remained below the surface for many years. In particular, accounts of “toxic” management are linked to widescale dissatisfaction, industrial action, and recruitment challenges in the sector (Watermeyer et al., 2021).
In a series of focus groups conducted as part of a project for Advance HE in Sept-Dec 2021 colleagues and I asked participants about the shifting context of global higher education (Watermeyer et al., 2022). Five key areas — policy, society, funding, students, and staff — were highlighted as impacting perceptions, experiences, and practices of leadership in contemporary HE. While the specifics of contextual issues varied between institutions and countries, there was strong agreement across the groups that current changes are producing tensions and challenges that are hard to resolve, as outlined in the following quote from a participant in Roundtable 1 with Heads of Departments and Deans.
“What we’ve seen… is this need [to]be agile and really responding to what is happening, straight now, but at the same time be someone who is looking ahead, at the same time as somebody who has that emotional intelligence to deal with not only their student population who is changing dramatically, but the needs of our staff and our whole pedagogy is changing? What do leaders need to do? How do they need to act? How do they need to be?” (p. 27).
In Britain, declining numbers of international students are putting huge pressures on a funding system dictated by government such that a third of universities are estimated to be trading at a deficit (Jenkins, 2023). In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that “bottom-line” financial performance metrics are of primary concern to senior institutional leaders, as are ranking schemes that determine the relative attractiveness of institutions to potential students.
Such measures, however, tend to be of far less significance to academics themselves in terms of what motivates and inspires them to work in HE. The growing divide between academics and managers is reported to be fueling extensive discontent within the sector, as indicated by unprecedented levels of industrial action across the UK (and elsewhere) throughout 2023 and reports of a “great resignation” (Ross, 2022).
Follower Perspectives on Leadership in Higher Education
Within the Advance HE scoping study mentioned earlier, participants were asked to identify “what new or future leadership skills/competencies/behaviours are required within your organisation, professional area and/or wider sector?” Thematic coding identified 11 categories, which were incorporated into a subsequent survey completed by 553 respondents from around the World (Neves & Parkin, 2023). Figure 1 shows the proportion of respondents who strongly agreed that these qualities were important for good leaders within HE, as well as the extent to which they felt they demonstrated these qualities themselves (when leading) or observed these qualities within the people they were expected to follow (being led).
Figure 1 – Chart based on those who “agree strongly” with each statement — the top point on a five-point agreement scale. Ranked in order of whether a good leader should have these qualities (Neves & Parkin, 2023: 9) [Reproduced with permission from Advance HE]
There is a clear pattern within the data, whereby good HE leaders are expected to be adaptable, collaborative, credible, authentic, inclusive, and self-reflective (with compassion also ranked highly). Participants rated their own capacity moderately highly on each of these qualities (albeit it consistently lower than the ideal). The most striking finding from this graph, however, is the huge gap between each of these rankings and perceptions of those people currently in leadership roles.
Follower perspectives (“being led”) suggest a gulf in expectations and experiences of leadership. Whilst it should be noted that there is no evidence to suggest that these negative assessments are reflective of the actual skills/qualities of senior leaders (indeed it is quite possible that many of these people are amongst those who rated their own capacity moderately highly) it highlights a significant issue to which senior leaders would be advised to pay attention.
Reclaiming Leadership in Higher Education
Follower-centric perspectives on leadership stress the importance of building strong relationships between leaders and followers that are founded on trust, respect, and a shared sense of purpose. The evidence outlined above suggests that this is not the experience of many people currently working in HE — a situation that has significant implications for the sector.
If we continue along the current trajectory the chances are that HE may slip into terminal decline (Fleming, 2021). A chasm between the values and priorities of those in formal leadership and management roles and those of academics involved in teaching, research, and/or external engagement will lead to further disillusionment with the academic profession and a corresponding deterioration in the quality and significance of academic work. This is a trend that has been well documented in critiques of neoliberalism and new public management in universities. So, what might we as academics (with or without management responsibilities) do to improve the situation?
First, we should acknowledge our rights and responsibilities as “citizens of the academic community” (Bolden et al., 2014) to play an active role in the governance of our HE institutions and the wider sector. Disengagement, whilst understandable, leaves space and opportunities for toxic management to thrive and may render us complicit in the process.
Second, as part of this we would do well to create and sustain spaces for critical and constructive debate around the nature and purpose(s) of HE in contemporary society. Whilst this should allude to and promote core values (such as academic freedom) it should also engage with the very real challenges facing many universities around financial sustainability and market position. Only through an honest and open dialogue can we hope to transcend the current fractures that characterize the sector.
Third, we need to ensure that a plurality of voices, perspectives, and lived experience infuse HE policy and practice. Genuine inclusion needs to be put at the heart of the educational mission of universities and used as a driver for continuity and/or change within the sector (see Bolden et al., 2019 for a similar argument about healthcare).
Fourth, we should rebuild our sense of community — to develop human relationships that have been fractured during the COVID pandemic, to mentor and support one another, and to celebrate collegiality and collective endeavour.
And fifth, we should find ways of (re)energizing and (re)inspiring current and future academics to embrace the privilege and opportunities of working in a sector that has such a huge impact on the lives of so many. Education and research are vehicles for individual and collective transformation and change and are the primary mechanisms through which we are likely to address global challenges such as climate change.
In relation to the last of these I was inspired by a recent LinkedIn post by colleague that reiterated his passion for the job (see below). As we reflect on the year that’s passed and consider the year ahead, I urge each of us to think on what WE can do and how, in our own (small) way, we can reclaim our role(s) and responsibilities as leaders in higher education.
Another term draws to a close 🌱
Each year, as September rolls around I always find myself thinking “I hope that I still love teaching and learning as much this year”. The sign that I finish off the term being simultaneously proud of students; grateful for the opportunity to be a small part of their journey; inspired by conversations; excited by the content; and sad for it to be over is a good one.
It’s no doubt that our world faces multiple crises, and that will continue, but being in this environment fills me with hope that generations want to understand what is happening in our landscape and want to put good into the world. Spending the time to delve into the human condition and understand new possibilities is what university is all about, and why I love this job.
So – here’s to accepting the feeling of sadness as a term draws to a close, but hope for what comes next 🌱
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Bolden, R., Gosling, J., & O’Brien, A. (2014). Citizens of the Academic Community: A Societal Perspective on Leadership in UK Higher Education. Studies in Higher Education, 39(5), 754-770. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2012.754855
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